EL GRECO at Palazzo Reale

The exhibition attempts to approach the Cretan painter El Greco and his work from the perspective provided by the environment of the Mediterranean cities in which he was trained and where he worked. A particular look will be reserved for the Italian period of the artist. Between Rome and Venice, El Greco learns the lessons of the great Italian masters and his art changes completely.
The extensive and unprecedented exhibition project, for the first time in Milan, presents more than 40 works by El Greco and boasts prestigious international loans – a unique opportunity to discover the artist’s work in light of the latest research on his work. A series of close comparisons with the great painting Roman and Venetian brings out the powerful theme of the labyrinth, underscoring how El Greco’s life was been a kind of immense coming-of-age novel set among the cultural capitals of the Mediterranean.
The exhibition consists of five thematic areas: the first, entitled “A Crossroads,” deals with the painter’s beginnings in the Cretan icon-making circle and his subsequent apprenticeship in Venice and then Rome. The second, “Dialogues with Italy,” displays a series of works made by El Greco under the direct influence of the Italian painters he admired for their use of color and light. In the third, “Painting Sanctity,” the exhibition delves into the early phase of El Greco’s work in Toledo as a painter of religious scenes and devotional paintings. The fourth section, “The Icon Again,” illustrates how the artist returned, in the last phase of his existence, to the compositional system of icons from his native Crete. The exhibition concludes with a section paying homage to the only mythological work created by El Greco, The Laocoon, a late and brilliant masterpiece full of messages that even today remain not fully interpreted.