Above the empty tomb

Toledo, 1579. An imagined witness at the convent church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo.

They raised it into the altarpiece on ropes, and for a long moment the canvas hung tilted in the air above the workmen, and the youngest sister in the choir forgot to lower her eyes.

She had heard about the painter. A Greek, people said, from the island of Crete, who had worked in Venice and in Rome and had arrived in Toledo only lately. This was his first great commission in Spain, for the chapel where Doña María de Silva was buried, and the whole altar was to speak of death and of what comes after. The canvas stood four metres high.

When it settled into place she saw the bottom first. A stone tomb, its lid shoved aside, open and empty. Around it the apostles, crowded together, every one of them caught in a different motion. A young man in a yellow tunic and a rose-pink cloak stood with his back to her and flung out his arm toward the tomb. An old bald apostle bent forward on the right. A white-bearded one sat low in blue, gripping a staff, his bare foot thrust out almost onto the altar. No two of them looked at the same thing.

Then her eyes travelled up the canvas, and it changed. Above a bank of cloud, the Virgin rose in a red gown and a mantle of such deep, luminous blue that it seemed to give off cold. She stood on a thin crescent moon. Her arms opened outward and her face tipped toward a gold light full of the small heads of angels, and the angels around her, in green and saffron and pink, turned toward her with folded hands. Below, everything was commotion and astonishment; above, everything had become calm.

The sister knelt with the others. Afterward she could not have said what the sermon was about. She remembered only the slip of white paper painted at the lower right corner, where the painter had written in Greek letters that Doménikos Theotokópoulos, Cretan, displayed this, and the year, 1577. In Toledo, people already called him El Greco.

The convent sold the canvas around 1830, and it reached Chicago in 1906. A copy hangs above the altar now. The original fills a gallery wall in Chicago to the height of a house.

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