Christ bids Farewell to his Mother

The scene never happens in the Gospels. It comes out of late medieval devotional writing, the moment Christ takes leave of his mother before going up to Jerusalem, and it suited the Toledo of the years after the Council of Trent, the Catholic reform assembly, when households bought small pictures to pray in front of at home. El Greco painted the subject rarely. It turns up only once in the two inventories drawn up after his death in 1614, and just two canvases of it are accepted today as fully his own hand, one of them now in Chicago. The version in Toledo has divided specialists for a century. August Mayer and Halldor Soehner, both German scholars of Spanish painting, argued that El Greco worked on it himself. Harold Wethey, who catalogued the painter's whole output in the 1960s, called it a mechanical copy out of the workshop. It was restored in 1963 and hangs in the Museo de Santa Cruz under El Greco's name.