Portrait of Veronica Spinola Serra

At the beginning of this "Golden Age" painting, the Dutch painters discovered everyday life as a subject for painting and achieved incomparable heights of portraiture with their keen realism. Singular among the Flemish artists was Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), four of whose works belong to the Kunsthalle collection. The oldest among them is his portrait of the 22-year-old Marchesa Veronica Spinola Doria (1607), which was painted while the artist was still in Italy. His bourgeois "Portrait of a Couple with Child" was painted around 1610, and the half-length portrait of the philosopher Seneca probably around 1614/15. Rubens' oil study of "The Founding of Constantinople", laid out as a design for a tapestry cartoon, was painted for Louis XIII before 1622.

The artist presents Veronica Spinola, a Genovese aristocrat, in a monumental scene. Her entire figure appears enthroned on a red chair before a round-arched alcove. Her floor-length black robe is artfully and preciously decorated with gold and silver, and her bright, youthful face is framed by an imposing ruff made of filigreed lace. She wears pearls, holds a fan, and a parrot sits on the back of the chair. Its feathers, like the curtain wafting into the image from the left above, pick up the basic colours of the composition: black, red, and gold-brown. These are the heraldic colours of the Doria family, into which Veronica Spinola had married. It was presumably her husband, Gian Carlo Doria, who commissioned the work.