Saint Paul

By around 1610 the painter the Spanish called El Greco, really Domenikos Theotokopoulos, a Greek from Crete, had been living in Toledo for over 30 years. He had come to Spain hoping for royal commissions, never won the king's favour, and instead built a strange, intense art for the churches and clergy of one deeply Catholic city. This Saint Paul belongs to that late world. It is the kind of apostle figure he and his workshop made in sets, the founders of the Church shown one by one. By now his manner had gone fully his own: the bodies stretched and narrow, the faces lit as if from within, the whole surface flickering like candlelight. Paul turns with the sharp, inward look El Greco gave nearly all his saints in those final years.