Cristo scaccia i mercanti dal Tempio

El Greco painted this near the end of his life, around 1609, only about five years before he died in Toledo. The subject had followed him for decades. He returned again and again to Christ clearing the traders and money-changers out of the Temple, and it is easy to see why it suited Counter-Reformation Spain, where the Church was busy purifying itself of corruption. By now his style had stretched almost to abstraction, the bodies elongated and twisting, the colours acid and strange, the space shallow and steep. It was made for a confraternity attached to the church of San Gines in Madrid, where it still hangs today.