Die Unbefleckte Empfängnis

In late 1607 the city council of Toledo needed someone to finish a chapel the Genoese painter Alessandro Semini had left undone at his death. They turned to El Greco, by then an old man in the city, and he took the whole scheme over, insisting everything be done in oil and reworking the plan around the woman who had founded the chapel, Isabel de Oballe. This towering Virgin, rising on a crescent moon through a rush of angels and flowers, was the altar's centrepiece, and it was among the last things he painted. It stayed in the church of San Vicente, fitted into the frame he designed for it, until 1961, when it came to the Museo de Santa Cruz nearby.