L'Annonciation

This is an early El Greco, painted around 1570 while he was in Venice, long before the stretched, flame-like figures of his Toledo years. He had trained on Crete as an icon painter in the Byzantine tradition, then come to Italy to learn oil and perspective from the Venetians. You can see whose work he was studying. Mary's pose owes something to Titian, the swirling composition something to Tintoretto. It is a small panel, barely the size of a book, painted in tempera rather than the oils he would soon take up. Within a few years he left Italy for Spain and settled in Toledo, where his style turned strange and unmistakable.