Portrait of Caspar Schoppe

The man in this picture was, by reputation, the most dangerous pen in Europe. Caspar Schoppe, who signed himself Scioppius in Latin, was a German scholar who converted to Catholicism in his early twenties and turned his learning into attack. In 1607 he published a book setting out to demolish the great French scholar Joseph Scaliger, once a close friend, by proving his family's claim to princely descent a fabrication. Four years later he went after James I of England in print, and in Madrid the English ambassador's servants beat him in the street for it.

Rubens was living in Rome when he painted him, in the second of his two Roman stays, with his elder brother Philip working nearby as librarian to a cardinal. Schoppe was still a young man then, some years into his time in papal service, and the wars of religion he wrote for had decades left to run. He died in Padua in 1649, having spent his last years arguing, more quietly, for the churches to make peace.