Portrait of Don Garcia Ibañez de Mugica Bracamonte

Around 1600 the severe, dark-clad Spanish portrait was at its height in Toledo, an hour from Ávila, where El Greco had settled and painted the city's clergy and gentlemen. This likeness of an Ávila knight, Garci Ibáñez de Múxica, belongs to exactly that world, a bearded gentleman set against a plain ground with nothing to distract from the face. For a long time it was called an El Greco, and the cathedral museum in Ávila still presents it as one. Modern El Greco scholarship is more cautious, placing it among the doubtful works rather than the accepted ones, which is why the catalogue now leaves the painter open. No firm date survives for it either, only the span of El Greco's late Toledo years. It still hangs among the treasures of the cathedral museum.