Portrait du cardinal Camillo Massimi (1620-1677)

Velazquez painted this in Rome around 1650, on his second Italian journey, the same stay that produced his ferocious portrait of Pope Innocent X. Camillo Massimi was then a young churchman in the pope's household, a private chamberlain and a serious art collector who would only later become a cardinal. The remarkable thing is the colour. His robes are painted in ultramarine, ground from lapis lazuli, a pigment so costly that it was almost never used in Spain, and Velazquez seems to have seized on its ready supply in Italy. William Bankes bought the picture in Bologna in 1820, and it still hangs in the Spanish Room he built for it at Kingston Lacy in Dorset.