San Domenico in preghiera

In Counter-Reformation Toledo, where El Greco spent his last decades, the Church wanted images that pushed a viewer straight into private prayer, and this was one of his reliable answers. Saint Dominic, the 13th-century friar who founded the Dominican order and spread the rosary, kneels alone in a rocky wilderness before a plain wooden crucifix propped against a rock. There is almost nothing else, just the black-and-white habit against a stormy sky and the long, stretched body El Greco gave nearly all his figures. He and his workshop repeated this composition several times over the years, each version signed in Greek on the rock at lower left, sold to convents and private patrons who wanted a model of what real prayer looked like.