San Giovanni Battista, Valencia

El Greco was born on Crete and trained first as a painter of Byzantine icons, then studied in Venice and Rome before settling for good in Toledo, in central Spain. This Saint John the Baptist comes from his late years there, around 1600. John is shown as a lean young man in animal skins, holding a slender cross-topped staff, with a lamb resting beside him as a sign of Christ. The stretched, flame-like body and the cool grey light are pure El Greco, the manner that would strike later centuries as almost modern. He often repeated his successful compositions with workshop help, and a close variant of this figure hangs today in a museum in San Francisco. This one has stayed in Valencia.