Christ the Saviour

Near the end of his life, working in Toledo, El Greco and his workshop turned out sets the Spanish called an apostolado: Christ together with his twelve apostles, each a half-length figure meant to hang in a row. This is the Christ that headed one of them. He faces straight out, raises his right hand in blessing, and rests the left on the globe of the world, which the museum calls crystalline and which he painted as a dull sphere with a single streak of light across it. He wears a red tunic and nothing over it, though a fold drawn on the left shoulder suggests a mantle he thought better of. The head, turned slightly to the right, sits inside a halo shaped like a diamond, and the long face, the long pointed beard and the fixed stare come straight from the Byzantine Pantocrator. El Greco had painted such sets before for Toledo Cathedral. This one hung in the parish church of Almadrones, out in the province of Guadalajara, until the State bought four of its canvases for the Prado in 1946.