The four ages of man

Anthony van Dyck, a Flemish painter who was trained in the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens, painted this work during a long stay in Italy, when he moved from Venice to Mantua where he was a guest at the court of the Gonzaga. This masterpiece, the work of an artist who has now reached maturity and success, still shows signs of the teachings of his master Rubens, visible especially in the rendering of the figures and of their flesh tones. However the sober brushwork and the attention to modelling the effects of light stand out as distinctive features of Van Dyck's own means of expression, influenced by Venetian painting and in particular by Titian.

The subject of the painting is easily recognisable: the sleeping child symbolises infancy, whereas maturity and youth are represented by a vigorous man in armour and by a young woman looking towards him, seductively offering roses; the bent white-haired man behind them symbolises old age.

The work is constructed with an elliptical movement which, from the whiteness of the child's body, abandoned in sleep, continues along the woman's arm right up to her face. An intense and anxious gaze links the two young people while the man, with a confident gesture, touches the arm of his beloved. Farther into the distance, the old man, pointing his finger down towards the child, seems to form the ideal closure of the circuit. This circular movement may express man’s abandon to the inexorable passing of time.

However it is also possible to interpret the painting in a mythological key, seeing the two young people as the lovers Mars and Venus, the child as a sleeping Cupid, while the old man with his gloomy, severe expression could allude to Vulcan, betrayed by his young wife.