The Assumption of the Virgin

El Greco was a Greek from Crete, trained as an icon painter, who had worked in Venice with Titian and Tintoretto and in Rome before settling in Toledo in 1577. Look at the colours, the acid greens and pinks, the deep blue and the flaming yellow, which come straight from Venice, and at the way the figures are stretched and twisted, already hinting at the elongated saints of his later years. The apostles are individual portraits with heavy hands and worried faces. The Virgin's pose, and the whole upward rush of the composition, are borrowed from Titian's Assumption in Venice, but the nervous energy is entirely his own.

The painting was the centrepiece of the high altar of the convent of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo, El Greco's first Spanish commission, and it stayed there until 1904. It was bought in Paris for Chicago in 1906 with money from Nancy Atwood Sprague, at a time when El Greco was only just being rediscovered, and it was one of the earliest of his works to enter an American museum. A memorable detail is the signature in Greek letters on a small piece of paper painted at the bottom of the canvas, the painter's proud reminder of where he came from.

Did You Know? El Greco signed the painting in Greek on a small painted scrap of paper near the bottom, as he did throughout his career.