Until 15 June and thanks to the sponsorship of the Fundación Amigos del Museo del Prado, eight of the nine works that El Greco painted for the conventual church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo will be displayed in the Central Gallery of the Villanueva Building for the first time since their dispersal.

The assumption, the large central canvas for the principal altarpiece, which has been in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1906, is displayed alongside the two works from that altarpiece in the collection of the Museo del Prado, the canvases that remain in Santo Domingo el Antiguo, and those now in other collections.

Curated by Leticia Ruiz, Head of the Collection of Spanish Renaissance Painting, the reuniting of these works is a remarkable artistic event which will allow visitors to see an exceptional group within El Greco’s early output in Spain.

In mid-1577, having recently arrived in Spain, El Greco secured the two most important commissions of his career to date: The disrobing of Christ for Toledo cathedral and the three altarpieces for the Cistercian convent of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, one of the oldest religious houses in the city.

The convent’s church was rebuilt in a classicising style between 1576 and 1579, funded by Doña María de Silva (1513-1575), a Portuguese gentlewoman in the service of the Empress Isabel, wife of Charles V, and by Diego de Castilla (ca. 1507-1584), dean of the cathedral. This new space was intended as the burial place of the two benefactors.

For the construction of the main altarpiece and the two lateral ones in the church, Diego de Castilla designated El Greco on the suggestion of his son Luis de Castilla (ca. 1540-1618), who had met the painter in the Farnese palace in Rome in 1571. Thanks to this recommendation El Greco secured a particularly complex commission, for which he had to design the structure of the three altarpieces, the five sculptures that surmounted the main one and paint eight canvases. The overall conception of the programme represented a renewal of the traditional Castilian altarpiece. The principal altarpiece was structured around a large canvas on the subject of The assumption, to which the other paintings were subordinated: the four saints in the lateral sections – Saint John the Baptist, Saint John the Evangelist, Saint Bernard and Saint Benedict – and The trinity in the upper section. Years after the church was consecrated, a coat of arms carved in wood and located above the principal painting was covered with a depiction of The holy face, also by El Greco.

The commission was completed in 1579 and the result must have aroused the admiration of those who saw it. El Greco proved to be a great master, bold and capable, who applied himself with dazzling ease to the composition of large-format works filled with Italianate reminiscences both in the figurative models and in the colour and pictorial technique.