The El Bonillo ‘Christ Carrying the Cross’ is one of the most remarkable works of this brilliant and deeply religious artist. In it, we see Christ standing, with a gaze full of depth and meekness, with white brushstrokes in the irises to make his eyes seem glassy and almost wet with tears. He is depicted with his head crowned with painful thorns. We admire his thin, bearded face, his long neck; he stands out against a background of tormented skies, his body clad as always in a red tunic and a blue cloak, following the traditions learned by the artist in Crete, where he studied Byzantine icons. The cross seems weightless, while the beautiful hands that hold it have fingers that are carefully modeled, almost ethereal, with the middle and ring fingers joined as if to suggest in some elegant symbol the union of the human and divine nature in the person of Jesus Christ.
The work is striking for the absoluteness of the figure of the Redeemer, who the artist, ignoring both historical data and the Gospel text, depicts in complete solitude, without the crowds or guards or the retinue of women followers or onlookers we normally see in the images of Christ's path to Calvary. Here all attention is focused on the internal dialogue between the Son and the Father. It is the resumption and completion of the dialogue that animated Christ’s tormented prayer during the night of agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. We see here the struggle between the desire not to have to face the painful experience of rejection and death and the courageous and confident willingness to do so if such is the only way to salvation. ‘Thy will be done …’ Jesus not only taught these words in the prayer of the Our Father, he was the first to live them out, at every moment of his life but even more intensely in the most challenging and demanding moment of his mission. This is exactly how the work of salvation is accomplished: God's love transforms everything. That transformation which had begun during the Lord's Last Supper, with him taking the bread and wine and changing them into his body and blood, all done out of love, to establish the new and eternal covenant, reached its most impressive moment in the transformation of the cross, from bring a horrible gallows invented by the cruelty of human beings and imposed as an absurd punishment on the innocent Messiah, into a symbol of self-giving and redemption for humanity from its guilty blindness, from its inexplicable pains, from the experience of death as a failure and a fall into nothingness. In El Greco's Christ Carrying the Cross, we already see the transformation that has taken place, especially in Christ's gaze which shines with a surprising and serene light. And all this when the Nazarene might have shown disappointment and resentment or despair and discouragement. The certainty that the Father's love is always with the Son, even during the great moment of sacrifice, and that His love is stronger than death and can redeem it, floods the heart of Jesus with light at the very moment when everything around is dark and seemingly without perspective.
