Adoration of the Shepherds - El Greco

This painting once decorated El Greco's tomb in one of the chapels of the Monastery of St Dominic (Santo Domingo El Antiguo) in Toledo. It was later transferred to the high altar for which it was originally intended. This ecstatic painting is one of the artist's most colourful works. Light radiates from the Child and the dazzling white cloth on which He lies, illuminating the figures of Mary and the amazed shepherds. From the very outset of his career El Greco had been interested in the problem of light: his early work Youth Blowing a Charcoal is primarily an exploration of the way in which a flaring light is reflected by the features of the face. When he painted The Adoration of the Shepherds, light was no longer used for its own sake but as a means to convey an idea. The words of the Pantocrator are occasionally to be found in Romanesque churches, usually inscribed in the apse, thus: Lux mundi (the Light of the World). In El Greco's picture this theme is now perfectly expressed in purely pictorial terms. The elongated figures, like tongues of fire, and all the indications of enthusiasm, faith and passion, are characteristic of a number of Mannerist painters but especially of El Greco. These characteristic features of El Greco's art are clearly seen in this beautifully realized creation which constitutes as it were a link between the Gothic style and modern art of the twentieth century.