This PhD examines elite feminine dress in the Republic of Genoa and the politics of display in portraits by Flemish painters Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641). This thesis combines art and dress history to demonstrate how Genoese women harnessed clothes and images to negotiate their social worlds. I argue that opulent dress and exquisite portraiture afforded these women agency in a milieu defined by its visual and material literacy, and within a fashion system shaped by the political, cultural, and economic consequences of globalism. As key agents in Spain’s imperial machine, Genoa’s nobles managed the expansion of imperial dominion and the movement of goods and peoples. They participated in a global idiom of luxury, which cannot be understood without Genoa’s role in the histories of colonisation and slavery. Looking more closely at modes of representation within the portraits, I explore the valences of light and shade as they materialise in the dressed bodies of female sitters and their attendants. Charged with aesthetic, scientific, and racial meanings, the play of light in Rubens’s and van Dyck’s paintings is mobilised to mould sitters’ pictorial identities. I also broaden understandings of display to encompass noblewomen’s engagement with elite spaces. This thesis uses the backgrounds of Genoese portraits to investigate the ways in which Genoa’s noblewomen engaged with affective materials and social spaces within villa gardens. This thesis thus stitches together the material and sensory qualities of material culture with embodied gender performances and practices of early modern knowledge making. Engaging with contexts underexplored by existing iconographical and compositional studies of Rubens’s and van Dyck’s portraiture, this thesis brings a critical reading of dress, materiality, and space into dialogue with recent histories of the early modern gendered body, artistic and scientific thought, empire, and global commodities. As such, this thesis is a timely interdisciplinary intervention into wider conversations about identity construction, and material and visual cultures in the global past.