Saint François d'Assise recevant les stigmates

El Greco was Greek, trained on Crete in the painting of icons on wooden panels, and in the 1570s he was working his way through Italy, Venice first and then Rome, as a foreign painter looking for patrons. This small panel, about 53 centimetres across, belongs to those Italian years. Francis kneels at the moment the wounds appear, with his companion Brother Leo behind him, and the figure is carried almost without colour over the warm brown ground that Cretan icon painters laid down first. Around 1577 he left for Spain and never came back. In Toledo he and his workshop returned to Saint Francis more often than to any other subject. The panel reached Bergamo with Guglielmo Lochis, a local collector who left his paintings to the city when he died in 1859.