El Greco case, Philip's dissatisfaction ended any hopes of royal patronage El Greco may have had. Lacking the favor of the king, El Greco was obliged to remain in Toledo, where he had been received in 1577 as a great painter. According to Hortensio Félix Paravicino, a 17th-century Spanish preacher and poet, "Crete gave him life and the painter's craft, Toledo a better homeland, where through Death he began to achieve eternal life." In 1585, he appears to have hired an assistant, Italian painter Francisco Preboste, and to have established a workshop capable of producing altar frames and statues as well as
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