Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino

El Greco painted this in 1609 in Toledo, near the end of his life, and the sitter was a real friend, not just a commission. Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino was a Trinitarian monk and one of the most celebrated preachers and poets in the Spain of Philip III. He had been made a professor of rhetoric at Salamanca at just 21. El Greco strips almost all colour out of the picture, leaving little but the black and white of the friar's habit, and lets the face and the two restless hands carry everything. There is a quiet postscript to the friendship. After the painter died, Paravicino wrote four sonnets to his memory, published in a book of his poems years later, so the man in the black robe eventually gave the artist his epitaph.