Saint Pierre (1608)

By 1608 El Greco was in his late sixties, working in Toledo, a city that had lost its royal court to Madrid a generation earlier and turned inward on the Church. He had spent decades painting for Spain's religious houses, and in these last years his figures grew taller and his colours stranger and colder. Here Peter stands high on a mountain, wrapped in heavy blue and gold, holding two keys. They point to the moment Christ named him the rock of the Church and gave him the keys of heaven, the founding claim of the papacy that Counter-Reformation Spain was defending hardest. The small head set against that great sweep of drapery is the signature of El Greco's final manner, painted a few years before his death in 1614.