Writers on El Greco's Fable (An Allegory of a Boy Lighting a Candle in the Company of an Ape and a Fool) tend to have a field day talking about the apparently sexual symbolism and metaphorical suggestions of the work.

It seems that something about a monkey, a grinning man, and a boy blowing on a candle just screams "sexytime" to generations of art historians. This made me scratch my head a bit until I read about the allegory which they constructed around these figures, which we'll discuss below. In the context of El Greco's post-Roman period in Spain, where he produced this work and its companion versions, which hang in the Virginia Kraft Payton in Florida, the Nazionale di Capodimonte Museum in Naples, the Harewood Collection in Leeds, and the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, biographers suggest that the artist brought the stories of ancient Rome to his work.

In particular, there are  stories in the Natural Histories of Pliny the Elder of the sculpture by Lycius called Boy Blowing on a Dying Fire. There is also a painting of the same subject by Philiscus, and a painting by Antiphilus that wowed critics for its realistic portrayal of light. Before you start searching museum catalogues, keep in mind that these works are all lost, probably during one of the many military campaigns that defined the ancient society, but the general point is that El Greco was pursuing a reference to a vintage theme, cultivated in the clique of Orsini, as they admired the Roman artists for aiming at a very high level of naturalistic detail. I've never tried to draw someone blowing on a flame, but surely my first several, or several dozen, attempts would barely pass the Pictionary test. We can appreciate El Greco's ambition: the way fire, flickering under the force of breath, casts light on people's faces, is a huge challenge to paint, and the way in which he achieves it communicates a very specific feeling and atmosphere.

These ideas are all based on things that we know, and in that regard they depart from most of the writing on this painting which focuses on the possibility that the image is an allegory for vice, represented by Curious George on the left there, and folly, represented by the gleeful man on the right, and their influence on sexual behavior. I don't know about that, but I so know that sex is one of the more challenging essential aspects of life to discuss in a frank and polite way and that, in a Biblical framework, the Divine Being created everything with the Word, except for us - we came from breath itself.