Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata

El Greco painted this in Toledo in the 1580s, in the thick of the Counter-Reformation, when the Catholic Church was pushing art that could stir intense personal devotion. Saint Francis kneels at the moment he receives the stigmata, the wounds of Christ, picked out by a burst of white light against near-total dark. The figure is stretched tall and almost weightless, the paint loose and flickering, a manner El Greco had absorbed in Venice before settling in Spain. It was a subject he returned to often, being himself a lay member of the Franciscan order. Look at the lower edge and there is what seems to be a torn scrap of paper stuck to the canvas, painted so convincingly it fools the eye, carrying his signature in his native Greek: Doménikos Theotokópoulos made this.