Retrato de Vincenzo Anastagi

El Greco painted this in Rome in the mid-1570s, in the stretch of his life between Venice and his move to Spain, when he was still a Greek painter trying to make a name in Italy. The sitter is Vincenzo Anastagi, a Knight of Malta who had helped hold the island against an Ottoman siege ten years earlier and had just been made military commander of the Castel Sant'Angelo, the papal fortress in Rome. It is one of only two full-length portraits El Greco ever made, and his first attempt at the type. He plays down the finery and plays up the man: the sunburnt face, the grey coming into the hair, the thick calves of an infantry officer who spent his career on foot in armour.