Saint François en extase

El Greco reached Toledo in 1577, a Greek painter trained in Venice and Rome who had never worked in Spain before. He arrived with two large public commissions, the altarpieces for Santo Domingo el Antiguo and the Disrobing of Christ for the cathedral, and he spent the next two years in a dispute with the cathedral chapter over what the second of them was worth. This small Saint Francis belongs to exactly those years. Scholars place it between 1577 and 1580, and the paint is still laid on the dense Venetian way he had learned in Titian's city. Franciscan devotion was one of the few subjects a painter in Spain could count on selling, and he returned to Saint Francis for the rest of his life, in version after version. Writers on this one keep coming back to the hands, and to the face lifted into the light.