St. Jerome

El Greco spent the last decades of his life in Toledo, in central Spain, and painted this Saint Jerome there in his final years. Jerome was the 4th-century scholar who translated the Bible into Latin, the version the church would use for over a thousand years, and El Greco shows him dressed as a cardinal, one long finger laid on the open book to mark the words. Those stretched fingers and the gaunt, flame-like face are the painter's signature by now, a way of working his contemporaries found strange and later ages came to prize. It was a composition he and his workshop liked enough to repeat several times over. When the collector Henry Clay Frick bought it for New York, he thought he was acquiring the portrait of a particular Spanish archbishop, not a saint at all.