Public data from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Learn more
About the Artwork
El Greco (Spanish for "the Greek") was trained on his native island, Crete, as a painter of small-scale devotional images (icons). In the late 1560s he moved first to Venice, where he may have worked with Tintoretto (1518-1594), and then to Rome. Finally, he settled in Toledo, Spain. Tintoretto's influence is visible here in the colors and in the elongated figural proportions. The graphic depiction of blood, however, may reflect the Spanish interest in Christ's sufferings as a subject for meditation.
Inscriptions
Inscription on plaque at top of cross, in Hebrew, Greek and Latin: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews
Provenance
By 1815-1952: Convent of the Salesas, Madrid, Spain 1952: Tomas Harris, London, England (Rudolf Heinemann, New York, NY) -1952: (M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., New York, NY, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art) 1952-: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
Exhibition history
In Memoriam: Leonard C. Hanna, Jr.. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (March 4-April 7, 1958). Religious Art. Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY (organizer) (December 15, 1964-January 10, 1965). Masterworks from The Phillips Collection. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (February 20-May 29, 2005). El Greco: Ambition and Defiance. Réunion des musées nationaux - Grand Palais, Paris cedex 12, France (organizer) (October 14, 2019-February 10, 2020); The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (March 5-October 19, 2020) https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/2939/el-greco-ambition-and-defiance.
Quick Overview
- Artist
- El Greco (Spanish, 1541–1614)
- Date
- c. 1600–1610
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- Framed: 221 x 144 x 10 cm (87 x 56 11/16 x 3 15/16 in.); Unframed: 193 x 116 cm (76 x 45 11/16 in.)
- Type
- Painting
- Classification
- Painting
- Department
- European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Gift of the Hanna Fund
- Accession no.
- 1952.222
More by El Greco in museum collections
Data retrieved from the Cleveland Museum of Art on October 8, 2026. The museum may have updated its record since.
Open-access museum record · AT-00009371
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