Apparizione della Vergine a san Lorenzo

El Greco had not long arrived in Spain when he painted this in the late 1570s, a Greek from Crete who had trained in Venice and then settled for good in Toledo. His subject is Saint Lawrence, a deacon of the early Roman church who, tradition says, was put to death on a gridiron for refusing to hand over the treasures of the poor. Here he kneels in his deacon's robes as the Virgin and Child appear to him in a burst of light, and the iron grill of his martyrdom rests beside him, the sign every worshipper would have read at once. The stretched figures and the cold silvery colour are already the manner that would make him famous, worked out for a church far off in Galicia, at Monforte de Lemos.