Saint Peter

Around 1600, in Toledo, El Greco ran a busy workshop turning out devotional pictures for Spanish churches and private chapels, and half-length saints like this Peter were part of the steady trade. This was Counter-Reformation Spain, where a Catholic image was meant to move you to prayer, and Peter, the apostle who held the keys and denied Christ before dawn, suited that kind of private devotion. The painter had come a long way to this. Born Doménikos Theotokópoulos on Venetian Crete and trained first as an icon painter, he only became 'El Greco', the Greek, once he settled in Spain. He never let the origin go: on his canvases he kept signing his name in Greek letters, and this apostle, painted for a Spanish believer, now hangs in the National Gallery in Athens.