身着盔甲的年轻男子

Rubens painted this head around 1620, in the last stretch of a truce. The Twelve Years' Truce between Spain and the Dutch Republic had held since 1609, it ran out in 1621, and Antwerp, a Habsburg city with a blockaded river, went back to war. The young man is nobody in particular. Heads like this were studio stock, painted from life and kept on hand so that a face could be worked into an altarpiece or a battle scene when one was wanted, and Rubens ran the largest workshop in northern Europe. This one seems never to have left the house. The inventory drawn up after his death in 1640 lists a young man in armour as number 129 among the paintings he still owned.