Saint Sebastian

Around 1602 El Greco was working in Toledo, running a busy workshop and painting saints as tall, flame-like figures that seem to stretch toward heaven. His Saint Sebastian is one of these, the young Roman soldier tied to a tree and shot with arrows for his faith, his body elongated far past anatomy under a stormy sky. This version was later cut down to an oval and lost some of its surface to old cleaning. Its afterlife is unusually tangled. King Carol I of Romania acquired it in the 1890s and left it to the Romanian crown, and in 2025 a planned sale at Christie's in New York was halted while Romania pressed a claim to keep it as national heritage.