The Agony in the Garden

In the late 1550s Titian, by then in his seventies and working for Philip II of Spain, grew fascinated by what he could do with darkness. This is a night scene, and almost everything in it is worked out in torchlight and a cold gleam from the sky. Christ kneels in the garden of Gethsemane while the soldiers who will arrest him press in from the right, a lantern bobbing among them. Philip was pressing the painter to finish it in the summer of 1558, and Titian, who then promised it within the year, only sent it in April 1562, in the same shipment as his Rape of Europa. In 1574 the king handed it to the monastery of El Escorial, where it hung in the vestibule outside the sacristy until it came to the Prado in 1837. The only warm colour in it is the orange of the torches.