An Allegory (Fàbula)

El Greco painted this scene at least three times, and each surviving version keeps the same three figures in the dark. A boy blows on a glowing ember to light a candle. A monkey leans in from the left, and on the right a man in a red cap grins at the flame. This one was made in Toledo in the 1580s, and El Greco left no word on what it means. In 1908 the Spanish scholar Manuel Bartolomé Cossío linked it to an old Spanish proverb: man is fire, woman is tow, the dry flax fibre, and the devil comes and blows. Later writers have seen the monkey as a nod to painting itself, an art that apes nature, and the grinning man as folly, with the whole scene perhaps warning against lust. The picture came to the National Gallery of Scotland in 1989. The boy's jacket, which reads almost black today, was painted green and has darkened with time.