Nicholas Mulroy

One of the earliest examples of landscape painting, this crackles with a symphony of apocalyptic colour. It might remind us of The Book of Revelations: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth”. Even now it’s a real jolt of modernity: a sky that explodes a storm of light through the picture, and a weird, gothic city that resembles lightning in built form. You can practically hear the thunder rumble, touch the drops of rain as the storm begins. Check out the miraculous use of colour – its visionary, altered state makes us look again at the very act of seeing. Although Toledo was home to El Greco, and good to him, he gives the place a brutal, forbidding air, and even commits the heresy of dislocating the cathedral from its actual site – the artist as omnipotent creator. In setting Toledo as the stage of the apocalypse, he’s making it a holy city: he creates his own holy city on his own terms, though, and the viewer is gripped and terrified by this battle between trouble and triumph