Saint Augustine

By around 1590 the Greek-born painter Domenikos Theotokopoulos, known in Spain simply as El Greco, had settled in Toledo, the religious heart of Counter-Reformation Spain. He painted Augustine, one of the great early theologians of the Church, as a towering bishop whose embroidered robe falls the whole height of the tall, narrow canvas. Off to one side sits a small view of a town, most likely Toledo itself, the city he never left. Pictures like this were often made in sets, a row of saints to line a single wall. The stretched figure and the stormy, streaked sky are pure El Greco, the manner that struck many of his contemporaries as strange and that later drew admirers such as Cézanne.