Los desposorios de la Virgen

El Greco painted this in Toledo around 1613, and he had little time left. He died the following year, in 1614. You can feel the hand of an old man who had stopped trying to please anyone. The figures stretch upward like flames, the colours flicker rather than settle, and the high priest joining Mary and Joseph presides over a scene that seems lit from inside rather than by any window. By this point El Greco had fallen out of fashion in Spain. A younger generation wanted clarity and calm, and here he gives them the opposite. The painting later travelled far from Toledo, and now hangs in Bucharest, in Romania's national collection.