Anthony van Dyck

For the earliest known edition of the Iconographie, published by Gillis Hendricx in 1645, Van Dyck’s unfinished etched self-portrait was made into a frontispiece by the engraver Jacob Neefs, the head transformed into a marble bust placed on a pedestal and inscribed with the edition’s title (“One Hundred Images of Princes, Scholars, Painters,” etc.). The copy shown here is one of the few preserved in a seventeenth-century binding. The painted portrait that Van Dyck originally intended to make into a print was later engraved by Lucas Vorsterman. In it, the artist wears a gold chain that may be the one awarded to him by Charles I in 1633.