Monte Sinai

This is the work of a young man who was not yet El Greco. Around 1570 Domenikos Theotokopoulos, trained as an icon painter on Crete, was in Italy, in Venice and then Rome, absorbing a completely different way of painting. Here he takes the peaks of Mount Sinai, where Moses was said to have received the commandments, with the monastery of Saint Catherine at their foot, and gives almost the whole panel over to the rocky landscape. Pilgrims and camels appear far below, tiny, almost an afterthought. He had never been anywhere near Sinai. The view is built from engravings printed in the travel books of the day, so he was working from other men's pictures rather than from the mountain itself.