Christus am Ölberg

El Greco painted this in Toledo around 1603, in the heart of Counter-Reformation Spain, where the Church wanted images that carried viewers straight into prayer. He returned to Christ in the garden of Gethsemane more than once. Here Christ kneels in the dark while an angel leans from a bank of cloud to hold out the cup he must drink, and below him the three disciples set to keep watch have fallen asleep. The bodies stretch, the drapery twists into flame-like folds, the colours run cold and acid, and the space never quite settles. He was painting this way, far from the naturalism gathering elsewhere in Europe, right up to his death about a decade later.