The Madonna of Charity

El Greco painted this for a hospital church in Illescas, near Toledo, in 1597, and reached back to a medieval image, the Virgin who opens her cloak to shelter the faithful beneath it. What he did with it caused trouble. Instead of anonymous believers, he tucked under her mantle a row of real Toledo gentlemen in the stiff white ruffs then in fashion, and the young man at the right is his own son, Jorge Manuel, who worked on the commission with him. The hospital's administrators were not pleased. They felt these fashionable faces had no business under the Virgin, and a long dispute over the pictures and the painter's fee followed. His signature runs in Greek along the lower edge.