São Francisco Recebendo os Estigmas

Francis of Assisi, kneeling in the wilderness, receives the marks of Christ's wounds in his own hands and side, a vision said to have come to him on a mountain in 1224. El Greco painted this small, dark version in Toledo around 1590, in the heat of the Counter-Reformation, when the Spanish Church wanted images that stirred intense private devotion rather than laid out a clear story. He was himself a lay member of the Franciscan order, and the saint's ecstasy was one of his favourite subjects. He returned to it so often that he and his workshop produced numerous close variations, some of which survive today from Brazil to Madrid. The skull beside Francis is the plain reminder of death he was meant to be meditating on.