The Lamentation of Christ, Italy, 16th century; oil on panel

Description The Lamentation of Christ Oil on panel 47.5x65.5 cm The panel can be attributed to a 16th-century artist active along the Adriatic coast. The old attribution, referring to the very early Venetian activity of Domínikos Theotokópoulos, known as El Greco (Candia, 1541; Toledo, 1614), originated in the 1950s when the label of "madonnero" for this specific genre was promoted by Rodolfo Pallucchini, who, arguing the youth of Tintoretto, stated that: "in Venice, today there is no longer any doubt, for some years El Greco worked as a madonnero". From these dates, therefore, an attributional misunderstanding arose on the early production of the artist. Pallucchini, however, was not the only one, many other scholars referred works to "El Greco madonnero" and among these, to mention the most well-known, we remember Giuseppe Fiocco, Sergio Bettini, Roberto Longhi and Antonio Morassi. It was only in the 1960s, thanks to the interventions of Arslan, that the phenomenon found a natural resizing. It was, in fact, the domination of the Serenissima that generated the Cretan Renaissance, to make the encounter between the two artistic traditions profitable. A phenomenon that also generated a modification of the social structures of the island thanks to trade and the birth of a merchant bourgeoisie increasingly adherent to the lagoon culture and at the same time a Venetian population capable of absorbing and making these illustrious traditions coexist. This new pictorial conception found its spread thanks to the masters who traveled along the maritime routes, divulging an illustrative taste by no means destined to fall back on itself. The prints, the icons and the precious canvases of the East and West were the basis of extraordinary creations and the phenomenon of Domenikos Theotokopoulos, an artist capable of renewing the examples of Titian, Jacopo Bassano, Andrea Schiavone and Polidoro da Lanciano, imagining real formal revolutions. Also in this case, the innovation has its fulcrum in the use of color, enameled according to Byzantine taste but tonal and iridescent according to the Venetian lesson, reaching in certain cases very high quality levels. This judgment can be applied to the table in question, whose aesthetic value is certainly distant from that commonly achieved by madonnari and it is perceived by observing the refined drafting enhanced by the chromatic preciousness. Dimensions 47.5x65.5 cm Provenance Private collection Bibliography Pallucchini Rodolfo, The youth of Tintoretto, Milan, Daria Guarnati, 1950, p. 58. Panayotis K. Ioannou, El Greco among the "Madonneri": criticism, ideologies, the market. New lights on the recovery of the Modena Triptych (1937), Studies in art history, vol. 27, 2017, pp. 151-174, notes 68-76. Arslan Edoardo, Chronistoria of the Greco "madonnero", in Commentari, XV, De Luca Editore, Rome, 1964, 3-4, pp. 213-231. Conditions Missing parts and defects. Breakages. Restorations.