The Resurrection

El Greco painted this around 1597 to 1600 for the high altar of an Augustinian college in Madrid, and it looks like almost nothing else made in Spain at the time. Christ rises straight up out of the frame, weightless, holding a white banner, while the soldiers guarding the tomb tumble away below in a tangle of bare, elongated limbs. The whole thing is stretched tall and narrow, lit by a cold, unearthly glow that flattens the bodies into flame-like shapes. El Greco had trained on icons in his native Crete before working in Venice and Rome, and you can still feel that Byzantine root in the diamond-shaped halo behind Christ's head. Only one of the guards, asleep at the bottom, seems untouched by what is happening above him.