This chapter investigates the substantial issue of El Greco's approach to the depiction of nude bodies in an age when censorial measures were taken against nude portrayals – most acutely against Michelangelo's Last Judgment. El Greco's treatment of the nude expresses his response to the scathing criticisms leveled against the Last Judgment, a response first articulated in the wax and clay modelli produced in his studio. Through a critical dialogue with Michelangelo's work, El Greco's pictorial art establishes gracile nudity as an instrument of religious art.

El Greco executed religious compositions that engaged with particular intensity the controversy over nudity. A highly divisive topic in the late sixteenth-century art world, nudity deepened the split between the inherited and the reformed positions. The debate separated supporters, who endorsed the ideal body as a critical topos for representation, from those who opposed the notion that the nude should contribute to the development of religious imagery. The reception of Titian's painting is relevant to the tensions over sensual expression in Spain. Although Titian was solely guided by his own talent, he culled from a variety of sources for bodily representation, including antique sculptures and cameos, as well as Michelangelo, Correggio, Parmigianino, and engravings by Primaticcio, Rosso Fiorentino, and others. The undisguised eroticism of Titian's paintings, most especially of the Poesie series, enthralled Philip II, despite the king's preference for characteristicly Spanish restraint.

El Greco took the depiction of nudity to new lengths by reconfiguring the body of the saint into an entirely consistent religious image. From the begining of his altarpiece endeavors in Toledo, the San Domingo retable stands out, filled as it is with idiosyncratic modalities for expressing narrative meaning with recourse to nude portrayals in the Trinity and St. John the Baptist panels, as well as the Resurrection from the side altar. The St. Sebastian from the Palencia Cathedral and related variations on the nude representation of St. Sebastian in the half-length format further illustrate El Greco's preoccupation with contorted and elongated bodily forms. His interest in the nude and emaciated body of the penitent saint culminates with St.