L'Adoration des Mages avec un cheval

The earliest document that places El Greco in Venice is from November 1568. A Cretan bookseller sending maps to a patron noted that the one of Cyprus had been drawn by master Menegos Theotokopoulos, a young painter. He was about 27, trained on Crete to make icons in gold and egg tempera, and he had arrived in a city where Titian and Tintoretto were both still at work.

This small Adoration belongs to those first Venetian years. The mounted figures at the left sit close to Titian's handling of the same subject, and the swing and crowding of the scene is what he was taking from Tintoretto. He painted the Magi twice in Venice, once with horses and once with camels, and that is still how the two are told apart.

It measures 45 centimetres by 52 and hangs in the Lazaro Galdiano Museum in Madrid, the house of a collector who died in 1947.