Cesare Alessandro Scaglia di Verrua, Abbé of Staffarda and Mandanici

Cesare Alessandro Scaglia had been the House of Savoy's man in Rome, Paris, Madrid and London, a churchman with two abbeys who had never taken holy orders and who ran his diplomacy on the Spanish side. When Victor Amadeus I turned Savoy towards France in 1630, Scaglia stayed on in the Spanish Netherlands and did not go home. Van Dyck painted him in Antwerp around 1634, in plain black, leaning on a plinth.

The Latin inscription along that plinth gives his titles, the fame of his embassies, the altar he endowed for the friars, and then a date: he died on 21 May 1641, seven years after the portrait was made. He had gone to live inside the Recollects house in Antwerp, and the altarpiece he ordered from van Dyck for his own tomb, a Lamentation over the dead Christ, hangs today in the same museum as this portrait.