Christus am Ölberg

El Greco painted the Agony in the Garden over and over across his career, and this is one of his later returns to it, made in Toledo in the early 1600s. The moment is the night before the Crucifixion, Christ praying in the garden while his closest apostles, Peter, John and James, sleep at the bottom of the picture, useless to him. An angel leans in from a burst of heavenly light holding the chalice, the cup of suffering he is about to accept. Off in the darkness at the right, Judas is already leading the soldiers in. El Greco stretches everything upward, the figures, the rocks, the cold moonlight, so the scene feels less like a place than a vision. It hangs today in the parish church of Santa Maria in Andujar, in Andalusia.