The Saviour

Domenikos Theotokopoulos had grown up on Crete painting icons in the old Byzantine manner before he ever saw Venice or Rome, and by the 1590s he was settled in Toledo, the spiritual capital of Counter-Reformation Spain. Around 1594 he painted this Christ as part of an apostolado, a set of Christ with his twelve apostles, meant to hang in a row. Christ blesses with his right hand and rests the left on a globe, the saviour of the world. In the full series he is the one figure who looks straight out at you while the apostles turn toward him, an arrangement El Greco kept from the frozen, forward-facing Christ of the icons he had learned as a boy. The elongated fingers and the cool, almost unearthly light are already the manner people would recognise as his.