Мученичество святого Себастьяна

El Greco painted this around 1610, in his last years in Toledo, when he was nearly 70 and painting unlike anyone else alive. Saint Sebastian, the Roman soldier shot with arrows for his faith, was a saint people prayed to against the plague, and El Greco gives him a body stretched long and weightless, lit by a strange inner glow while a storm rolls over the city of Toledo behind him. For centuries afterwards that stretching looked like a fault, until modern painters decided he had simply seen further than his own age. At some point the canvas was cut in two. The Prado reunited the halves only in 1987, when the missing lower section, the saint's legs and the town, turned up on the market.