San Andrés y san Francisco

El Greco painted these two saints standing together against a stormy grey sky in Toledo, the Spanish city where he spent his last decades. On the left is Andrew, an apostle, leaning on the tall X-shaped cross on which he was said to have been killed. On the right stands Francis of Assisi in his rough brown habit, his hands showing the stigmata, the wounds of Christ he was believed to have received. The two are not a usual pair, and the picture was probably made for a particular altar that wanted both. Everything is stretched upward, the bodies long and thin, the drapery like cold metal, in the strange elongated manner that made El Greco unlike anyone before him. He signed it, as he often did, in Greek letters.