Healing of the Man Born Blind

When he painted this, the artist we call El Greco was not yet in Spain and not yet famous. He had been born on Crete and trained painting icons in the Byzantine manner, then made his way to Italy, and around 1570 he was in Rome, taken up by the powerful Farnese family after the miniaturist Giulio Clovio recommended him. You can watch him learning fast here. The deep architectural space and the crowd of gesturing figures come straight from the Venetian painters he had just been studying. The subject is the moment in the Gospels when Christ gives sight to a man blind from birth, a scene he had already painted a few years earlier and would return to again.