Equestrian portrait of Francisco de Moncada

Francisco de Moncada was a Spanish nobleman doing several jobs at once: diplomat, army commander, and a serious historian of the wars in Flanders. When Van Dyck painted him on a rearing horse, Moncada was standing in as governor of the Spanish Netherlands, holding the line for Madrid in its long war with the Dutch. Van Dyck had spent years in London perfecting exactly this kind of image for Charles I, and he brings the same machinery here, the low viewpoint, the wide sky, the commander's baton, all of it built to make a man on a horse look like the natural order of things. Moncada would be dead within a few years, on campaign in the country he governed. The picture reached the Louvre from a Roman palace in 1798.