Le Christ chassant les marchands du Temple

El Greco returned to this scene again and again across his career, and this is one of the late versions, painted in Toledo in the years around 1600. Christ swings his arm to drive the traders out of the temple, and the figures scatter in a twisting knot of limbs and sharp, acid colour. The subject carried a charge in Counter-Reformation Spain. A Church intent on purging heresy read Christ clearing the temple as an image of its own cleansing, and El Greco sharpens the split, with the guilty flung to one side and the calm apostles to the other. Behind them he set a stone relief of Adam and Eve being driven from Eden, quietly rhyming with the traders driven out below.