Saint Francis in Prayer

El Greco had settled in Toledo by this point, a Greek-trained painter who had passed through Venice and Rome and then found his real audience in the intense religious world of Counter-Reformation Spain. Saint Francis was one of the most requested subjects there, an emblem of poverty and penitence at a moment when the Spanish church prized both, and El Greco and his workshop turned out many versions of him. Here the saint stands in his rough friar's habit, hands pressed together, his face gaunt and stretched long in the way that became the painter's signature. That elongated, weightless body was a deliberate manner of his, meant to pull the eye upward and make earthly flesh look almost spiritual.