The commission for the painting was secured thanks to El Greco's friendship from Rome with Luis, the son of Diego de Castilla, the dean of the Cathedral of Toledo.

The radiant face of the Savior is violently juxtaposed to the coarse figures of the executioners, who are amassed around Him creating an impression of disturbance with their movements, their gestures and lances.

The purple garment (a metonymic symbol of the divine passion) is spread out in a light fold; only the chromatic couple of yellow and blue in the foreground raises a separate note which approaches, in power, the glorifying hymn of the red.

[3] In designing the composition vertically and compactly in the foreground El Greco seems to have been motivated by the desire to show the oppression of Christ by his cruel tormentors.

The original altar of gilded wood that El Greco designed for the painting has been destroyed, but his small sculpted group of the Miracle of St. Ildefonso still survives on the lower center of the frame.

[6] The Disrobing of Christ was a subject of a dispute between the painter and the representatives of the Cathedral regarding the price of the work; El Greco was forced to have recourse to legal arbitration and eventually received only 350 ducats, when his own appraiser had valued it at 950.

[3] Two greatly reduced versions are generally accepted as from the hand of El Greco himself; possibly one may have been an oil sketch study, or, more likely, a studio record of the composition.