03 — ARTWORK
The Adoration of the Shepherds
- MEDIUM
- Oil on canvas, 144,5 x 101,3 cm
- TYPE
- Religious
PALETTE
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- FILE
- 980 × 1446 px · JPEG
COMMENTARY
UNDERLINED TERMS ARE DEFINED IN THE GLOSSARY.
The Adoration of the Shepherds c. 1610 Oil on canvasA woven cloth used as a support for painting. The best-quality canvas is made of linen; other materials used are cotton, hemp, and jute. It is now so familiar a material that the word 'canvas' has become almost a synonym for an oil painting, but it was not until around 1500 that it began to rival the wooden panel (which was more expensive and took longer to prepare) as the standard support for movable paintings (the transition came later in Northern Europe than in Italy). Canvas is not suitable for painting on until it has been coated with a ground, which isolates the fabric from the paint; otherwise it will absorb too much paint, only very rough effects will be obtainable, and parts of the fabric may be rotted by the pigments. It must also be made taut on a stretcher or by some other means., 144,5 x 101,3 cm Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
This painting served as a sort of prelude to the great <A onclick="return OpenOther('/html/g/greco_el/21/2108grec.html')" HREF="/html/g/greco_el/21/2108grec.html">Adoration of the Shepherds</A> (Museo del Prado, Madrid) El Greco planned for his own tomb. The idea of a nocturnal Nativity certainly originated with El Greco's recollection of Correggio celebrated altarpieceA picture or sculpture that stands on or is set up behind an altar. The term reredos is used for an ornamental screen or partition, not directly attached to the altar table but affixed to the wall behind it. A diptych is an altarpiece consisting of two panels, a triptych one of three panels, and a polyptych one of four or more panels. From the 14th to 16th century, the altarpiece was one of the most important commissions in European art; it was through the altarpiece that some of the most decisive developments in painting and sculpture came about. known as <A onclick="return OpenOther('/html/c/correggi/madonna/night.html')" HREF="/html/c/correggi/madonna/night.html">'La Notte'</A> (now in Dresden) and of certain paintings by the Bassano, both Jacopo and Francesco.
El Greco's great paintings, like this Adoration, are ecstatic visions, in an unearthly light, with dreamlike distortions of forms, released from earthly perceptions. Mystics have spoken of luminous apparitions, poets have continually sought to reproduce dream faces in words: El Greco caught the visions of those in ecstasy and the magic imagery of the dreamers in line and colour, in exact recollection of the experience and without assimilation to the visible world. From the moment of the 'overcoming of sensual perception' El Greco's paintings are filled with an optical content which cannot be further explained, which defies all the laws of composition and colour and can no longer be tested by the proportions and optics of the tangible and visible world.
Although the picture cannot bear comparison to the sublimeTerm that came into general use in the 18th century to denote a new aesthetic concept that was held to be distinct from the beautiful and the Picturesque and was associated with ideas of awe and vastness. The outstanding work on the concept of the Sublime in English was Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). This book was one of the first to realize (in contrast with the emphasis on clarity and precision during the Age of Enlightenment) the power of suggestiveness to stimulate imagination. The cult of the Sublime had varied expressions in the visual arts, notably the taste for the 'savage' landscapes of Salvator Rosa and the popularity among painters of subjects from Homer, John Milton, and Ossian (the legendary Gaelic warrior and bard, whose verses - actually fabrications - were published in the 1760s to great acclaim). The vogue for the Sublime, with that for the Picturesque, helped shape the attitudes that led to Romanticism. Adoration for El Greco's tomb, it is superior to the reduced replicas that was made in his studio. (It should be, nonetheless, noted that this picture almost certainly involved the workshop, too.)
CITE THIS RECORD — BIBTEX
@online{wga-r7662c77fa48524,
author = {Krén, Emil and Marx, Daniel},
title = {The Adoration of the Shepherds by GRECO, El},
organization = {{Web Gallery of Art}},
date = {2026-09-09},
url = {https://beta.wga.hu/artists/greco-el-r8ef3afacca162f/the-adoration-of-the-shepherds-r7662c77fa48524},
urldate = {2026-09-09},
langid = {english}
}ACCESSED 2026-09-09. REPLACE THE AUTHOR FIELD WITH THE COMMENTARY AUTHOR WHERE ONE IS NAMED.
