Anthony van Dyck, 'Portrait of I. Cattaneo Della Volta Imperiale (?)', about 1625-7

The dark red curtain in the background gives a warm, luxurious atmosphere to this portrait and complements the sitter’s auburn hair and sparkling brown eyes. The rose – traditionally a nuptial flower – tucked over her ear accentuates her beauty and might suggest that this engaging young woman is married.

The painting came from the collection of the prominent Cattaneo family in Genoa and was in 1907 acquired as a companion piece to Van Dyck’s Portrait of Giovanni Battista Cattaneo, which is also in the National Gallery’s collection. The woman was then assumed to represent the wife of the male sitter. However, pendant portraits of husband and wife in this period were almost invariably painted with the sitters facing each other, so it is highly unlikely that these paintings were conceived as a pair. What is more, Giovanni Battista Cattaneo Della Volta (1574–1649) was never married.

Genealogical research now suggests that the woman in this portrait is a different member of the Cattaneo family from Genoa. She might be Giovanni Battista Cattaneo Della Volta’s cousin, Isabella Cattaneo Della Volta Imperiale (about 1600 – after 1647), who had married Francesco Imperiale di Nicolò (d. after 1647) in 1619 and would have been in her mid-twenties at the time her portrait was painted. She is drawing attention to her long gold necklace with her right hand, which might be a play on the family name, as Cattaneo phonetically recalls catena, the Italian word for chain.

The picture is not signed and some parts are in a compromised state of preservation, which makes an attribution more uncertain. But the style and quality of the painting are such that it was Van Dyck himself who painted the portrait during his time in Italy. Recent technical analysis revealed several pentimenti strengthening the attribution, while conservation treatment confirmed the irreversible loss of traces indicating how the black costume was originally decorated with elaborate ornamentation made of gold or silver thread, similar to what can be seen in other Genoese portraits by Van Dyck.