天使报喜

In 1596 El Greco took the biggest commission of his career, the high altar of an Augustinian college in Madrid founded by a noblewoman, Dona Maria de Aragon. He painted it in his workshop in Toledo and had the finished canvases carted to Madrid in 1600. This Annunciation stood at the centre. By now in his late fifties, he had pushed his figures into the tall, flickering shapes that were entirely his own, lit by a cold, unreal light. The angel arrives in a rush of drapery, Mary leans back, and above them a burst of music-making angels fills the sky. The altarpiece was later broken up and its parts scattered, which is why the two paintings that once flanked this one now hang in Bucharest and elsewhere in the same museum in Madrid.