Portrait of the Poet Alonso Ercilla y Zuniga

The man in this portrait is remembered less for his face than for a poem. Alonso de Ercilla had sailed to the far south of the Spanish empire and fought in the long war against the Mapuche people of Chile, then turned the campaign into La Araucana, the epic that Spaniards of his day read as their answer to Homer, and unusually one that granted its native enemies real dignity. El Greco painted him in the 1570s, soon after the Cretan-born artist had left Italy and settled in Toledo, where he would spend the rest of his life.