St John the Baptist

Around 1610, in Toledo, an aging painter from Crete named Doménikos Theotokópoulos, the man Spain had come to call El Greco, kept a busy workshop that turned out version after version of his tall, flame-like saints. This St John the Baptist is one of those studio pictures. The museum catalogues it as the work of that workshop rather than the master's own hand, assistants trained to repeat his stretched figures and cool, silvery light. El Greco died in 1614, only a few years after a canvas like this would have left his studio, and his strange elongated manner then fell so far out of favour that for a long time it was explained away as the fault of a diseased eye, until modern painters took him up again around 1900. This saint was one small link in that chain, copied out in the master's manner while he was still alive to see it done.