Santo André

El Greco spent his last decades in Toledo running a busy workshop, and by around 1610 the appetite for his tall, flame-like saints was strong enough that the shop produced replicas to meet it. This Saint Andrew is one of them. The Metropolitan treats it as the work of an assistant rather than the master's own hand, a reduced copy of the apostle who fills the left side of a larger signed canvas by El Greco now in the Prado in Madrid. The figure keeps the stretched body and the cool, silvery light that made his manner so easy to recognise. Andrew leans on the diagonal, X-shaped cross that is always his sign, from the old tradition that he asked to be crucified on one unlike Christ's. Copies like this were coming out of El Greco's own Toledo workshop while he was still alive.