圣伯尔纳

El Greco painted this the year he settled in Toledo, 1577, a Greek-born artist trained in Venice and Rome who had come to Spain hoping for royal work and found it first in the Church. His earliest major Spanish job was a set of altarpieces for the convent of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo, and this half-length Saint Bernard, staff and book in hand, was made as part of that commission, paired with a Saint Benedict. It already shows the tall, spare figures and cool light that Toledo would come to prize. The panel's later travels were rougher than its making. It reached Berlin by the 1940s, was carried off to the Soviet Union as war booty after 1945, and hangs today in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.