Mater dolorosa

El Greco signed his work in Greek his whole life, and this small devotional Virgin shows why that mattered. He was born on Crete, then under Venetian rule, and trained first as a painter of Orthodox icons before he ever saw Italy or Spain. By the 1590s he was settled in Toledo, the old religious capital of Spain, painting for a fiercely Catholic clientele. Yet the Mary he gives them here, wrapped close in blue against a dark ground, has the frontal stillness and the young, smooth face of the Byzantine icons he grew up copying. It is a Western subject, the grieving mother, held in an Eastern manner. The paint is thin and cool, and the hood folds around her almost like a shell.