La Dormizione della Vergine

This panel was painted around 1565 by a young man who signed himself Domenikos Theotokopoulos, on the Venetian-ruled island of Crete, long before the world knew him as El Greco. It follows the strict pattern of a Byzantine icon of the Virgin's death, the apostles gathered around her bed, Christ above holding her soul as a small swaddled figure. But look closely and the old rules are already loosening, in the way the figures turn in space and catch the light, a hint of the Italian pictures he would soon go to study. For centuries it hung on the island of Syros as an object of worship, its author forgotten. His signature, on the base of the candelabrum in the middle, was only found in 1983.