Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Francis of Assisi

This canvas came out of El Greco's Toledo workshop after 1600, in a Spain gripped by the Counter-Reformation, when the Church wanted images that would move worshippers to intense private devotion. The workshop obliged with figures like these, stretched tall and lit from no clear source, more vision than portrait. The two saints lived about twelve centuries apart. John the Evangelist, from Christ's own lifetime, stands beside Francis of Assisi from the Middle Ages, the pairing untethered from any single moment. You can tell them by their attributes, the eagle at John's feet and the cup in his hand, and on Francis the marks of the stigmata. It repeats a picture now in the Uffizi in Florence, one of the many repetitions the workshop turned out of El Greco's most sought-after inventions, and the Prado keeps it on deposit at the Museo del Greco in Toledo.