수태고지

This is El Greco before he was El Greco. He painted it around 1576, while living in Italy, years before the stretched, flaming figures people picture when they hear his name. He had grown up on Crete painting icons, then gone to Venice and Rome to learn oil and colour, and it shows here. The warm Venetian light and rich fabric owe a plain debt to Titian, and the angel Gabriel could have stepped out of Veronese. Gabriel arrives on the left as Mary rises from her reading, and a shaft of light thick with tiny cherub heads carries the dove of the Holy Spirit down between them. Within a couple of years he would leave for Spain for good. The floor tiles run back in careful straight-ruled perspective, something he would soon abandon.