Christ on the Cross

In July 1600 El Greco hired a carter to haul a finished altarpiece out of his Toledo workshop and up the road to Madrid. It was the largest job of his career, the high altar for an Augustinian college founded by Dona Maria de Aragon, and he was paid just under 6,000 ducats for it, more than for anything else he made. Most of its panels hang in the Prado now. In the years directly after that his workshop was also turning out small pictures like this one, single figures meant for private devotion in a house or a chapel. Christ is alone on the cross here, with no soldiers and no mourners, under the dark clouds El Greco gave this subject in every version of it. The Getty dates the canvas between 1600 and 1610, the stretch when his son Jorge Manuel was working beside him.