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) to sign his piece on the stone under his Sebastian's foot. Saint Sebastian (El Greco, 1576–1579) Saint Sebastian is an autograph work by the famed artist Doménikos Theotokópoulos, commonly known as El Greco. It shows the Martyred Saint in an atypical kneeling posture which has led some scholars to believe it to be a compositional quotation of various works by other great masters whom the artist admired. The painting is currently on display in the Palencia Cathedral. The precise details of the provenance of this particular work are, of necessity, based largely on conjecture. Based on stylistic clues and the