Christ Cleansing the Temple
The original, as its museum records it
Every line above is reproduced from the holding institution’s own catalogue entry, which is linked. Where their title, date or attribution differs from ours, theirs is the one printed here.
The file this print is made from
Sizes
About this painting
The whip has four tails, held high across his body. Below, the trade: a cage of five white birds under a woman's hand, an old man's basket of gold coins, rabbits nosing silver spilled from a pouch, a lamb tied to a stick, belly up.
The Gallery explains the currency of so uncommon a subject. The Council of Trent had promoted it as a symbol of a Church purifying itself, and it spread. El Greco, painting in Venice, set the purge in what looks like an Italian palace, and signed beside the birdcage in Greek: Domenikos Theotokopoulos, Cretan.
Sources: National Gallery of Art, Washington, artist page 'El Greco', entry for Christ Cleansing the Temple, 1957.14.4; read 2026-09-01. · National Gallery of Art, 'Christ Cleansing the Temple', El Greco, probably before 1570, 1957.14.4 · Google Arts & Culture, 'Christ Cleansing the Temple', El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), carrying the National Gallery of Art's overview text · pubhist.com, 'El Greco - Christ Cleansing the Temple', w19865
And when he had made, as it were, a scourge of little cords, he drove them all out of the temple, the sheep also and the oxen: and the money of the changers he poured out, and the tables he overthrew.
John 2:15 · Douay-Rheims (Challoner), from the project’s own corpus at data/bible_drc.js
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 17,735 px master of the original. The whole image is printed — never cropped to fit the sheet — so every sheet carries an archival margin, and the dimensions and resolution listed above are the ones you receive.