OPENING OF THE FIFTH SEAL EL GRECO The Opening of the Fifth Seal was painted in the last years of El Greco's life (between 1608 and 1614). The material used to paint is oil on canvas, it has a dimension of 224.8 cm Ă— 199.4 cm and nowadays is located in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, USA. The Opening of the Fifth Seal was painted for the San Juan Bautista church in Toledo. The Opening of the Fifth Seal is inspired in the book of Revelation 6:9-11, when the Fifth Seal of Apocalypse is opened, for the ascension to Heaven of martyred souls. St. John is positioned in the ground with this image of the open Heaven with all the martyred souls behind him, going up to the heaven. The souls are supposed to be happy, but they look tormented. The tempestuous light and these twisted, serpentines figures look quite terrifying. The fabrics seem to move and glow in an unnatural way, they possess a solidity that fabric should not have. John the Evangelist is on the left side of the painting wearing a robe. The souls are going up to heaven and only the people who sacrificed their lives for God are going up. The martyred are going up in body and soul. On the painting there are dark colours to express the apocalypse and a small use of light only in some specific souls. This painting can be considered a Renaissance work of art because the figures have a serpentine shape and returned to classical model.
In the 19th century the owner was the prime minister of Spain Antonio Cánovas del Castillo. Dissatisfied with the poor conditions of the painting, he sent the painting to restore. This painting was restored around 1880. After Cánovas´s death the painting was sold for 1,000 pesetas to Ignacio Zuloaga, a painter. In 1956 the Zuloaga Museum sold this painting to the Metropolitan Museum of New York. The restorators actually cut the painting by at least 175 cm, leaving John the Evangelist emphatically pointing nowhere. This painting inspired some cubist painters, such as Pablo Picasso in the painting “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon”. When Picasso was working on “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon”, he visited his friend Zuloaga in his studio in Paris and studied El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal. The relation between “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon” and the Opening of the Fifth Seal was pinpointed in the early 1980s, when the stylistic similarities and the relationship between the motifs of both works were analyzed.
Ángel Aranda Ruiz 3º ESO A