Portrait of Francisco de Moncada marqués de Aytona

In December 1633 the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia died in Brussels and the Spanish Netherlands were left without a governor. The man in black here held them in the meantime. Francisco de Moncada, marqués de Aytona, was born in Valencia, served Philip IV as ambassador at the imperial court in Vienna, and then commanded the king's troops in Flanders. Van Dyck painted him in Brussels in 1634, the year the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand arrived to take the government off his hands, and that canvas is now in Vienna. The Prado's picture came out of van Dyck's workshop and repeats the composition with changes, among them the coat of arms in the hanging behind him. Moncada wrote history as well. In 1623 he published an account of the Catalan and Aragonese soldiers who went east against Turks and Greeks in the 14th century. He died of fever in 1635, in camp at Goch on the Lower Rhine.