Portrait of bishop Joannes Malderus

Around 1627 Anthony van Dyck came home to Antwerp after years in Italy and set about becoming the city's most sought-after portraitist, in open competition with Rubens, the master he had trained under as a young man. His sitters now included the senior men of the church. This is Joannes Malderus, bishop of Antwerp, a theologian who had taught at Leuven and was near sixty-five when he sat. Van Dyck gives him almost nothing to hold: the dark habit, a book, and the pectoral cross, and the rest is the face, alert and a little tired. He painted it around 1629, four years before the bishop died. Van Dyck returned to this same sitter more than once, and a half-length portrait of Malderus still hangs in Antwerp's fine-arts museum today.