Mater Dolorosa

El Greco settled in Toledo in Spain in the 1570s and spent the rest of his life making images for a Catholic country in the grip of the Counter-Reformation, when the Church wanted art that could move ordinary worshippers to feeling. The Mater Dolorosa, the grieving Virgin, the mother of sorrows, was exactly that kind of image, a face made for private prayer, meant to be kept close and looked at alone. El Greco and his workshop painted the subject more than once, and this version in Berlin is often held to be the finest of them. She is cropped tight to a pale face and reddish hair under a white veil, her eyes turned up and wet, all of it set against near-darkness so nothing pulls attention from her grief.