Adoração dos Pastores

El Greco painted this at the very end of his life, around 1612, in Toledo, and he painted it for himself. It was made to hang over his own tomb, in a chapel at the monastery of Santo Domingo el Antiguo. Knowing that changes how you read it. The shepherds crowd in around the newborn child, and everything strains upward, the figures stretched thin and flickering as if lit from the body of Christ itself, the colors sharp and unreal. There is no calm here, only light pulling everything toward heaven. He signed it in Greek, low in the corner, the way he always did. His remains were later moved elsewhere, but the painting stayed at Santo Domingo for more than three centuries.