Adoration of the Shepherds

El Greco painted this night scene in Toledo sometime between 1596 and 1600, and there is no lantern or fire anywhere in the stable. The light comes from the newborn Christ himself, glowing on the straw and catching the faces of the shepherds as they lean in out of the dark. The museum links that unearthly glow to the Spanish mystic John of the Cross, whose Dark Night of the Soul, written around 1579, speaks of another light beyond the visible one. The canvas is less than half a metre wide and more than twice as tall, and the narrow shape pulls every figure upward. Its full-size counterpart, an Adoration more than three metres high, hangs today in Bucharest, in the National Museum of Art of Romania.