Adoration of the Shepherds

El Greco was a newcomer to Spain in 1577. Cretan by birth and trained in Venice and Rome, he had just settled in Toledo, where the dean of the cathedral gave him his first major Spanish commission — a set of altarpieces for the convent of Santo Domingo el Antiguo. This Adoration was made for that church. He lights the whole scene from the newborn Christ, so that Mary, Joseph and the crowding shepherds are modelled by a glow rising off the child rather than by any daylight. The stretched figures and cold, flickering colour that Spain would come to know as his signature are already here, in one of the first things he painted after landing. The painting later left the convent and belongs today to the Banco Santander collection.