San Giovanni Battista

By around 1600 the painter everyone called El Greco, the Greek, had lived in the Spanish city of Toledo for more than 20 years, and yet he still signed his work in Greek, in cursive letters you can find here on the rock beside the saint. This is a late painting, and you can see how far he had pushed his own manner. The young John the Baptist is stretched tall and almost weightless against a stormy sky, dressed in animal skins and holding a slender reed cross. At his feet a lamb sleeps on the rock, the Lamb of God whose coming John foretold. El Greco made the picture for a Spanish convent, where it stayed until 1929 before eventually crossing the Atlantic to San Francisco.