El Greco's striking portrait of Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara, Archbishop of Seville and Inquisitor General of Spain, painted around 1600 and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is well known (Plate 12). What is not often acknowledged is its comparative rarity; in comparison with the number of images that survive in all media depicting Italian cardinals both before and after the Council of Trent, there are relatively few portraits of their Spanish counterparts in any medium. Niño de Guevara's image is indeed almost a unicum. The Spanish kingdoms had historically endured a considerable numerical disadvantage within the cardinalate compared with Italy, and even France. Even so, the continuing relative absence of cardinal portraiture from Spain in the first half of the sixteenth century is striking.

By the sixteenth century the Spanish crown exercised an ever-increasing degree of control over the church and the Spanish monarch, among the other expressions of that power, took a direct and close interest in the appointment of cardinals. The Venetian ambassador at Rome, Lorenzo Priuli, wrote in his dispatch to the Senate of 1586 that he had heard directly from the Spanish ambassador that Philip II: ‘being aware how much damage a Spanish cardinal who was not his dependent could do to him, besought the pope in an official dispatch that he should never choose a Spaniard who had not been named by him, and rather than that he would be pleased if none was created’.