Saint Bernardino of Siena (El Greco) Saint Bernardino of Siena (El Greco) Saint Bernardino of Siena is a 1603 work by El Greco. It is owned by the Museo del Prado but displayed at the El Greco Museum in Toledo, Spain. Showing Bernardino of Siena in a Franciscan habit, holding a cane topped with the monogram IHS and with a book under his left arm, it was commissioned for the university college of San Bernardino in Toledo. He was paid 3,000 reales for it in February 1603 and it was ready the following September. In the left background is a landscape of the city of Toledo,
El Greco in nature". Art historian Max Dvořák was the first scholar to connect El Greco's art with Mannerism and Antinaturalism. Modern scholars characterize El Greco's theory as "typically Mannerist" and pinpoint its sources in the Neoplatonism of the Renaissance. Jonathan Brown believes that El Greco endeavored to create a sophisticated form of art; according to Nicholas Penny "once in Spain, El Greco was able to create a style of his own—one that disavowed most of the descriptive ambitions of painting". In his mature works El Greco demonstrated a characteristic tendency to dramatize rather than to describe. The strong spiritual emotion transfers