La Piedad

Around 1580 El Greco painted the dead Christ lowered from the cross, held by his mother, Mary Magdalene, and Joseph of Arimathea locked into a tight triangle of grief. By then the painter had already come a long way, born on Crete in the old Byzantine tradition, trained among the colourists of Venice, then drawn to Rome. This scene carries all of it. The muscular body of Christ comes straight from Michelangelo, whose famous Pietàs El Greco knew through engravings, while the Virgin's twisted sorrow echoes the ancient Laocoön statue he had studied in Rome. He never simply copied these sources. He stretched and lit the figures into the flickering, elongated forms that became his own.