Der Apostel Petrus in ganzer Figur

By the 1590s the painter known as El Greco, the Greek, had settled in Toledo and built a busy workshop turning out saints and apostles for Spanish churches. This full-length Saint Peter is one of them. You know it is Peter by the keys in his hand, the keys to heaven that Christ, in the Gospels, is said to have handed him. El Greco painted Peter more than once, often as an old man caught somewhere between authority and regret. This picture spent generations in a village church at Talavera la Vieja, west of Toledo. In the 1960s a dam was built on the river Tagus, and the reservoir it created rose over the old village. The church went under the water, but its Saint Peter had already been carried up to the monastery at Guadalupe, where it hangs today.