St John the Evangelist

In the Toledo of around 1600, El Greco ran one of the busiest workshops in Spain, and portraits of Christ and the 12 apostles, called apostolados, were steady work. This is Saint John, shown as a young man rather than the usual aged writer. He holds up a golden chalice, and if you look closely a small dark dragon rises out of it: the legend held that John was handed a cup of poisoned wine and drank it without harm, the poison escaping in the shape of a serpent. El Greco lit him with a strange silvery light against clouds that seem to boil, and stretched the body far past natural proportion, the way he did in his last Toledo years.