San Luca

El Greco painted this in the last years of his life in Toledo, around 1610. In that final stretch he made a specialty of the apostolado, a set of bust-length apostles with Christ at their head, and his workshop turned out several such series. Luke, the evangelist traditionally believed to have been a painter himself, holds an open book. This particular figure came from a group of nine that hung in the parish church of Almadrones, a village in the Spanish province of Guadalajara. Their later history is tied to a war. During the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s the church was badly knocked about, and the pictures were taken out for safekeeping and in time sold off. Luke made his way to Indianapolis, where he hangs now.