The Annunciation by El Greco

This great artist, originally from Crete, spent the last 40 years of his life in Spain - which is where he acquired the nickname that the world knows him by - but despite the fact that the artist lived in Italy for some ten years (1567 – 1577), few of El Greco’s works can be found in Italy’s museums.  The Annunciation, an original El Greco, painted in Toledo between 1596 and 1600, is the final version of a large painting,  complete with an elaborate, articulated wood frame, commissioned as a majestic altarpiece (in Spanish retablo), for the most important altar in the College of Our Lady of the Incarnation in Madrid. The Retablo of Doña Maria de Aragon as it is known, named after the founder of the College and the person who commissioned it, was dismantled in the early 19th century and five of the large panels found their way to the Prado whilst the sixth went to the National Museum of Rumania in Bucharest.  Dedicated to the Redeemer, the retablo was probably envisioned in two levels with the Annunciation, flanked by the Adoration of the Shepherds and the Baptism of Christ below and the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the Pentecost above, with perhaps a seventh, smaller painting that completed the work. 
El Greco’s painting style is the result of the artist’s in depth knowledge of three different cultures, namely the Byzantine tradition that is hieratical and spiritual associated with a fixed framework, Italian art – which reached insuperable expressive heights during the Renaissance when nature was translated into figurative representations – and finally Spanish art that is often introspective in character. 
 Although El Greco never denied how much he had learned during his time in Italy, it was, however, only in Spain and in the city of Toledo, that he achieved such exalted levels of spirituality.  His reflective interpretation of religious themes was accentuated by elongated figures and the distortion of nature in favour of calling forth something that was almost abstract.  It is not by chance that the “rediscovery” of the artist at the end of the 19th century is one of the premises of the vanguard of modern art.  
 The Annunciation is one of the highest pinnacles of the artist’s final style, where elongated shapes lay over quick brush strokes, with an almost paroxysmal use of colour and a vacuous horror that results in every part of the composition being filled.