Santa Catarina

El Greco painted this in Toledo in the last years of his life, around 1610, decades after he had left Crete, then Venice, and settled for good in Spain. Saint Catherine of Alexandria stands almost life-size, holding the palm of a martyr and resting one arm on a broken wheel. That wheel is her whole story in a single prop. Condemned for her faith, she was to be tortured on a spiked wheel, which the legend says shattered before it could harm her, so she was beheaded instead, and the sword in her other hand is that ending. The long fingers and the flickering, almost restless brushwork are the mark of El Greco's late years, learned partly from the Venetians Titian and Tintoretto.