Il martirio di san Sebastiano

El Greco painted this soon after 1577, the year he settled in Toledo. He was a Greek trained in Venice and Rome, still an unknown in Spain, and Saint Sebastian, the Roman soldier shot with arrows for his faith, gave him his first life-size male nude. You can see where he had been looking. The twisting body carries the muscular weight of Michelangelo, and the strained pose echoes the ancient Laocoon statue he had studied firsthand in Rome. Sebastian's arm is roped to the tree above him, so that the whole figure seems to hang and kneel at once. El Greco signed his name, in Greek letters, on the rock that takes the saint's weight.