Portrait of Giulio Clovio

This is the earliest surviving portrait we have from El Greco, painted around 1571 soon after the young Cretan arrived in Rome. The sitter, Giulio Clovio, was the man who helped him settle there, a celebrated painter of manuscript miniatures whom Vasari called the Michelangelo of the small scale. El Greco has him turn toward us and point, with his own masterpiece, the illuminated Farnese Hours, held open in his hand. Behind him a window opens onto a stormy sky already lit the restless way El Greco's later work would be. The commission came from Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, in whose Roman circle the two men met. When the Bourbons inherited the Farnese collection the picture travelled south, and it hangs today in Naples.