Die Apostel Petrus und Paulus

El Greco painted this in Toledo in the 1590s, decades after leaving his native Crete and passing through Venice, whose warm colour he never lost. He sets the two founding apostles of the Church side by side. Peter, older and hesitant, holds the gold keys of heaven. Paul, in deep red, rests a firm hand on a book and a sword, the sword being the instrument of his own execution. Watch their hands: they come close but do not touch, and that small gap is deliberate, a quiet nod to the fact that these two men once quarrelled openly over how the new faith should be run. Behind their heads El Greco tears a patch of blue into the clouds so it reads almost as a shared halo.