A Thousand Words
El Greco's St. Joseph and the Child Jesus
by Mary Elizabeth Podles
El Greco's image of St. Joseph is that of a young and vigorous father protectively holding the child Jesus, while a tumbling vortex of angels descends through a stormy sky. This is a newly minted iconography for Joseph, not seen before in the history of art. It springs primarily from the theologians of the Counter-Reformation. At the end of the Middle Ages, marriage was in an increasingly sorry state. Social and economic changes had pushed the marriage age for men later, while for women, it grew younger. This resulted in a good bit of disaffection all around. Divorce, or rather annulment on complicated grounds of consanguinity, was rife. Families fell apart. The resulting chaos, and the general reluctance to institute drastic reforms, was one of the generally unacknowledged causes of the fracture we call the Reformation.
In response, the Catholic Council of Trent (1545–1563) set in place counter-measures to rectify the marriage laws and also to bolster the spiritual life of the family. St. Joseph, for example, was proposed as a model for fathers, and his image was upgraded from the little old man of Byzantine and medieval art to the athletic young male we see here. The cult of St. Joseph took hold strongly in Spain (it is at this time that the name "José" became popular in Spanish-speaking lands). El Greco's painting was a special commission for the revamping of a chapel within the cathedral in Toledo in 1597.
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on art from the online archives
33.2—March/April 2020
An Architectural Sign of Mere Christianity by Michael Ward
32.4—July/August 2019
on Single-Mindedness in Durer's Ritter, Tod, und Teufel by Anthony Costello
more from the online archives
32.6—November/December 2019
on Taking Heed of the Parallels Between the Crises of Yesterday & Today by Korey D. Maas
22.6—July/August 2009
on the Integration of Anger into the Virtuous Life by Leon J. Podles
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
