View of Toledo

The city of Toledo rears up on its hill beneath a churning, storm-black sky shot with cold green light, the Tagus winding below and the cathedral tower shifted from its real place for the sake of drama. El Greco paints not a topographical record but a vision - the buildings seem to quake, the clouds to boil, the whole scene charged with supernatural unease. One of the very few independent landscapes in Spanish art of the age and now in the Metropolitan Museum, it feels centuries ahead of its time in its raw emotional weather.