El Greco of Chandax, present day Heraklion) on Crete, El Greco was descended from a prosperous urban family, which had probably been driven out of Chania to Candia after an uprising against the Catholic Venetians between 1526 and 1528. El Greco's father, Geórgios Theotokópoulos (d. 1556), was a merchant and tax collector. Nothing is known about his mother or his first wife, also Greek. El Greco's older brother, Manoússos Theotokópoulos (1531 – 13 December 1604), was a wealthy merchant and spent the last years of his life (1603–1604) in El Greco's Toledo home. El Greco received his initial training as an icon
Saint Sebastian (El Greco, 1576–1579) As Andrew Casper says in his "Art and the Religious image in El Greco's Italy", the figure in "Saint Sebastian" is a quotation of a “figure taken from Michelangelo's body of work—though scholars do not agree on which one.” Certainly a number of scholars have made much of the seeming comparison between El Greco's Sebastian and various figures from Michelangelo's body of work. In his work on El Greco, Michael Scholz-Hansel states without prelude that the figure is “based on Michelangelo as well as on the renowned Greco-Roman statue of Laocoön and His Sons which the artist had evidently studied