The Immaculate Conception

By 1611 El Greco was in his late sixties and near the end of a long career in Toledo, running a busy workshop with his son Jorge Manuel. The two worked on this picture together. The Virgin rises on a bank of cloud carried by cherubs, her body stretched impossibly tall, her robe streaming upward as if gravity had let go of it. That elongation was El Greco's late signature, and for centuries it made viewers wonder whether his eyesight was failing. Scattered through the dim landscape below are the emblems from the Litany of the Virgin, a rose, a lily, a walled garden. Scholars think the son painted that ground and the father the shining figure above it.