Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Francis of Assisi

El Greco painted this in Toledo around 1600, in a Spain gripped by the Counter-Reformation, when the Church wanted images that would move worshippers to intense private devotion. He obliged with figures like these, stretched tall and lit from no clear source, more vision than portrait. The two saints lived 13 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. The Prado's version came out of El Greco's Toledo workshop, where assistants helped turn out repetitions of his most sought-after inventions.