Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
Christ without a scene
Like several entries in this catalogue the title gives only the figure, not an episode. The devotional single image of Christ is a type in its own right, distinct from the narrative cycle: it is not the Nativity or the Passion at a particular hour, but the person addressed outside time. Painters worked it at half length, at close range, and generally repeated it, since demand for such images was steady in a way that demand for a specific episode was not.
Its relation to the cycle
None, in the strict sense. It stands beside the sequence rather than inside it. That is why a catalogue can carry a devotional head with no date of event attached while every narrative title — the baptism, the flagellation, the entombment — implies a position in a fixed order.
The record
The catalogue names El Greco, dates the work to 1585, and gives the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas. The dimensions are 50.5 by 39.4 centimetres, upright and small. The style is entered as Mannerism and late Renaissance and the artist as Spanish; the subject fields class the work as a single male figure and as religious. The measured palette reads as brown. This catalogue holds seventeen works by El Greco, more than by any painter here except one.
Sources
4 references- Greco, Nicolás — Getty ULAN
Spanish artist, active late 16th - early 17th century
- El Greco — Wikipedia
Doménikos Theotokópoulos (Greek: Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος, pronounced [ðoˈminikos θeotoˈkopulos]; 1 October 1541 – 7 April 1614), most widely known as El Greco (Spanish pronunciation: [el ˈɣɾeko]; "The Greek"), was a Greek painter, sculptor
- Greco, El — Getty ULAN
Greek painter, 1541-1614, active in Spain
- Christ Carrying the Cross (El Greco, New York) — Wikipedia
Christ Carrying the Cross is an oil painting by El Greco, produced early in his Toledo period circa de 1580. The picture depicts Christ in a moment of personal reflection as he carries the cross to his death, therefore committing the ultima
