The large canvas of the Baptism of Christ (1608-1624) is a work from one of the three altarpieces in the Chapel, a magnificent and personal compositional invention by El Greco, which was completed in superficial areas by his own son Jorge Manuel.
As is known, Pedro Salazar de Mendoza, the administrator of the Hospital Tavera, signed a contract with the old Greek artist on 16 November 1608 to make the main altarpiece and the side altarpieces of the chapel, dedicated, as is logical, to Saint John the Baptist, one of the major ensembles that are among his most outstanding works, even though the main altarpiece did not follow his designs in all their elements and the canvases intended were never placed on their respective retablistic machines. Of the 7,000 ducats that this work, to be completed in five years, would cost, when the dispute between the Hospital and the workshop arose in 1622, it was established that El Greco and his son had been receiving different amounts until they had accumulated the enormous sum of more than 8,600 ducats.
No contract has survived concerning the canvases that were to decorate these three altarpieces; in the inventory of the estate of 1614, at the death of Dominico Greco, it was indicated that the paintings in the hospital chapel had been started, and that two canvases for the finials of the collateral altarpieces were only ready; In the inventory of his son Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli's estate in 1621, "the main Baptism of the hospital" (The Baptism, which is still preserved today in the Toledo institution) and "two canvases for the large side altarpieces of the hospital" were listed among the works only sketched, which we have to suppose The Annunciation from the Banco Santander in Madrid and - in its upper part - with The Concert of Angels from the National Museum of Athens, and the so-called Vision of the Apocalypse of St. John the Evangelist from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; On the other hand, it is evident, especially in the main figures in the foreground of the two Gospel scenes, that there is a drop in quality only attributable to Jorge Manuel's intervention.
While some authors agree that his son was responsible for the work, others maintain the tradition that it is an autograph work, although the allusion to its unfinished state in the inventories of the time could not be understood as a fiction intended by Jorge Manuel to avoid the seizure of his assets to which he was already exposed due to the long dispute he had with the Hospital administration over the delay in the delivery of the works.
In fact, in 1624, as canvases lent by Jorge Manuel to the hospital while the commission as a whole was being completed, The Baptism had been placed on the left side altarpiece, and an unidentified "Coming of the Holy Spirit" ("Pentecost") on the right; the former was taken to an infirmary before Jorge Manuel died in 1631 and the latter, owned by the painter's heirs, was sold at the same date.
It is today completely impossible to reconstruct the iconographic programme that would have been devised for the three altarpieces; it has been assumed, according to the contract signed in 1635 by the painter Félix Castello to repaint the three altarpieces after the death of Jorge Manuel and his replacement Gabriel de Ulloa, that the originals would have followed this 1635 programme: Castello's new images of the "Incarnation" and a "Vision of the Apocalypse" were painted on the sides and those of the "Preaching in the Desert" and the "Beheading" of the titular saint in the attics, while the central altarpiece would only have a new canvas of the "Baptism".
It is possible that The Incarnation and, in our opinion, the canvas that would be The Resurrection of the flesh (in the United States), or "of the dead", with the transformation - justified by the Baptism and Resurrection of Christ - of the "animal body into a spiritual body", of the "earthly man into a heavenly man", according to the Epistle to the Corinthians (15:12-49), were planned for the side altarpieces. At the ends of the chapel, they would symbolise the beginning and end of Salvation, which made eternal life possible for the deceased cardinal and the sick and poor of the hospital in Toledo.
In the main altarpiece, logically dedicated to the titular saint, the Baptism of Christ would have been thought of as a Trinitarian epiphany and its central theme, which would justify this possibility, the certainty of Salvation.
This canvas depends compositionally on the late Augustinian College of the Incarnation or Doña María de Aragón in Madrid (now in the Museo del Prado), even though the figure of God the Father is of higher quality, less hieratic and frontal. Despite his depiction of the miraculous divine irruption on Earth and the dynamic transformation of the natural world as a result, the Cretan's figures (with the exception of Christ) retain their three-dimensional power and plausible anatomy, in a charged atmosphere transmuted by light.
If Salazar de Mendoza required religious painting to be proprietary with respect to tradition and texts, he also accepted the existence of painters' and sculptors' licence, like that due to poets; if with Horace he recognised that artists had the power to dare whatever they wished, the painter who considered that his art should deal even with the impossible should have been hired not only as a translator of texts into textual images, but for his own formal, transformative capacities. We cannot therefore be surprised by the "imperceptible" nature of the five virtues that appear, tiny and one of them devoid of identifying symbols, above the scene of The Annunciation, or the "intrusion" of the angel in the foreground, between Christ and Saint John, in The Baptism, which is unjustified from a historical, textual or doctrinal point of view. Or that in The Resurrection of the Flesh the souls were not clearly distinguished from the bodies, according to Salazar's interests, accompanied by five virtues (Charity, a figure without symbols that should perhaps be Hope, Prudence, Faith and Temperance).
Despite his years, Dominico continued to let himself be carried away by his own desires and intentions, which were expressed in the preparatory drawings and sketches on his canvases, even if he only left them sketched, to become - as someone capable of painting the impossible - the artistic personality who had gone further in the conception of the unknown; the natural and the supernatural, and their interaction, required different formulas, to which only a painting that for the Candiote was, precisely for this reason, "scientific", could provide an answer.
Fernando Marías, August 2008