This book is a new translation, in contemporary English, of Miguel de Unamuno's 1920 masterpiece book-length poem about another masterpiece of Western Civilization, Diego Velázquez's "The Christ of San Plácido," which is commonly known as "The Christ of Velázquez." The translation by William Thomas Little is accompanied by a full scholarly introduction and poem-by-poem commentary. Unamuno, Spain's foremost public intellectual of the early twentieth century, considered this book his masterpiece. This is a book of poetry and religious devotion as well as an
ekphrasis
, that is, a detail-by-detail meditation on one of the world's greatest paintings. Composed of eighty-nine poems that are fully integrated one with the other, the result is a masterpiece of spiritual meditation via poetical expression.