Adoration of the Shepherds

In 1570 the painter we now call El Greco was neither Spanish nor famous. He was a young man from Crete, freshly arrived in Rome, whom a friend at the papal court recommended as a follower of Titian. He had trained as an icon painter in the Byzantine tradition, then spent a couple of years in Venice absorbing its colour and its handling of light, and you can see that schooling at work here. The shepherds crowd toward the newborn Christ, whose body throws almost the only light in the scene, a device he had picked up from Venetian painters like Tintoretto. The stretched figures and restless energy that would later make him unmistakable are only just beginning to surface.