Daniel van den Dyck

Clorinda, the younger sister of van den Dyck's wife was married to the prominent Italian painter Pietro della Vecchia (1605–1678).

Boschini dedicated two pages to van den Dyck and represented the artist in a print as Jupiter embellishing Virtue with a royal mantle.

On 2 April of the next year he was named by duke Carlo II Gonzaga as his official court painter, architect, surveyor of his building program and engineer for stage designs for the theatre.

[3] As the prefetto delle fabbriche (surveyor of works) van den Dyck had to move between the various construction sites such as Maderno, Marmirolo, Mantua and Venice, to check the transportation of the many marble statues, inspect the progress and quality of the various construction works undertaken at the ducal palace as well as the suburban residences, ordered supplies and tools, organized the daily assignments of the workers and made sure the duke was informed timely through frequent correspondence.

The constant and exhausting travel in this role did not allow van den Dyck to work as a painter, the premier reason for his appointment to the court.

Van den Dyck's son may have become a painter as his grandfather Nicolas Régnier bequeathed onto him all his prints, drawings and reliefs to study.

[5] One of his key works, a Martyrdom of St. Lawrence hangs in the Church of Madonna dell'Orto in Venice, which was frequented by the Flemish community residing in the Republic.

This work shows the influence of Rubens in its sensuality and that of Anthony van Dyck in the livid tonality and the smooth and thin application of the paint.

Marco Boschini mentions in his Le ricche minere della pittura veneziana of 1674 a Portrait of three lawyers including Giovan Francesco Loredano (still alive) by van den Dyck as being kept at the Doge's Palace in Venice.

His early style is also close to that of other painters active in Bergamo or Mantua such as Carlo Ceresa and Domenico Fetti to whom some of his portraits have been erroneously attributed in the past and vice versa.

This work shows the classicist influences of Giulio Romano as well as the Flemish Baroque with its muscular and bearded hero Aeneas who is being submitted by the robust nymphs to a grooming before his elevation to godly status.