Van Dyck in the 1630s: a family portrait, an allegorical portrait as Prudence, and a deathbed portrait, as well as a number of miniatures, including an early one by Isaac Oliver, where she is possibly dressed for a court masque. In April 1633, Venetia Digby died suddenly in her sleep. Distraught at her loss, Digby permitted an autopsy, not a routine event at the time. She had, he said, been suffering occasional headaches through the previous eight years, for which she took "viper-wine" (which could have been one of several concoctions involving vipers or their venom in wine, but which is unlikely to have been toxic). The physicians reported finding her brain much putrifyed and corrupted: all the cerebellum was rotten, and retained not the forme of the braine but was meere pus and corrupted matter. Venetia's death was a tragedy for Digby, probably the defining event of his life. Although he had not been faithful while his wife was alive and he carried out a long relationship with another woman after her death, he never remarried, and the event separated the two great phases of his life: one in which he was a bright young courtier jockeying for position, and one in which he was a melancholy scientist and Catholic apologist. He commissioned plaster casts made of her head, hands, and feet, and had Van Dyck, a good friend, paint Venetia on her deathbed before she was buried at Christchurch, Newgate, in London, in an elaborate tomb of marble topped with a portrait bust. Soon after, Digby sent his children to live with their grandmother, and himself moved to Gresham College. There he initially spent his time writing letters eulogizing his wife, which, collected together with verses by Ben Jonson and other poets patronized by Digby, eventually formed a volume titled In Praise of Venetia. Around this time he commissioned a portrait of himself from Van Dyck, bare-headed, bearded, and wearing mourning black. Afterwards, he took up in seriousness the scientific experimentation that he was to be known for through the rest of his life. He lost possession of Venetia’s deathbed portrait in one of his flights from England during the English Civil War. (It is now in the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, and another version is at Althorp.) Shortly before his death in 1665, Digby included in his will his desire to have his "dust lie by