El Greco's Agony in the Garden, painted around 1590 and now in the National Gallery of London, represents the most complete expression of his mature theological and formal vision in the treatment of a Gospel narrative. The painting transforms the prayer of Gethsemane - as recorded in Luke 22:39-46 - from a narrative of psychological anguish into a mystical vision of supernatural intensity, an encounter between heaven and earth in which the boundary between physical and spiritual reality has dissolved entirely.
The composition organizes itself around a dramatic opposition of scales. Christ kneels on a strange, dreamlike rock formation that seems to float rather than rest on solid earth, his white robes catching the supernatural light that descends from the angel above. The angel - luminous, enormous, filling the upper left of the canvas - descends from a swirling cloud-mass of yellow and grey, bearing a cup. Below and behind Christ, barely visible in a cave-like depression in the rocks, the three disciples - Peter, James, and John - sleep in a tight huddle, their colors dark and earthbound. On the right, approaching through a moonlit valley, a distant procession of soldiers and torchbearers led by Judas moves toward the garden.
Luke 22:43 - 'An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him' - is the only Gospel account to mention the angelic presence at Gethsemane, and Luke 22:44 alone describes the sweat like drops of blood. El Greco's treatment draws on Luke's distinctive emphasis, but transforms the scene from a moment of physical distress that is spiritually supported into something more like a mystical elevation: Christ does not appear to be in agony in the conventional sense but in the ecstasy of divine encounter, the cup before him not merely the symbol of suffering but the chalice of divine will that his prayer resolves to accept.
This transformation reflects El Greco's formation in Byzantine icon painting before his move to Venice and then Spain, and his subsequent deep immersion in the Spanish mystical tradition. Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, whose Interior Castle and Dark Night of the Soul were among the defining texts of late 16th-century Spanish Christianity, described the soul's encounter with God in terms of overwhelming supernatural light, spatial dissolution, the suspension of ordinary bodily experience. El Greco's paintings are visual equivalents of these mystical accounts: the phosphorescent, unearthly colors, the elongated figures that seem to be losing their physical density, the swirling forms that dissolve the distinction between natural and supernatural - all are the visual language of mystical theology.
The sleeping disciples below - Luke 22:45 notes that they were 'exhausted from sorrow' - provide the necessary contrast of earthly limitation against which Christ's mystical isolation is measured. They are not failures in this composition but representatives of ordinary human capacity, the human condition that cannot sustain the intensity of the divine encounter that Christ undergoes alone.
El Greco painted several versions of the Agony in the Garden, each refining his formal vocabulary for the subject. The National Gallery version is generally considered the finest, its composition the most resolved, its color the most extraordinary. The painting's influence extended to the Expressionist generation of the early 20th century, who recognized in El Greco a predecessor for their own conviction that formal distortion and intensified color were more honest vehicles of spiritual truth than the classical naturalism of the academic tradition.