A Boy Blowing on an Ember to Light a Candle

The idea behind this picture is very old. Around the year 77, the Roman writer Pliny described a lost painting by the Greek artist Antiphilus that showed a boy blowing on a fire, his face lit by its glow. Fifteen centuries later, during his years in Venice, the young El Greco set out to reconstruct that lost scene, painting a boy who cups a glowing ember to catch a candle flame in the dark. That original now hangs in Naples. The version here is a later copy, made around 1700 by an unknown hand, one of many that carried El Greco's firelit boy across Europe long after him. The whole image is built from a single source of light, the ember and the small flame it feeds, with everything else falling away into shadow.