The subject of the painting is perfectly suited to a cardinal commission: the parable of a time of profound religious crisis and a real split in Christian Europe, now divided between Catholics and Protestants, a clear allegory of the role of the Church of Rome which, like Christ, alone can open our eyes to the true faith.
The work has been documented since the seventeenth century in the collections of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome and it is very likely that it was commissioned directly from the Cretan artist by Cardinal Alessandro: the painter had in fact arrived in Rome from Venice in 1570 and had been recommended to the high prelate by the miniaturist Giulio Clovio, at that time in the service of the Farnese, and had immediately found a great admirer in the cardinal’s cultured librarian, the very erudite Fulvio Orsini.
Curiosity
In the group crowded on the left, some portraits can be recognized: perhaps the young prince Alessandro Farnese at the end and in the middle of the group, Cardinal Ranuccio Farnese. The characters that have been identified by some scholars as effigies of members of the Farnese family, are not found in the other two versions of this same subject that El Greco painted (one in Dresden, dating back to the first Venetian stay, and the other in New York, considered to belong to the time of the arrival in Spain).