Portrait of a Trinitarian Friar

This is one of the last portraits El Greco painted, made in Toledo only a few years before his death in 1614, when he was around 70. We do not know who the man is. He wears the white habit with the red-and-blue cross of the Trinitarians, a religious order founded centuries earlier to ransom Christians captured across the Mediterranean, so he was a friar of some standing, but no name has stuck to him. What the painting is really about is the face and the cloth. The expression is cool and guarded, almost cold, while the white robe erupts around it in fast, slashing strokes, folds that seem to move on their own. El Greco had spent a career pushing paint toward that kind of nervous energy. Set against a plain dark ground, the friar looks lit from somewhere the room cannot account for.