圣雅各伯

El Greco was pushing 70 when he took on this set of 13 canvases, Christ and the twelve apostles, each figure alone against a plain brown ground. He was working out of rented rooms in a half ruined palace in Toledo and had accepted more commissions than he could finish. When he died in 1614 his son Jorge Manuel inherited the studio, the unfinished pictures in it and the debts, and several canvases in this series are noticeably less worked up than the rest. Saint James is one of the resolved ones, in a pale blue tunic under a strong green mantle, holding the short staff that marks him as a pilgrim to his own shrine in Galicia. All 13 hang in a single room of the Museo del Greco, a house the Marquis de la Vega-Inclan assembled in 1910 as an evocation of the painter's Toledo.