El Greco - The Vision of Saint John [1608-14]

El Greco - The Vision of Saint John [1608-14], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

The painting, unfinished at El Greco's death and listed in a postmortem inventory, depicts a passage in Revelation describing the opening of the Fifth Seal and the distribution of white robes to "those who had been slain for the work of God and for the witness they had borne." It is cut down from a large altarpiece commissioned in 1608 for the church of the hospital of Saint John the Baptist in Toledo. The missing upper part may have shown the Sacrificial Lamb opening the Fifth Seal.

The broad open brushwork is characteristic of El Greco's late style. The picture is much damaged. Much admired by twentieth-century artists, the picture was studied in Paris by Picasso when he was working on ‘Les Demoiselles d'Avignon’ and it was sketched by Jackson Pollock.

[Oil on canvas, top truncated, 222.3 x 193 cm, with added strips 224.8 x 199.4 cm]