El Greco in Italy and the Italian Art

The Adoration of the Shepherds
Scholarly research on the decade of El Greco's stay in Italy has gone through many different phases and has given rise to controversies among specialists. This is not the appropriate place to dwell on this admittedly interesting chapter of the historiography of art.
However, the fact that the last thirty years have produced an extremely small number of publications on El Greco's Italian period is of direct interest on this particular occasion.

Among the few contributions to the subject we should single out the following:

The exhibition Da Tiiziano a El Greco - Per la Storia del Manierismo a Venezia, organized by Rodolfo Pallucchini in 1981 at the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, which included twelve paintings by El Greco and discussed his Venetian sojourn
Two papers (by L. Puppi and H. Wethey) delivered at the symposium El Greco of Tïledo (2-4 April 1982) and published in the collective volume El Greco: Italy and Spain, in Studies in the History of Art, XIII, which accompanied the special exhibition of that same year, presented in Spain and the US; and finally
Some papers (by G. Dillon, C. Gardner von Teuffel, P. Joannides, L. Pupp, C. Robertson and M. Stoyanova - Cucco) presented at the Iraklion symposium of 1990 El Greco of Crete, whose Proceedings have just been published (Municipality of Iraklion, 1995).

This lack of systematic study of El Greco's Italian period -which may be partly due to the impact of Harold Wethey's "El Greco and his School" (1962), and Edoardo Arslan's "Cronistoria del Greco Madonnero" (Commentari, 1964)- has been the reason for the organization of this exhibition and of the accompanying symposium in Rethymno, Crete (22 - 24 September).
In addition, there is another dimension regarding Venetian painting as such. t is true that the Athenian, and generally the Greek public, was never given a chance to see paintings by the Venetian masters of the sixteenth century. A notable exception was the exhibition From El Greco to Cézanne presented n 1992 at the National Gallery and Alexandros Soutzos Museum, which was very rich in impressionist works but strikingly poor in Venetian sixteenth - century examples (Tintoretto's Finding of Moses and Veronese's Boy with a greyhound, were the only ones included in the exhibition).

The Burial of Christ

Portrait of a Man
We should clearly point out that regardless of aesthetic preferences, a closer contact with important moments of the history of European art and of that of other continents and cultures as well, is greatly needed in our country. Collective introversion has never been productive. We should go through the kiln of the creation of others with open rather than with closed eyes, in order to be able to give expression to our present realities and to our history.
The present exhibition, where important works by eleven Venetian masters are shown alongside with numerous works by the artist from Crete, derives from the above mentioned viewpoint. In addition, visitors will have an opportunity to admire two particularly instructive works, whose creators are unknown. We hope that this may enable us to go a little beyond the fetishism of great names, which does not mean that we dismiss the contribution of each gifted artist, but that we should appreciate the individual merit of each work per se, independently of the label it bears.

El Greco in Italy and the Italian Art

Nicos Hadjinicolaou