The Adoration of the Shepherds (El Greco, Madrid) The Adoration of the Shepherds (El Greco, Madrid) The Adoration of the Shepherds is a painting of the traditional subject which was painted during the last year of El Greco's life. The painting is a work which the artist made to hang over his own tomb in the church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo. El Greco's signature, in Greek, may be seen in the lower left corner. Extreme distortion of body characterizes the "Adoration of the Shepherds" like all the last paintings of El Greco.The infant Christ seems to emit a light which plays off the faces of
Saint Sebastian (El Greco, 1576–1579) As Andrew Casper says in his "Art and the Religious image in El Greco's Italy", the figure in "Saint Sebastian" is a quotation of a “figure taken from Michelangelo's body of work—though scholars do not agree on which one.” Certainly a number of scholars have made much of the seeming comparison between El Greco's Sebastian and various figures from Michelangelo's body of work. In his work on El Greco, Michael Scholz-Hansel states without prelude that the figure is “based on Michelangelo as well as on the renowned Greco-Roman statue of Laocoön and His Sons which the artist had evidently studied