Taufe Christi

This is an early work by the painter the world would later call El Greco, though he signed himself Doménikos Theotokópoulos, a Greek from Crete. Around 1567 he was in his mid-twenties and moving between two worlds, the flat gold-ground icon tradition he had trained in on Crete and the Italian painting he was reaching toward in Venice. You can see both here, in the modelled bodies and the still-Byzantine intensity of the faces. It is one of only two works by him that remain on the island where he was born, and it hangs in Heraklion, the city he left as a young man to make his name abroad.