Holy Family with Saint Anne

By the 1590s El Greco had long since left Rome and settled in Toledo, then a proud old city losing ground to Madrid as the seat of the Spanish court. He painted this quiet, close-in scene there, probably around 1595. Saint Anne, the mother of the Virgin, leans in from the shadows to watch her daughter nurse the infant Christ, and Joseph stands behind. There is no crowd and no throne, just faces pressed together in a warm brown light. The picture later hung in the great hospital founded by Cardinal Tavera on the edge of the city, given by the widow of a local man, and an inventory there records it by 1631.