洗礼者ヨハネ

In 1577 El Greco arrived in Toledo, a Greek painter trained in Venice and Rome who had failed to win work at the Spanish court and moved inland looking for patrons. Almost at once he landed his first major Spanish commission: the altarpieces for the convent church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo. This figure of John the Baptist belonged to that project. Working far from Italy, he began stretching his figures taller and lighting them from within, the manner that would define everything he made in Spain. The Baptist is shown as the desert preacher, lean and ascetic, the forerunner who pointed the way to Christ. It was the commission that let a newly arrived outsider set up as a master in Toledo, where he stayed for the rest of his life.