Nativity, Venetian-Cretan school (oil on panel, late 16th century)

The oil on panel that we present constitutes a significant and iconic testimony to the chronological arc of the history of painting known as the Venetian-Cretan school: the preponderance of the Greek element evident in the intermediate social classes that played a fundamental role in the development of Cretan culture meets with the Venetian aristocracy, which had largely adopted the language of the island and the Orthodox rite.
The echoes of this wonderful synthesis, the first and direct consequence of a period of commercial splendor, are directly reflected in the figurative field: in the early Renaissance, the inhabitants of Venice received the greatest cultural impulses from Byzantium and, after the fall of the Eastern capital (1453), Venice became the favorite place of exile for the Eastern Orthodox Christians. The exchange, however, took place in both directions.
In Crete, annexed to Venice since 1211, Western and Eastern culture are consequently mixed, as well as, in the religious sphere, Latin and Orthodox Christianity. This is the cultural background of the incipient artistic production of the Spanish painter, but of Cretan origins, who began as an icon painter and then became a pupil of Titian: Domenikos Theotokopoulos better known by the Spanish epithet of El Greco (Crete 1541-Toledo 1614).
Our panel with the Nativity as its subject can be compared to the pictorial production of the early El Greco (Dormitio Virginis, an icon painted in Crete before 1567, kept in Ermopoli in the church of Dormitio Virginis, the first certain work in Byzantine style that can be attributed to El Greco; the Modena Triptych 1560-1565; the tempera of the Adoration of the Magi, 1566-1567, in the Benaki Museum in Athens, among the first works painted in Venice, attributed by some to the late Cretan period; the Last Supper, 1568, kept in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna; the Adoration of the Magi, in the Lazaro Galdiano Museum, 1567-1570), directly attributable to the “hybrid” painting of the Cretan school of icons, in which Byzantine models coexist with Western influences, which reached Crete mainly in the form of prints.
Just like in the El Greco of the Modena polyptych (panel of the Adoration of the Shepherds) we find ourselves in the presence of a work of transition, which clearly and directly attests to the iconographic passage that is taking place in painting from the post-Byzantine world of icons and "Cretan madonnari" to the European one, of Latin influence.
Even in the case of our panel, the unknown patron could belong to a Cretan-Venetian family. It is worth remembering, incidentally, that the workshops of the Cretan school, which flourished between the late 15th and mid-16th centuries, with followers still at the end of the 16th century, benefited from a demand that went beyond regional borders, coming from the eastern Mediterranean and from Venice itself.
If the model of the faces of the Virgin and Child, treated with colours studied to highlight the luminous aspect, betrays pictorial reminiscences of a peculiarly Cretan context, for the rest the use of colour attests to a completely Venetian maturation process, in a general iconographic system likely attributable to engravings on the theme such as the Adoration of the Shepherds by Giovanni Britto or the engraving in the manner of J. Mignon, derived from a drawing by Luca Penni.
It is precisely here, as in the Modena polyptych, the fascinating world of light and colour that allows our painter to truly transform the essential iconographic models derived from Italian engravings to arrive at the construction of a perspective structure of apparent simplicity.
All this increases the charm of our work, all aimed at rediscovering the conditions of classical and ancient dignity, that of the "Greek fathers", to use El Greco's words, while at the same time capturing and channelling the irresistible suggestions of the pictorial lesson of the Serenissima, first of all that of the brightness of the lagoon.

In case of sale, a written appraisal is issued, signed directly by Prof. Giorgio Maturi

Measurements: H 48 x 40

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