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St Luke Painting the Icon of the Virgin,
1560-67
Athens, Benaki Museum
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This is one of the earliest existing works by El Greco. He painted the picture in around 1567, before leaving Crete for Venice. The picture shows the evangelist St. Luke as painter. According to legend, St. Luke had a vision in which the Virgin Mary with the Christ child appeared to him. The evangelist recorded his vision in a painting, which led to him being considered the patron saint of painters. St. Luke was also the patron of the guild of painters in Candia, which was the Cretan capital and Domenikos Theotokopoulos’ home town. Similar representations of the saint were quite common in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Despite the ravages of time which the painting has endured, we can see that the young painter displayed considerable talent. The portrayal of the Madonna and Child show him to have been a master of Byzantine icon painting. For the angel above Domenikos employed an entirely different and fluid style. The work also reflects a sensitivity to spatial relationships not characteristic of Byzantine painting. Both these elements are evidence of Domenikos’ interest in contemporary western Renaissance art.
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