Agony in the Garden

By 1604 El Greco had lived in Toledo for more than 25 years, a Cretan-trained painter who had passed through Venice and Rome before settling in the religious heart of Counter-Reformation Spain. This is Christ praying in the garden of Gethsemane on the night before his arrest, the disciples asleep below while an angel comes down from a sky that seems to churn. El Greco painted this scene several times, and here the figures stretch and the drapery burns with cold color in the way that made his late work look like nothing else being made in Spain at the time. He signed it, as he always did, with his full name in Greek letters, Domenikos Theotokopoulos. The canvas entered the museum in Buenos Aires in 1936.