The Feast in the House of Simon

El Greco painted this in Toledo in the last years of his life, around 1608 to 1614. He had been born on Crete, trained among Venetian painters, then settled in Spain, and by now his manner had drifted far from anything you would call natural. The apostles crowd a narrow table, their faces lit by the food in front of them while the rest of the room falls away into shadow. The moment is a supper in the house of Simon, where a woman anoints Christ's feet. Some of the figures were finished by assistants in his busy workshop, which you can sense in the slightly different handling from face to face. The painting reached the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949.