Mourning madonna

El Greco painted this around 1590 in Toledo, the strict Catholic heart of Philip the Second's Spain. It is not an altarpiece. It is a Mater Dolorosa, the Mother of Sorrows, the Virgin shown alone with her grief after her son's death, cut down to half-length so she fills the space up close. Pictures like this were made for private prayer, to hang in a bedroom or a small oratory where one person could pray face to face with her. The Church had encouraged exactly this kind of intimate devotional image in the decades after the Council of Trent. El Greco, a Greek from Crete who trained in Venice before settling in Toledo, painted the subject more than once. This version has belonged to the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection since the 1950s.