El Greco Masterpiece is a Vision at Dulwich Picture Gallery

LONDON.- Every month during the Gallery’s Bicentenary celebration year a spectacular masterpiece will hang on the end wall of the Gallery’s enfilade. It is difficult to decipher this great, enigmatic masterpiece for not only is it unfinished, but it has also been cut down. Whatever vision Saint John is experiencing clearly inhabited a lost upper section. The subject of the picture is from the Book of Revelation (6:9 – 11): Saint John the Evangelist, in a vision set in Heaven, sees the Lamb (Jesus) opening the Seven Seals. The first four unleash the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, but on the opening of the Fifth Seal (the subject of this image), the martyrs of God, ‘under the altar’, cry out for justice. Angels hand out the white robes symbolising salvation. How El Greco would have depicted the Lamb opening the Fifth Seal (presumably the subject of the lost upper section) is anyone’s guess, but there is no doubt that his interpretation would have be

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