Portrait of Rodrigo Vázquez de Arce

The sitter is Rodrigo Vázquez de Arce, a Castilian jurist who rose to head the Council of Castile under Philip the Second, and El Greco's original portrait of him is lost. The name itself took a long time to come back. The old royal inventories record only a gentleman in a golilla collar and say nothing of the painted inscription that identifies him, perhaps because it was covered over at the time; not until Ferdinand the Seventh's estate was catalogued, in 1834, is he written down as Rodrigo Vázquez. What hangs in the Prado is a copy by an unknown hand, and you can read the difference in the brushwork. Where El Greco worked in loose, nervous strokes, the copyist tightened everything into careful detail, keeping the composition but not the touch. The ruff and the sober Spanish black are the dress of a man near the top of Philip II's government.