The Immaculate Conception with Saint John the Evangelist

El Greco had arrived in Toledo only a few years before he painted this, around 1580, a Greek-born and Venice-trained painter who had failed to win royal favour in Madrid and made the old Spanish city his home for the rest of his life. The picture shows Saint John the Evangelist on the ground, gazing up as the Virgin rises into the sky wrapped in cloud and ringed by angels, the vision of her Immaculate Conception, a doctrine Toledo's clergy defended fiercely. He painted it for a local church, San Roman. Already you can see the elongation and the restless, flickering light that would mark everything he made in Toledo. The figures seem stretched toward the heaven they are looking at.