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,
Posthumous fame of El Greco impeccable originality because it is not possible to avail yourself of El Greco's language, if in using it, it is not invented again and again, by the user." To the Blaue Reiter group in Munich in 1912, El Greco typified that "mystical inner construction" that it was the task of their generation to rediscover. Two years after the publication of Cossío's catalog, in 1910, another art historian, Borja de San Román, published his own research about El Greco, which included 88 new documents, among which the proxy where El Greco directed that his son, Jorge Manuel, should have the power