The Coronation of the Virgin

By 1591 El Greco had been settled in Toledo for about a decade, running a busy workshop and taking commissions from parish churches around the city. This panel crowned an altarpiece he made for the village church of Talavera la Vieja, southwest of Toledo. It sat at the very top, the Virgin raised between Christ and God the Father while the apostles look up from below. The elongated bodies and cold, flickering colour were his own language by now, nothing like the Italian training he had arrived with. The reason it hangs in a Toledo museum today rather than in that village is grim. The church was destroyed in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, and only a few of its canvases came through. This was the one from the summit.