This work is a large fragment of one of three altarpieces El Greco was commissioned to paint in 1608 for the church of the Hospital of Saint John the Baptist (also called the Tavera Hospital in honor of its co-founder, Cardinal-Archbishop Juan de Tavera, 1472–1545), just outside the walls of Toledo. This picture (originally measuring about 330 x 211 cm.) was meant for one of the side altars—that to the right of the high altar; the other lateral altarpiece, for the left-hand altar, depicts the Annunciation (cut in two: upper part National Gallery, Athens; 115 x 217 cm.; main part Colección Santander Central Hispano, Madrid; 294 x 209 cm.). The Baptism , meant for the high altar, is now installed on a side altar in the church. The commission was El Greco's last large-scale undertaking, and he did not live to complete it (in 1621 the paintings are decribed as "sketched"; see below). The Baptism and Annunciation were finished by his son Jorge Manuel, but The Met's picture remains as El Greco left it. In 1880, it was cut down by a Prado restorer (as much as 69 inches may be missing from the top and as much as 8 inches from the left side), and badly damaged, but remains the best testimony to the visionary heights of the artist's late style. The elongated, ecstatic figure of Saint John appears in the foreground, his head turned imploringly heavenward, his arms raised. Behind him are two groups of figures: two male and two female on the left; three male on the right, reaching upward for white garments distributed by a flying cherub. It was Cossio (1908) who first proposed that these features suggested a visualization of the Book of Revelation (6:9–11), when Saint John the Evangelist witnesses the breaking of the Fifth Seal by the Lamb of God. Unlike Dürer, who illustrated this passage in the upper register of one of his celebrated woodcuts of the Apocalypse, and Matthias Gerung, in his 1546 woodcut, El Greco shows no altar. However, it is possible that an altar may have been represented above, in the sky, surrounded by angels, as in Dürer's and Gerung's prints. Such a scene would have been important to the hospital, which offered spiritual consolation as well as physical care to patients, promising salvation to those who died within its walls. Pedro Salazar de Mendoza, the hospital administrator responsible for the commission, was an admirer of El Greco and a collector of his works. As Mann (1986) has shown, the spiritual ministry of the hospital was emphasized by Salazar de Mendoza, whose active interest in the altarpieces must be taken into account. The hospital was empowered to grant indulgences that, in effect, enabled patients to join the ranks of the elect; this circumstance encouraged Mann to suggest that The Met's altarpiece actually shows The Resurrection of the Elect . Without the upper portion of the altarpiece, the precise identification of the event shown is bound to remain speculative—if, indeed, the intent was to illustrate a specific event rather than allude to the implications of John's apocalyptic vision. Mann also suggests that it was The Met's painting, rather than The Baptism , that was intended for the high altar since, according to the contract, the tympanum of the frame for the main altarpiece was to be decorated with a sculptural group of angels adoring the Lamb of God. That subject would, indeed, have been appropriate for a scene of the Apocalypse—but no less so for a Baptism . It is difficult to get around the very specific notice in the 1621 inventory of Jorge Manuel's possessions in which The Baptism is referred to as the principal altarpiece, and the fact that the hospital was dedicated to Saint John the Baptist. (For the 1621 inventory, which includes works inherited by Jorge Manuel from his father, see Javier Docamp and José Riello, La Biblioteca del Greco , exh. cat., Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 2014, p. 233: "183. Dos quadros bosquejados para los colaterales del ospital grandes" and, "184. El bautismo prinzipal del ospital"). What cannot be doubted is that, when taken together, the three scenes offered a synopsis of God's plan of salvation by showing the incarnation of Christ, the manifestation of his divine mission, and a vision of the elect at the end of time. In realizing this hallucinatory scene, El Greco's imagination returned to Rome and Michelangelo. The pose of one of the nude figures ultimately derives from the sculpture group of the Laocöon . The pose of Saint John recalls Michelangelo's Hamen in one of the pendentives of the Sistine Chapel, although as Joannides (1995) has remarked, it was Michelangelo's "spiritual expressiveness" that interested El Greco, rather than the direct transcription of a motif. Despite its unfinished and truncated state, the picture remains enormously powerful. Its visionary treatment of space and dematerialization of form have been shown to have played a crucial role in the genesis of Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) (see Richardson 1987 and Laessøe 1987). Picasso knew the painting from visits to the Paris studio of the painter Ignacio Zuloaga, who had acquired it in 1905. The painting also loomed large among the German Expressionists (see Schroeder 1998). Later, it was sketched by Jackson Pollock (see Baetjer 1997). [2011; adapted from Christiansen et al. 2003]

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