Retrato de Diego de Covarrubias y Leiva

El Greco reached Toledo in 1577, and that was the very year Diego de Covarrubias died, so the two men almost certainly never met. Covarrubias had been one of the great legal minds of Counter-Reformation Spain, a professor at Salamanca and bishop of Segovia who helped shape the closing decrees of the Council of Trent. To paint him around 1600, decades later, El Greco worked from an earlier likeness by the court painter Alonso Sanchez Coello, which still hangs in the same Toledo museum. You can read the borrowed source in the stiff, frontal pose, which El Greco then loosened with his own quick, nervous handling of the white hair and the pale, tired face.