San Giovanni Evangelista

When El Greco painted this, in 1577, he had just arrived in Toledo, a Greek trained in Venice and Rome with almost no reputation in Spain. The commission that brought him was a set of altarpieces for the convent church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, arranged through a Spanish churchman, Diego de Castilla, whom he had met in Rome. It was effectively his introduction to the city where he would spend the rest of his life. This tall panel of Saint John the Evangelist stands to one side of that scheme. The saint is drawn as a long, narrow figure, the body stretched and the drapery falling in cool greens, already showing the elongation that would become his signature.