Saint Francis of Assisi in ecstasy

Around 1600 El Greco ran a crowded workshop in Toledo, and no figure came off its easels more often than Saint Francis. Counter-Reformation Spain wanted images of penitent, praying saints, and the demand outlasted the painter: copyists and followers were still repeating his Saint Francis well into the 17th century, and this canvas is one of those repetitions. The Prado catalogues it not as El Greco but as an anonymous 17th-century copy after him, of the variant known as the Escorial type, and keeps it on deposit at the Museo del Greco in Toledo. The scene itself is fixed. Francis kneels in the wilderness of Mount La Verna in September 1224 and receives the wounds of Christ. Everything else is stripped away. No crucifix is painted inside the light, which is what makes this the Escorial type, and nothing is set beside him: only the grey habit, the hands raised with the wound already dark in one palm, and a face tipped up into a light with no clear source.