Portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares

For more than 20 years, the man in this portrait effectively ran Spain. The Count-Duke of Olivares was chief minister to King Philip IV, the power behind a throne stretched across an empire, and Velazquez was his household's rising painter. Here Olivares fills the frame in dark clothes and a heavy jaw, a green cross of the Order of Alcantara at his chest, watchful and a little tired. When Velazquez painted him around 1638, the wars Olivares had pushed were draining the treasury, and revolts were brewing in Catalonia and Portugal. Within a few years his master would dismiss him, and he died soon after, out of favour and half-mad. Velazquez owed him much. It was Olivares, a fellow native of Seville, who had first brought the young painter to court.