Die Heilige Familie

El Greco painted this in Toledo in the early 1580s, not long after he had settled in Spain for good, having failed to win the royal favour he wanted at the court of Philip the Second. Turned away from grand commissions, he built a steady business in intimate devotional pictures like this one, which pious households prized. He shows Mary as a young mother bending over her sleeping child, with Joseph looking on across her shoulder, gentle and a little anxious. The passage everyone remembers is the Virgin's veil, a sheer white mantilla laid in with a few swift, confident strokes that let you see the skin beneath. It is the kind of quiet, close-up tenderness the Catholic reform of the day wanted from religious art, made to be prayed before at home.