Allegory of the Order of the Camaldolese

In 1597 a Spanish Benedictine, Fray Juan de Castañiza, petitioned Philip II for permission to bring the Camaldolese hermits into Spain. This picture belongs to that campaign, and it works like a plan. The clearing in the wooded mountains is seen from above, with the hermits' separate cells set out in rows around the buildings where they came together to worship, which is precisely the arrangement being put to the court. A Latin inscription describes the hermit's life, and two coats of arms carry the names of Benedict and of Romuald, the Italian nobleman who founded the order shortly after the year 1000. Philip II died in 1598, a year after the petition. El Greco was in his late fifties in Toledo and busy with church altarpieces when he took this on. A second version of the same composition, on a slightly larger canvas, is in Valencia at the college of the Patriarch.