Portrait of Francisco de Moncada, Marqués de Aytona

The man in armour here was more than a soldier. Francisco de Moncada, a Catalan nobleman in Spanish service, commanded armies in the Low Countries and for about a year governed the Spanish Netherlands from Brussels. He was also a writer, the author of a much-read history of a band of Catalan mercenaries who had fought their way across the Mediterranean three centuries earlier. Van Dyck painted him around 1634, soon after Moncada returned to Flanders, and made several portraits of him at once, some on horseback, this one just the head and shoulders. Van Dyck was by then the most sought-after portraitist in Europe, the man who taught a whole generation how a nobleman should look on canvas. The next year Moncada was dead, of fever while on campaign.