El Greco's legacy has traditionally been cast as rather slight. He had a long, fairly successful career in Toledo, where he enjoyed the patronage of a certain portion of the city's elite. Later, El Greco's distinctive style struck a chord with the Expressionist movements of the early twentieth century, as well as among Greek and Spanish nationalists. In his own day, however, he made little mark beyond the confines of provincial Toledo, and he did not spawn a school of followers. His son Jorge Manuel continued to paint in what has been described as a “debased version of his father's manner,” and Luis Tristán sometimes adopted compositional formulas associated with the older artist, but the intense artifice of his style was soon displaced by the new naturalism that came to characterize the art of Spain's Golden Age. Velázquez may have drawn on El Greco's painterly openness as his own art moved in that direction following his return from Italy in 1631, but the example of the late Titian, represented so well in the royal collection, loomed much larger as a model in that stylistic evolution.

A key figure in the rise of naturalism in Spain was Juan Bautista Maíno (Plate 2). He was a talented artist who was formed in Rome during one of that city's most innovative decades, from around 1600 to 1610. He was in the thick of things when he returned to Spain, first in the Toledo of the elderly El Greco, then in the Madrid of the emerging Velázquez.