Der heilige Franziskus mit Bruder Leo

El Greco painted Saint Francis more than almost any other subject, turning out over a dozen versions from his workshop in Toledo. This is one of them, made in Counter-Reformation Spain for private devotion, the kind of picture meant to hang in a convent cell or a small chapel. Francis kneels in a cave holding a skull, his hands marked with the stigmata, while his companion Brother Leo prays beside him. The skull is the point of the whole image. It was an aid to the sort of meditation on death that Saint Ignatius of Loyola set out in his Spiritual Exercises, then spreading fast through Spanish religious houses. El Greco's stretched figures and cold, flickering light give the scene its charged, otherworldly feel. Of his many Saint Francis paintings, only four bring in Brother Leo like this.