Portrait de Rodrigo Vázquez de Arce

The El Greco who painted the original of this portrait is one you can still meet elsewhere. Around 1587 he set Rodrigo Vázquez de Arce, a powerful jurist who rose to head the Council of Castile, among the black-clad mourners in his great funeral scene The Burial of the Count of Orgaz in Toledo. The face there and the face here belong to the same man. That original single portrait is now lost. 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.