La Visitation

This comes from the very end of El Greco's life, around 1610, when he was an old man in Toledo and his painting had grown stranger and freer than anything else in Spain. It was made for a small chapel in the church of San Vicente, commissioned by a woman named Isabel de Oballe, and its canvas is round, meant to sit high inside a decorated frame. The subject is the moment the pregnant Mary visits her older cousin Elizabeth, herself unexpectedly with child. El Greco strips the scene almost bare. Two tall figures, wrapped and all but merged in swaying robes, lean toward one another under a dark arch. It is loose and smoky enough that when it resurfaced centuries later, some doubted a 17th-century hand could have made it.