San Bernardino de Siena

El Greco was paid 3,000 reales in February 1603 for this altarpiece and delivered it the following September, painted for a small college in Toledo named after the saint it shows. Bernardino of Siena was a Franciscan preacher, and El Greco stretches him into a tall flame of a figure, all vertical folds, in the elongated manner of his late Toledo years. Look low, by his feet: three bishops' mitres lie on the ground, one for each of the three sees Bernardino was offered and turned down. Behind him runs a thin strip of Toledo itself, the city El Greco had by then made his home, including a monastery that war would later destroy.