Christ with the cross

El Greco painted this in Toledo around 1590, decades after leaving his native Crete and passing through Venice and Rome. By then he had settled into the intense, upward-reaching manner the Spanish church wanted from him. Christ carries the cross here, yet there is no crowd, no soldiers, no road to Calvary. He holds the wood almost tenderly and lifts his eyes, and his fingers curl around the beam as if it were something to be embraced rather than dragged. The devotional books of the day, above all the widely read Imitation of Christ, encouraged exactly this kind of close, face-to-face image. Versions of this composition left his workshop many times over, made for patrons who wanted one to pray before at home.