This newly discovered painting by El Greco, one of the most original artists of sixteenth-century Europe, is a remarkable early work. Executed circa 1568 or 1569, almost immediately after the artist’s arrival in Venice from Crete, the painting shows how rapidly he internalized myriad visual sources that together coalesce in this rare panel that helps elucidate the great painter’s artistic genesis.

Born in Crete to a Greek Orthodox family of government functionaries who worked for the Venetian colonial service, El Greco arrived in Venice between January and August 1568. He remained there for just over two years and is recorded in Rome (via Verona, Parma, and Florence) by late 1570. His t.mes in Venice, though critical to understanding El Greco’s artistic trajectory, remains somewhat opaque. For instance, while he certainly knew Titian, and likely visited his workshop, it has yet to be determined if the two painters ever directly worked together.

The present painting, like all known works produced by El Greco in the late 1560s, reflects a certain striving quality. He appears at once to be searching for compositional resolution, figural cohesion, and gestural legibility, with varying degrees of success. Much as in other early paintings, including the Adoration of the Magi in the Benaki Museum, Athens (fig. 1), the Modena Triptych at the Accademia Carrara (fig. 2), and the Annunciation at the Museo del Prado (fig. 3), El Greco brings together motifs from a number of etchings and engravings.¹

As in those works, he adapts, transposes, and modifies. The elongated figural forms, with agitated twisting drapery and spindly fingers, recall those in Andrea Schiavone’s prints: the man in green framing the composition at right strikes the same downcast pose as the apostle Saint Thomas (fig. 4). For Saint Lawrence, who, with arms tied above his head, bucks forward slightly, El Greco seems also to have borrowed from Giulio Bonasone’s Cupid in the Elysian Fields (fig. 5). For the statue of Neptune seated upon a large, festooned plinth at left, El Greco appears to have drawn from Elijah Challenges Ahab and the Priests of Baal, engraved by Philips Galle after Maerten van Heemskerck (fig. 6). And for the slightly disjointed architectural elements, which reveal El Greco’s early difficulty with the construction of fully legible perspectival space, he incorporated elements from Dirck Volkertsz. Coornhert and Cornelis Cort.

El Greco culled not only from graphic sources circulating in Italy, but also from the works of the great colorist Jacopo Tintoretto. The burnt citric oranges (which also appear in El Greco’s near-contemporaneous Entombment of Christ in the National Gallery, Athens²), in particular, recall the Venetian’s luminous tones, as does El Greco’s use of pure white to indicate luster in the flickering highlights that animate the draperies. Additionally, the corporeality of certain poses suggests an interest in Michelangesque figural force, as filtered through Tintoretto’s Venetian gaze. (The receding tiles that demarcate the composition’s left side also recall such patterned floors in Tintoretto’s compositions; a similar geometric motif appears in El Greco’s Annunciation [fig. 3].)

Infrared reflectography recently conducted on the panel (fig. 7) reveals the marvelously free brushwork that underpins the entire composition. Executed with a dark liquid pigment, the underdrawing is remarkable for its fluidity, spontaneity, and vigor, recalling the same approach evident in the Modena Triptych and the Prado Annunciation, both executed in these same years, when El Greco was a fledgling painter.³

¹ See F. Marias, “Crete, Italy, Toledo,” in El Greco of Toledo, Painter of the Visible and the Invisible, exhibition catalogue, F. Marias (ed.), Madrid 2014, pp. 125-135.
² inv. no. 9979.
³ See M. Garrido Pérez, El Greco pintor, Estudio Técnico, Madrid 2015, pp. 57-87, cat. no. 2, figs. 2.10, 2.12, 2,14, 2.15, 2.17, and pp. 95-101, cat. no. 4, figs. 4.2, 4.5.