The painting shows Christ looking up to Heaven with an expression of serenity; His idealized figure seems segregated from the other people and the violence surrounding him. A man in green to Christ's left holds Him firmly with a rope and is about to rip off His robe in preparation for his crucifixion. At the lower right, a man in yellow bends over the cross and drills a hole to facilitate the insertion of a nail to be driven through Christ's feet. El Greco Paints this scene with a level of disturbance with all the chaos around Christ. Christ is clad in a bright red robe; it is on this red tunic that El Greco concentrated the full expressive force of his art. The purple garment (a metonymic symbol of the divine passion) is spread out in a light fold; only the chromatic couple of yellow and blue in the foreground raises a separate note which approaches, in power, the glorifying hymn of the red. In designing the composition vertically and compactly in the foreground El Greco seems to have been motivated by the desire to show the oppression of Christ by his cruel tormentors. El Greco chose a method of space elimination most common in Byzantine artistic pieces in which the superposition of heads row upon row is employed to suggest a crowd.
El Greco's continued theme of a christian or catholic figure looking up to the heavens continues in this piece, and once again it involves a famous bible scene, this specific scene is one of violence and aggression which could symbolize what he was going through at that time in Toledo. El Greco's artistic talent is on full display with how he paints the draping silky cloak around Christ. The cloak has a almost heavenly aura that El Greco employ's often to show importance and captivate his audience. El Greco made this chaotic piece as his first piece after moving to Toledo, so the chaos and struggle represented by Christ, could be a small reflection on his life and the turmoil he was facing as he was moving. These notions further the beliefs of religious painting, the value of heavenly and spiritual life, and Toledo greatly influencing El Greco as an artist.
Coleção : Toledan Art