杰罗尼玛·斯皮诺拉侯爵夫人肖像

In the 1620s Anthony van Dyck, still in his twenties, went to Genoa and more or less remade the aristocratic portrait there. The city's merchant-banking families, the Spinola among the grandest of them, wanted to be shown life-size and unhurried in their tall palace rooms, and Van Dyck obliged. This marchesa stands in dark silk against a sweep of column and curtain, her lace collar catching the light he reserved for faces and hands. He had learned the format from Titian and the Venetians, whose paintings hung in these same Genoese houses, then stretched the figures taller and cooler. When he left for England a few years later he took this manner with him, and it shaped court portraiture there for generations.