Nativity

This was one of five paintings El Greco made for the high altar of a charity hospital church in Illescas, a small town south of Madrid, in the first years of the 1600s. He was in his sixties by then, long settled in Toledo, painting figures that stretch and flicker like flame. Of all his Nativities this is the quietest. There is no crowd of shepherds or kings, just Mary, Joseph and the newborn child, lit from the baby himself so the light seems to rise off the manger. In the shadows an ox lifts its head into the foreground, looking up from below. The commission came through his son Jorge Manuel, who was helping run the family workshop by then.