Sensitively, Van Dyck set to work, ignoring the gruesome realities of death, such as the rapid onset of rigor mortis. Across Venetia’s pale, comely neck, he arranged a string of pearls. Meanwhile, on the hem of her sheet, he placed a delicate pink rose, shedding its petals. According to Digby, who believed that Van Dyck’s painting, which now hangs in London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, was the artist’s “Master peece”, the rose seems “to wither apace, even whiles you looke upon it… a fitt Embleme to express the state her bodie then was in”.

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Admittedly, even today, rumours persist that Digby, a keen alchemist, was the architect of his wife’s death. Some say that he administered a concoction of viper’s blood, which he hoped would preserve her beauty. Others suggest that he killed her in a fit of jealousy – after all, he supposedly once remarked, apropos her notorious promiscuity, that “a wise man, and lusty, could make an honest woman out of a brothell-house”. In a rare move, the Crown ordered an autopsy, though its findings have not survived.

In both public and private, however, Digby appeared devastated by Venetia’s death. He wrote to his brother that Van Dyck’s deathbed portrait of her “is the onely constant companion I now have. It standeth all day over against my chaire and table… and all night when I goe into my chamber I sett it close by my beddside, and by the faint light of candle, me thinkes I see her dead indeed.”

In other words, if Digby’s letter is to be believed, Van Dyck’s modestly sized oil painting, less than one square metre, offered solace and comfort to a heartbroken widower. If the rose in the picture is an “Embleme” of life’s transience, so the painting, itself, is emblematic of what we might call the art of grief.

Grieving and engraving

Aside from funerary monuments in churches, which were principally commemorative, grief in Western art before Van Dyck’s era, during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, was generally the preserve of religious painting and sculpture focusing on the tragic story of Christ’s death.