Retrato de Francisco de Pisa

El Greco painted this in Toledo in the last years of his life, around 1610, when he was near 70 and long settled in the Spanish city where he did his greatest work. The sitter is Dr. Francisco de Pisa, a Toledan priest and the official historian of the city, a serious, exact man caught in plain black clothes against a plain ground. By this point El Greco's religious paintings had grown famously strange, with their stretched bodies and cold flickering light, yet in a portrait like this he stays sober and direct, reading a real face. Pisa left the picture to a convent he was helping to found, and it was still recorded hanging there years after both men had died.