Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
A name, not a scene
The subject is the Holy Name — the letters IHS, the abbreviation of the name of Jesus, honoured as an object of devotion in its own right. Nothing happens in it. There is no hour of the day, no place on the road to Jerusalem, no witnesses whose names the gospels supply. The subject exists because a word can be venerated, and it entered painting as an image of adoration directed at a monogram rather than at a body.
Its relation to the narrative
It stands outside the cycle entirely, in the same territory as the Trinity and the Last Judgement: subjects that a life of Christ cannot place, because they are not moments in a life. A cycle running from the Annunciation to the Ascension has no position for it, which is why images of this kind were made for chapels and for private devotion rather than for narrative sequences.
The record
The catalogue gives El Greco, 1580, and the National Gallery, London, UK. It measures 140 x 110 cm, upright. The style is entered as Mannerism Late Renaissance and the artist as Spanish. The subject fields class the work under cultural heritage and as religious, with no figure classification, which is consistent with a subject that is not a portrait of anyone. The measured palette reads as ochre.
Sources
1 references- Greco, Nicolás — Getty ULAN
Spanish artist, active late 16th - early 17th century
