Opening of the Fifth Seal

El Greco painted this in his last years in Toledo, working on it from 1608 until his death in 1614, for a side altar in a hospital church. The kneeling figure in blue thrown into the lower left is Saint John, arms flung up as the fifth seal of Revelation opens and the souls of the martyrs rise naked to receive their white robes. The bodies stretch and flicker like flames. What survives is only the bottom part; around 1880 a restorer cut more than a metre and a half off the top, which is why John seems to reach up toward nothing. Nearly 300 years later the painter Ignacio Zuloaga showed it to a young Picasso in Paris. Picasso was then working on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and the angular, upward-stretching figures here left a clear mark on it.