L'Agonie au jardin des Oliviers

In the late 1550s Titian, by then in his seventies and working for Philip II of Spain, grew fascinated by what he could do with darkness. This is a night scene, and almost everything in it is worked out in torchlight and a cold gleam from the sky. Christ kneels in the garden of Gethsemane while the soldiers who will arrest him press in from the right, a lantern bobbing among them. Philip had asked for the picture in 1557 and kept pressing the painter to finish. It finally reached Spain in 1562, sent in the same shipment as Titian's Rape of Europa, and the king hung it near his private rooms at the Escorial, where the only warm colour is the orange of the torches.