L'estasi di san Francesco d'Assisi

For a long time this painting hung quietly in a parish in eastern Poland, thought to be the work of a minor Flemish hand, its lower corner even carrying a signature reading van Dyck. Then in 1964 two Polish art historians taking inventory in a priest's rooms looked harder. Beneath the false name they found another, in Greek letters: Domenikos Theotokopoulos, the man the world calls El Greco. He had painted it around 1575, a Cretan trained first on icons and then in Venice and Rome, showing Saint Francis at the instant of his vision, gaunt and upturned in a grey, stormy light. It took until 1974 for a state commission to accept what the Greek signature said, and the picture now hangs in a diocesan museum in the town of Siedlce.