Die Grablegung Christi

Before he was El Greco, he was Domenikos Theotokopoulos, a young icon painter from Crete trained in the flat, gold-ground manner of Byzantium. This small panel catches him in Venice around 1570, teaching himself a completely different language. He is watching Titian and Tintoretto and trying on their crowded, twisting compositions and their warm colour. The dead Christ lies pale and heavy in the centre while the mourners lean and turn around him in poses drawn straight from the Venetians he admired. The dramatic elongations and the strange charged light that would later make his name in Spain are barely here yet. He painted it partly in tempera, the old icon-maker's material, on a panel not much bigger than a sheet of paper.