The Immaculate Conception

El Greco's The Immaculate Conception of around 1611, one of his last major works, depicts the Virgin at the moment of her miraculous sinless conception — the doctrine declared dogma in 1854 but passionately defended in late sixteenth-century Toledo — surrounded by the symbolic attributes of Revelation 12. El Greco treats the theological doctrine as a visionary experience, the Virgin's figure luminous and ascending against a sky populated by angelic witnesses. The painting demonstrates his late style at its most spiritually ambitious, the human figure dissolved into supernatural light.

El Greco renders the ascending Virgin with extreme elongation and swirling celestial forms, using his latest, most expressionistic style to create a vision of Mary's spiritual purity as dynamic upward movement.