Attributed to El Greco

Attributed to El Greco is the label a museum chooses when it believes a picture comes from the painter himself but stops short of certainty. With El Greco that doubt grows out of the way he worked. In Toledo, the old church capital of Spain where he settled around 1577, he ran a busy workshop with assistants, his son Jorge Manuel among them, and repeated his most popular compositions in several versions and sizes.

His series of the apostles show why. He painted complete sets of Christ and the twelve apostles, each a single figure, and the same designs return from one set to the next, some largely his own work and some largely the workshop's. Museums weigh that balance picture by picture. One set, from about 1605 to 1610, is in the sacristy of Toledo Cathedral, and another was still unfinished when he died in 1614.