Giovanni Vincenzo Imperiale

Sir Anthony van Dyck

National Gallery of Art

Shown from the knees up, a pale-skinned man wears a tall, black hat, wide white ruffs at the neck and cuffs, and a voluminous black garment in this vertical portrait painting. The dark costume nearly blends into the brown background in some places, so details are difficult to make out. The man sits in a chair so his body and knees are angled to our left. His face is also turned in that direction, but he looks at us from the corners of his brown eyes under dark, heavy brows. He has a thin face with a long, bumped nose. His brown mustache flicks up at the outer ends, and a thin line of hair down his chin creates his beard. His black hat has a high, rounded top and is draped with black fabric and a rosette. The ruffs at his neck and cuffs are pleated into tall, narrow figure eights. His black garment appears to puff widely at the shoulders and fold back over his lap. He wears a ring on the pinky finger of his left hand, which holds a piece of paper. The other hand hangs limp from where his arm rests on the chair, which appears to be upholstered in dark maroon-red fabric and is topped at the back with gold finials. A square window pierces the brown wall behind the man in the top left quadrant of the canvas. A few gold lines glint on the fringed brown curtain pulled up over the window, which opens onto a dark, perhaps nighttime landscape. A coat of arms hangs on the wall behind the chair, to our right of the man’s head. A shield is vertically striped with white to either side of a red stripe with a bird of prey silhouetted in black beneath a gold crown. Gold lettering on the wall below reads, “IO: VINSS: IMPS. ANN: SAL: 1626 AET: SVAE: 44.”