The Tears of Saint Peter

By the 1580s the Catholic Church, pushing back against the Reformation, had made confession and repentance central to its message, and no figure carried that better than Peter, the apostle who denied Christ three times and then wept. El Greco, working in Toledo, seems to have painted this weeping Peter first, then returned to the subject perhaps six more times over his life. Peter looks up, hands clasped, the keys of the Church hanging at his side. In the distance, at the left, a small figure hurries from the empty tomb, the news of the Resurrection already arriving. John Bowes bought the picture in 1869 for a couple of hundred francs, not even sure it was really an El Greco.