Fundación Casa Ducal de Medinaceli

La Sagrada Familia con Santa Ana (c. 1595), painted on canvas by El Greco, was a gift to the Hospital de San Juan Bautista in Toledo from Teresa de Aguilera, the widow of Alonso Capoche; it is mentioned in a hospital inventory of 1631 and may have been executed around 1595 judging by the style and brushstrokes, although not all historians share the same opinion and some date it to a somewhat later stage in the Cretan's career. This superb artwork is also a devotional painting characteristic of Counter-Reformation Spain, and the success it enjoyed is borne out by the numerous surviving versions and copies with varying formats and figures. This version appears to be based on the one now in the Hispanic Society in New York [], which does not feature Saint Anne.

The composition as a whole has a component that is intentionally moving and magnificently conveyed by the artist. While the endearing, idealised face of the Virgin [] is considered by many critics as one of the most beautiful of all the female images painted by El Greco, the emotional and artistic aspects of the composition are closely interwoven by the delicate interplay of hands that El Greco had already developed in the Disrobing of Christ (El Expolio) in the cathedral []: Saint Anne gently caresses the head of the child, whose right hand clutches the fingers of his mother's left hand, while Saint Joseph, on the other side of the canvas, touches Jesus's foot with his left hand []. This protective attitude of Saint Joseph, depicted as a man at the prime of life rather than elderly, coincides with the fresh significance attached to Jesus's putative father by the most advanced Counter-Reformation currents.

An X-radiography of the Hospital Tavera Holy Family, which shows the underdrawing, gives us an idea of how the artist worked. For example, El Greco first portrayed the Virgin's face on the canvas in alla prima fashion, and subsequently retouched it, stylising and refining her features in order to achieve an image of greater elegance, finesse and beauty that was also more artistic, but still markedly naturalistic.

From an iconographical viewpoint, the Marian image is that of the Virgin Suckling the Christ Child, and the scene also shows--whether in Nazareth or during the stay in Egypt on account of the slaughter of the innocent and the flight into Egypt--a mother who breastfeeds a totally naked Christ Child, whose gender attests to his human and not only divine nature. Iconologically speaking, this scene could be attributed a dual symbolic meaning: on the one hand, the Virgin fed Christ just as the Church fed its faithful; and, on the other, the fact that the Virgin mother was accepted as the Redeemer's source of food made Mary a co-redeemer. However, this episode, drawn from the tradition of the apocryphal gospels, confirms the idea that El Greco was capable of taking liberties when choosing his religious sources, some of which, like the one in question, were not acknowledged as fully orthodox and therefore considered inadvisable by the Counter-Reformation church.