Portrait of Cardinal Tavera

El Greco never met the man in this portrait. Cardinal Juan Pardo de Tavera had died in 1545, more than 60 years before it was painted, and he had founded the great hospital in Toledo where the picture still hangs. So in 1609 El Greco worked from the only likeness left, the wax death mask a sculptor had cast of Tavera's face for his tomb. That is why the cardinal looks so bloodless and drawn, the cheeks fallen in. El Greco was, in effect, painting a dead man back into a living pose, seating him upright in scarlet robes with a book and a bell on the table before him. He would die five years later, still at work on other commissions for the same hospital.