Towards the end of his career, El Greco’s use of shape and height became more elastic and free

int their
usage, in the fashion of such Mannerist painters as Tintoretto. In Adoration of the Shepherds this
elongation, this playing with height, reaches new and dizzying extremes. The Shepherds’ impossibly
elongated forms seem almost to be reaching to the angels above. The unnatural twisting and contortion
of the bodies is typical of El Greco, and in part led to him perhaps being undervalued in his time by
contemporary critics of the Spanish Renaissance. But this playing with form is revolutionary, whilst
laying the groundwork for Modernism, 400 years later, it simultaneously has a foot in the past, in the
Byzantine tradition of icon painting.

The Adoration of the Shepherds is beautifully composed. With the figures circulating around a luminous,
glowing Christ child. The light in the painting seems to come from Christ himself, and this otherworldly
light contriubutes to the extraordinary use of colour. El Greco was bolder than any of his
contemporaries (and, arguably, anyone until Delacroix in the 19 th century) in his use of pigmentation,
and in Adoration of the Shepherds intense and vivid reds and blues provide a dramatic contrast to the
darkness around the edge of the painting. It implies the light of Divinity, juxtaposing it with the darkness
of the world away from Christ. This is a poem which says that the Divine is with us every day.

As the Shepherds adore, angels circulate above. Again, El Greco has played with traditional notions of
composition, the angels bodies are foreshortened, their frames at curious angles. The effect of this,
mirroring the circling of the adoring Shepherds, is to imbue the painting with a great deal of eneergy,
there’s a very real sense of motion, of these people, and by extension humanity, revolving around this
peaceful, glowing Christ at the centre of all things.

The Adoration of the Shepherds is in many ways the culmination of the elements which made El Greco
the artist he was. It combines his religiosty, the strongest recurring theme in his work with possibly the
strongest expression of his contortion of form. It could be said to be the apogee of his work; it draws
together many traditions, standing at the crux of Mannerism and the Baroque, marrying