ベナベンテ公の肖像

El Greco spent the second half of his life in Toledo, in Spain, painting the city's clergy and nobility in his own stretched, flickering style. This is a portrait of a Spanish grandee, most likely Juan Alonso Pimentel, Duke of Benavente, who served around 1600 as the king's viceroy in Valencia. He stands in dark armor with a ruff at his throat, one hand resting near his sword, the whole figure lit against deep shadow. For a long time the attribution was uncertain, until a cleaning uncovered El Greco's signature on the canvas. The painting hangs today in Bayonne, in the French Basque country, in a museum built from the collection of the 19th-century painter Léon Bonnat.