Der heilige Ludwig, König von Frankreich

This is Louis the Ninth of France, the 13th-century king who led crusades to the Holy Land and was later made a saint, the figure people reached for whenever they wanted to picture a pious Christian ruler. El Greco painted him around 1590 in Toledo, three centuries after the king had lived, in gleaming armour with a crimson cloak, a crown, and a sceptre, gazing off past us. A young page stands at his side, small and attentive, looking up at the king's face. That a Greek-born painter working in Spain would take up a French royal saint shows how far the cult of Louis still reached across Catholic Europe. The picture later hung in the chateau of Chenonceau in the Loire valley before the Louvre bought it in 1903.