Eventually he became court painter to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Philip II, King of Spain.

ECONOMIST: The greatest painter of the Venetian Renaissance

His mother died when he was 11 and his father, Emperor Charles V, was often abroad, occasionally even for years at a time.

ECONOMIST: Spanish empire

Pope Clement VII's 1530 bull approving the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V might seem an assertion of papal supremacy until one notes that it followed the 1527 sack of Rome by Charles's mutinous troops, many of them German Lutherans.

WSJ: Lux in Arcana | Capitoline Museum | The Papacy's Private Papers | By Francis X. Rocca