126 CHRISTMAS THROUGH THE EYES OF PAINTERS Shepherds—he treated the theme several times—because he designed it for his own funeral chapel. He too was drawing near to the end of his life. At the age of more than seventy, he already felt the shadow of death coming over him—the shadow that makes his Nativity dramatic by giving that muchmore power to the light streaming from the Child. How strange it is, this Nativity stretched out lengthwise, this crown of angels and shepherds whose vibrant bodies are lengthened disproportionately around the Child. The light radiated by theNewborn projects it supernatural brightness on the emaciated faces, starkly heightens the contrasts of colors on the limbs and the garments, and pushes back into darkness the scenery that has been reduced to its simplest possible expression. Above all it magnifies the face of Mary, which by dint of the illumination is almost as white as the cloth on which the Child is reclining. El Greco is no longer content to highlight the symbiosis between the Mother and her Newborn. In that era a new gesture surfaces in Christian art, repeated many, many times in 17th-century paintings: the presentation of the Child. The Blessed Virgin now shows him to the shepherds, delicately lifting the corner of the white cloth on which he is resting, like the Host at Mass on the corporal prepared to receive it. The development which little by little transformed the theme of the Nativity into that of the adoration of the shepherds finds its outcome here. Not only the birth of theWordmade flesh is celebrated here, but also, and even more clearly than in the past, the recognition of him as Son of God by the first ones to adore him. The Infant is “presented” to them in a quasi-liturgical way that suggests themore andmore frequent expositions of the Blessed Sacrament in a century marked by a reaction against the Protestant Reformation and by the exaltation of Eucharistic devotion. Forming a circle around this “bread of life,” his adorers express the various nuances of a common ecstasy. The shepherd closest to the Virgin receives, as she does, the divine light full in the face and bends over as though to receive even more, (El Greco, Adoration of the Shepherds, 1612–1614, Madrid, Prado Museum)
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