This group portrait shows four adults and a child in a palace-like interior with ornate furniture and portrait busts on pedestals. The figures seem like actors in a play and they exhibit various poses and gestures designed to tell us something about them.

Look at the very centre of the painting, often reserved for the most important people in the group, where the seated man and the young child point to each other. The gesture seems to want to communicate a specific meaning, the older man perhaps passing something on to the child.

Look also at how the heads of the child, the seated man and the sculpted bust on the right are all in a diagonal line.