圣家族与圣徒

The man who signed this in Greek letters was born on Crete and trained among the painters of Venice before he settled, for good, in the Spanish city of Toledo. There, from the 1580s on, El Greco painted the Holy Family again and again as something close and domestic, Mary and the child and Joseph and their kin gathered like an ordinary household rather than a heavenly court. These were private devotional pictures, meant for a room where someone would pray in front of them, not for a great public altar. The stretched, elongated figures and the cool, almost phosphorescent light are his own invention, unlike anything else being painted in Spain around 1595. This version hangs today in a small Catalan town, on long-term loan from the Prado in Madrid.