The Tears of Saint Peter

Saint Peter is shown just after the worst moment of his life. He has denied knowing Christ three times, the cock has crowed, and now he stands with wet eyes and clasped hands, the keys of the Church hanging at his wrist. El Greco painted this subject over and over from the 1580s onward, and it suited the Counter-Reformation Spain he worked in, where the Church was pressing hard on the value of confession and private repentance. This version, from his Toledo workshop, sets the saint against a dark rock hung with ivy, a plant long tied to sorrow. The tears are the whole picture. There is almost no story around him, only a large old man caught in the act of regretting something.