O Despojamento de Cristo

In 1577 a painter from Crete who had trained in Venice and Rome turned up in Toledo; the earliest record of El Greco in Spain is a document from that July. His first major Spanish commission was an altarpiece of Christ stripped of his robes, and it landed him in a lawsuit. The cathedral haggled hard over the price and objected to the three grieving women he had added at the lower left, since the Gospels don't place them there. He refused to paint them out. This is a smaller repetition of that composition, and the whole picture is built around the deep red of Christ's tunic, calm at the centre of a jostling, hostile crowd.