Portrait of Ambrogio Spinola (1569-1630)

Early in 1608 Ambrogio Spinola, the Genoese general who commanded Spain's armies in the Netherlands, came to The Hague to negotiate a truce with the Dutch, the enemy he had been fighting for years. This small panel, barely 30 centimetres high, belongs to a set of busts of the Nassau family and the commanders of the war with Spain that hung at the court in Leeuwarden, capital of Friesland. It may have been ordered by the Frisian stadholder Willem Lodewijk, cousin of Prince Maurice of Orange. Spinola wears armour and the chain of the Golden Fleece, the Habsburg order of knighthood, and a painted inscription names him as the Marquis Spinola, with Mierevelt's name beside it. The Rijksmuseum gives the panel to Mierevelt's workshop and dates it only to sometime between about 1609 and 1633.