São Francisco de Assis

By the 1590s El Greco had been settled in Toledo for years, painting for a Spain deep in the Counter-Reformation, when the Catholic Church held up saints of poverty and penance as models for the faithful. No subject came through his workshop more often than Saint Francis of Assisi. Francis suited the mood exactly: the wealthy young man who gave everything away, and who was said to have received the marks of Christ's wounds on his own body. El Greco paints him gaunt in a rough grey habit, gazing up out of the shadow, the figure stretched tall in the way that makes his work unmistakable. So many versions left his studio that scholars still argue over which hands did which. This one hangs in Toledo, the city he made his home.