Das Engelskonzert

This is a fragment, the top of a much larger Annunciation that El Greco painted near the end of his life in Toledo, and the lower part with the Virgin and the angel is now in Madrid. What survives here in Athens is the heavenly half, a crowd of angels playing instruments in a burst of cloud and light. By this stage, past 70, El Greco had pushed his figures into those long flickering flames of colour that made him look almost modern to painters centuries later. Look for the viola and the harpsichord among the angels, real instruments of his own day set into the sky. The Greek state bought this piece in 1931.