Portrait du cardinal Guido Bentivoglio

In 1623 Van Dyck was a young Fleming making his name in Italy, and in Rome one of his warmest patrons was Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, who had spent years as the pope's envoy in Flanders and knew the painter's world. Van Dyck seems to have stayed at the cardinal's palace, and he shows him seated and alert, one hand resting, the red silk of his robes catching the light against a quieter ground. Bentivoglio was a diplomat and historian who had written a long account of the wars in Flanders. The picture worked so well that it became a kind of pattern. For generations afterwards, painters showing a prince of the Church reached back to the way Van Dyck had posed this one.