Le Christ chassant les marchands du Temple

El Greco painted this in Toledo around 1600, decades into a Counter-Reformation that was set on purging corruption from the Church. The subject fit that mood exactly. Christ, furious that the temple has been turned into a marketplace, drives the traders out, his arm raised to strike and his body coiled like a spring about to release. Around him figures scatter in acid greens and pinks, an overturned table flung across the foreground so the disorder cannot be missed. El Greco had trained in Venice and knew its colour well, and it shows in those charged, unnatural hues. This was a scene he returned to at least four times across his life, rearranging the cast and the props with each version.