Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) was considered Europe’s foremost portraitist. He consolidated this reputation primarily through the publication of prints. His principal work in this medium is the Iconography, a book containing a whole series of portraits of the most famous crowned heads, military leaders, scholars and artists of the time. The prints date to the first years after van Dyck’s return to Flanders from Italy in 1627. A first edition of the Iconography was published in 1632, but no copy of it has survived. Van Dyck himself etched some of the prints, including an unfinished self-portrait. The engraver Jacob Neefs subsequently made this into a frontispiece for the earliest known edition, published in 1645 by Gillis Hendricx. In his engraving, Neefs turned van Dyck’s head into a marble bust and placed it on a pedestal flanked by Mercury and Minerva. The pedestal is inscribed with the Latin title of the edition. The date 1645 was at one point altered in pen in brown ink, with the 5 being turned into a 6, but this change was later reversed.