El Greco, in the last years of his life, paints The Opening of the Fifth Seal (or The Fifth Seal of the Apocalypse or The Vision of Saint John) for a side-altar of the church of Saint John the Baptist outside the walls of Toledo.

Competed in 1614, El Greco's painting will be referred to before 1908 as Profane Love.

Cossio had doubts about the title and suggested The Opening of the Fifth Seal.

The Metropolitan Museum, where the painting is kept, comments: "the picture is unfinished and much damaged and abraded.” The subject is taken from the Book of Revelation (6:9-11), where the souls of persecuted martyrs cry out to God for justice upon their persecutors on earth.

The ecstatic figure of St. John dominates the canvas, while behind him naked souls writhe in a chaotic storm of emotion as they receive white robes of salvation. (It has been suggested that the Opening of the Fifth Seal served as an inspiration for the early Cubist works of Pablo Picasso, especially Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which mirrors the expressionistic angularity of the painting. When Picasso was working on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, he visited his friend Ignacio Zuloaga, a painter instrumental in reviving European interest in El Greco, in his studio in Paris and studied El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal.)