El Greco arrived in Toledo in 1577 with no reputation in Spain and was handed the high altar of a convent church. The painting he made for it is four metres tall. He signed it in Greek, in full, on what looks like a scrap of paper pinned to the bottom of the canvas.
How a Greek got the job
He was born in Crete in 1541 and trained there painting icons, which is a trade with rules: fixed poses, gold ground, no invention. He went to Venice, then to Rome, and by 1571 he was working at the Palazzo Farnese.
In Rome he met a Spaniard, Luis de Castilla. Luis's father, Don Diego de Castilla, was dean of Toledo cathedral, and in 1577, on his son's recommendation, he gave the unknown Greek three altarpieces for the church of the Cistercian convent of Santo Domingo el Antiguo. The church was being rebuilt as the burial place of a noblewoman, Doña María de Silva, so the whole commission is about death and what comes after it.
The main altarpiece was in place by September 1579. He was thirty-eight, and he never left Toledo again.
The lower half exists to make you look up
It is 403 centimetres high and 212 wide, because it had to fit the frame of a retable above an altar. That shape decides everything inside it.
The bottom half is the earth: the apostles packed shoulder to shoulder around an open, empty tomb, arms out, heads back. The top half is the sky, where the Virgin rises with angels around her. Not one figure in the lower half looks out at you. They are all looking up, and because they are, you look up too, which in a church meant up into the vault.
The faces down there are specific enough that the Art Institute suspects he worked from people he knew — a foreigner in a convent church, painting apostles off whoever in Toledo would stand still for him.
Out of Spain, and back for four months
Around 1830 the altarpiece was taken apart and this canvas was sold off. The Spanish government confiscated it in 1835, gave it back in 1861, and after 1902 the owner's heirs parked it at the Prado.
Then an American painter intervened. Mary Cassatt talked the Paris dealer Durand-Ruel into buying it in October 1904 — a hundred thousand francs, with the money coming from the New York collector H. O. Havemeyer — and on 17 July 1906 it went to the Art Institute of Chicago, where it has been ever since.
In 2025 it went home for four months. The Prado borrowed it from Chicago and hung it with seven of the eight other paintings El Greco made for that church, which had not stood together since about 1830. The loan ended in June.
It went back to Madrid for four months in 2025. Four metres there, and rather less than that here.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.