天使报喜

By 1610 El Greco was nearing 70 and running a crowded workshop in Toledo, where his son Jorge Manuel worked at his side. This Annunciation comes from those last years, and scholars think father and son shared the labour on it. You can see the manner he had reached by then. The figures stretch upward like flames, the Virgin and the angel Gabriel caught in a light that seems to come from no ordinary source. Above them he set the dove of the Holy Spirit and lit it hard, so the eye goes straight to that bright centre. The bodies barely obey their own weight. El Greco died in 1614, a few years after this, and Jorge Manuel carried on the workshop, repeating the family repertoire of saints and Annunciations like this one for years afterward.