The Adoration of the Shepherds

By 1602 El Greco had lived in Toledo for about twenty years, a Greek from Crete who trained in Venice and then found his real audience in the intense religious world of Counter-Reformation Spain. This night scene of the shepherds at the manger is built almost entirely from light thrown upward by the newborn Christ, so the faces and hands glow while everything around them falls away into darkness. The bodies stretch and twist in his unmistakable way, closer to flame than to anatomy. It hangs in Valencia, in the seminary college founded by Juan de Ribera, the reforming archbishop whose circle prized exactly this kind of fervent, otherworldly picture. El Greco would take up the same subject again at the very end of his life, for his own burial chapel.