This chapter evaluates El Greco's San Ginés Purification of the Temple as a painted composition in which the sacramental meaning is invested in the background architecture. El Greco interprets the Eucharistic significance of the church altarpiece as a unifying agent of the distinct entities of the narrative of Christ Cleansing the Temple, architecture, sculpture, and painting. The San Ginés Purification exhibits the versatility and self-consciousness of El Greco's pictorial art in employing media to narrative ends and in redistributing architecture and sculpture to assist painting in transmitting the sacred meaning.

El Greco's manifest ability to enhance the aesthetic dimensions of painting by tethering the devotional to prototypal images led to his advanced concept of narrative composition. The Saint Ginés Purification (fig. 51) provides a key interpretation to the artistic presentation of narrative development in the Gospel account of the Cleansing of the Temple. Surpassing the post-Tridentine interest in interpreting the generative force of the Gospel as a theological exercise in visual argumentation, El Greco creates an array of cross-references in his last painting of a series of six of The Purification of the Temple. Located in Madrid's Saint Ginés Church in the room of the Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament, this is one of El Greco's last major undertakings during his prolific time in Toledo. It represents a conscious summation of his ideas – narrative, architectural, and literary – about depicting a sacred istoria in a Spanish post-reformation climate marred by uncertainty and change. Completed approximately four years before his death in 1614, the composition depicts Christ's expulsion of the merchants and money traders from the Temple of Jerusalem, as described in both the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John (John 2:13-2:25; Matthew 21:12- 21:16; Mark 11:15-11:19; Luke 19:45-19:48). The Purification or the Cleansing of the Temple tells of how Christ, before the Jewish Passover, went to Jerusalem and found in the temple's courts people selling oxen, sheep, and doves, with money changers sitting at tables; He made a whip of cords and drove them out of the temple, scattering the coins of the money changers and overturning their tables.