Cristo scaccia i mercanti dal tempio

El Greco returned to this scene his whole life: Christ swinging a cord of whips to drive the traders and money changers out of the Temple. This is one of his earliest attempts at it, from around 1568, when he was a young Greek painter working in Italy and still absorbing Venice. The subject was pointed. In the years after the Protestant break, Catholics read the cleansing of the Temple as an image of the Church purging itself of corruption and heresy, so a painter who wanted patrons chose it deliberately. The architecture opens back in the steep perspective he had just learned from Italian art, and the figures scatter left and right from Christ's raised arm. Off to one side a small knot of onlookers stands apart, arguing among themselves.