Saint Martin and the Beggar

El Greco painted this for a chapel in Toledo, commissioned in 1597, and he took a very old legend and set it in his own city. The story is from the 4th century: a young Roman soldier, Martin, cuts his cloak in two to clothe a freezing beggar, and later becomes a saint. El Greco dresses Martin as a Toledan nobleman in gold-worked armour on a pale horse, and lays the town of Toledo and the river Tagus out in the distance behind them. The two figures are painted very differently on purpose. Martin is solid and naturalistic, while the near-naked beggar is stretched thin and strange, a hint that he is not quite of this world, since in the legend Christ himself appears in the beggar's place in Martin's dream that night.