Venetia Stanley's affair with Edward Sackville was public knowledge before she married Kenelm Digby, and the Digby family objected to the match on those grounds, a fact recorded plainly in the standard reference literature on the period rather than hushed up by later cataloguers^[1]. The marriage went ahead regardless. When Venetia died in 1633, sudden and unexplained, the likely cause given was a preparation her husband had made for her, intended, it was said, to preserve her beauty rather than to harm her^[1]. Digby's grief was reportedly severe. His response was not silence but commission: he called Van Dyck to record his wife's image twice over, once as she lay dying and once, in the allegorical portrait now in London, transformed into an image of the very virtue her life had been accused of lacking.

The picture builds its argument from a settled visual vocabulary. A serpent was Prudence's attribute since antiquity, standing for wisdom and self-knowledge, sometimes paired, as in earlier printed allegories of the virtue, with a mirror for self-examination^[2]. White doves signified chastity. Figures personifying Deceit, Anger, Envy and Profane Love appear crushed beneath Venetia's feet, while putti overhead hold the palm and laurel wreath conventionally awarded to victors, spelling the picture's meaning as plainly as a seventeenth-century viewer could ask for: virtue's triumph over vice^[1]. This is allegorical portraiture doing the work that neither an epitaph nor a sermon quite could, restoring a reputation in the durable medium of paint rather than argument.

Lady Digby on Her Deathbed, now at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, is the more startling of the two pictures precisely because it declines to show what it is. Van Dyck painted Venetia not as a corpse but as a woman on the point of falling asleep, her eyes still faintly open, her head resting on one hand, wearing the pearls she had favoured in life^[1]. The only concession to what the picture actually records is a withered rose, apparently fallen from her hand. Together the two pictures form a pair of responses to the same death: one softening it into sleep, the other transfiguring the sitter into the personification of the very quality her critics had denied her.