Venetia, Lady Digby as Prudence

Venetia Stanley died in her sleep on 1 May 1633, and her husband Sir Kenelm Digby spent the rest of that year commissioning pictures of her. Two days after her death he had van Dyck, then working in London for Charles I, paint her lying in her bed. Kenelm wrote to his brother that the painter had added nothing to what he saw, apart from a rose on the hem of the sheet. This canvas came out of the same grief and does the opposite. Venetia sits alive on a plain block of stone, a serpent in her right hand, the old attribute of Prudence, her other hand resting on two white doves. Three small winged figures carry a laurel crown above her head. On the ground at the left lie the things she is meant to have beaten: Fraud, two-faced and chained, blindfolded profane love, and a weeping cupid whose torch has gone out. Kenelm almost certainly worked out that programme himself. Venetia's name had been attached to a run of lovers before the marriage, which he denied for the rest of his life, and the picture makes his case in the language of allegory. Van Dyck painted a second, smaller version, now in London. This one has been in the inventory of the Royal Palace in Milan since 1857, and nobody has established how it got from France to Italy.