Van Dyck captures the Mediterranean features of Godines, who was from a Portuguese family, in a masterly way, his self-confidence exuding from his literally weighty appearance. Godines was the Spanish king’s tax collector in Antwerp. His wife’s genteel reticence reveals her ancestry, being descended from a wealthy Antwerp family of merchants (see inv. no. 201). The full-length portrait of a figure standing was initially devised in the sixteenth century for the nobility but was soon used for non-aristocratic patricians too. Columns and drapery, however, lend the picture an aristocratic air.