Die Auferstehung

In 1577 a Greek painter trained in Venice and Rome arrived in Toledo, and almost at once landed his first big Spanish commission, the altarpieces for the convent church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo. Domenikos Theotokopoulos, whom the Spanish called El Greco, was an unknown quantity in Castile, and these pictures had to prove he could carry a whole church. His Resurrection sends Christ shooting upward out of the tomb while the soldiers below tumble and twist, their bodies already stretched into the tall, flamelike shapes that would become his signature. Nothing quite like this had been seen in Spain. It was the beginning of the nearly 40 years he would spend in Toledo, the city he never left again.