Christ Healing the Blind

When El Greco made this, around 1570, he was a young Greek painter newly arrived in Venice, still signing his work in Greek letters. He had trained on Crete as an icon painter, in the flat, gold-ground Byzantine tradition, and this picture is him teaching himself something completely new. The floor is paved in receding tiles that pull your eye deep into the space, his first real experiment with perspective. Two figures in the foreground are cut off sharply at the frame, a device straight from Titian and Tintoretto, the Venetian masters he was studying. Christ reaches to touch the eyes of a blind man while onlookers react around them. It would be years before El Greco reached Spain and the stretched, flame-like figures he is famous for.