Laokoon

El Greco painted this near the end of his life in Toledo, around 1610, and in a career filled with saints and altarpieces it is the one time he turned to Greek myth. The story is the Trojan priest Laocoön, who warned his city not to bring in the wooden horse and was strangled with his two sons by sea serpents sent by the gods. El Greco does something strange with the setting. He drops the ancient Trojans right outside the walls of his own Spanish city, Toledo, with the horse trotting toward the gate. There was a local legend that the people of Toledo were descended from Trojans, which may be why. The bodies stretch and twist far past anything anatomy allows, pale and elongated against a bruised grey sky, the way El Greco painted almost everything in his last years.