Théophile Gautier came to write the flippant nonsense he did about El Greco. Even if the legend of the painter's madness were true, it is certainly not apparent in this canvas. What is apparent is a complete want, felt everywhere in El Greco's work, of sensibility of the more subtle and penetrative kind, an inaptitude that made the limitation of his art to conceive or paint emotion on a woman's face. The three Maries are present, so close as to touch the robe of Jesus. Well, the three faces express nothing stronger in feeling than curiosity, in the case of the middle figure more slightly depressed by a vague instinct of passive grief; in the case of the younger women such a curiosity as a passing incident might excite, with neither a touch of terror nor abhorrence much less that of martyred love. The dark and lovely head behind of the third woman, said to be the painter's daughter, with the superb hand and arm, is that of a young Toledan girl placidly watching some street procession and looking for the appearance of her lover. The smile is not far from the shadowed eyes and sweet, grave mouth, and the whole suggests soft, young romance. A rash youth, passing at that moment, if his eyes fell first upon her in the tragic scene, would greet her with an eloquent smile, and probably fling her a kiss through the air, but he would never suppose she was looking on at barbarous men as they bored holes in a cross and tore the garments from the form of her Lord and Saviour about to be crucified. The same curious indifference to appropriate form and expression is shown in his St John the Evangelist. The last of the row of apostles on the right of the sacristy, a pallid, lean young man enveloped in the peculiar tints of dull green and faded pink, one soon learns to recognise as El Greco's hues of predilection, which are more than once reproduced elsewhere in the figures of St Joseph, the infant Jesus and Mary. This is not the dreamy and loving youth of the New Testament, full of tenderness and mystical reverie. The face is delicately hard, long, pointed and intellectual, its cold ardour clouded with a suggestion of impatience and contempt.