La Crucifixion

El Greco painted this around 1598 for the high altar of a new Augustinian college in Madrid, founded by a noblewoman of the court, Dona Maria de Aragon. He was in his late fifties by then, settled in Toledo, and working in the strange manner of his last years. Christ's body stretches upward well beyond natural proportion, lit by a cold silver light that leaves the whole scene weightless. Angels stoop to gather the blood from his wounds. There is no crowd and almost no landscape, just a handful of figures against a churning grey sky. The college was dissolved in the early 19th century, and for a couple of decades afterward the picture hung in the Madrid house of the Inquisition before it came to the Prado.