La Anunciación

Around 1598 El Greco was at work on the largest commission of his late career, the high altar for a new Augustinian college in Madrid founded by a lady of the court, María de Aragón. This small Annunciation is his own working version of one panel from it. The finished altarpiece left his Toledo workshop by cart in the summer of 1600, a year after the college church was consecrated. Even at this size the ambition is clear. The angel and the Virgin barely share the same floor, and a shaft of light built from cherub heads pours down with the dove of the Holy Spirit, binding the plain room to the sky above it. The stretched figures and crowded space were the manner some of his Spanish patrons found difficult.