Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (after Raphael)

By 1630 Peter Paul Rubens was as busy a diplomat as he was a painter. He had just spent two years shuttling between the courts of Madrid and London, negotiating peace between Spain and England, and both kings had knighted him for it. In the middle of that public life he copied a portrait Raphael had painted more than a century earlier, of Baldassare Castiglione. Castiglione was himself a diplomat and the author of The Book of the Courtier, the handbook every European gentleman read on how to carry himself at court. So here is one accomplished courtier painting the likeness of the man who defined the type. Rubens worked from another copy or a print rather than Raphael's original, and he treated it the way he treated all the old masters, as homage and quiet competition at once. He kept the panel. It still appears in the inventory of his belongings taken after he died in 1640.