Le Christ guérissant l'aveugle

El Greco came from Crete, where he trained in the flat, gold manner of Byzantine icons. This is one of the first things he painted after reaching Venice, still learning from Titian and Tintoretto. The gospel scene shows Christ giving sight to a blind man while bystanders react, set in a hall of tiled floor and steep architecture that plunges back into space, the kind of perspective he had just absorbed. The figures rushing in at the right are lifted almost directly from a Tintoretto he would have known in the city. It mattered enough to him that he carried it along when he left Italy for Spain around 1576. The upper-left corner is left unfinished, the underdrawing still visible, and the canvas now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.