Christus am Ölberg

By 1611 El Greco was about 70, still working in Toledo, the Spanish city where he had spent most of his life as an outsider born on Crete. Spain was deep in the Counter-Reformation, and the Church wanted paintings that made faith feel urgent and personal rather than calm and orderly. That is what he gives here. Christ kneels in a red robe on the Mount of Olives, reaching up toward an angel who holds out a chalice, the cup of the suffering ahead, while his followers sleep in a huddle below, unaware. The bodies stretch and the light behaves like nothing in nature, cool and almost electric. This is one of several versions El Greco and his workshop made of the scene, a composition he kept returning to in his last Toledo years.