Painting In Vatican's Collection Is Newly Identified As An El Greco

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Vatican Conservators Uncover a Newly Identified El Greco, Long Hidden Under Overpaint

A modest panel painting that once hung quietly in a papal apartment has been newly recognized as a work by Greek-born Spanish Mannerist painter El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos, 1541–1614), the Vatican announced.

The picture, titled“The Redeemer” and dated to the late 1500s, came into focus during a conservation campaign led by restorers Alessandra Zarelli and Paolo Violini. As treatment progressed, the team realized the image visible on the surface was not the original: an unknown hand had overpainted El Greco's composition, effectively masking it for decades.

“The Redeemer” is a small oil painting on board with an unusually intimate history for a newly authenticated Old Master. It entered the Vatican collections in 1967, when Spanish official José María Sánchez de Muniaín Gil donated it to Pope Paul VI. The work was then displayed in the Pope's apartment at the Apostolic Palace.

Despite its prominent placement, the painting had remained largely unexamined.“Since its arrival in the Vatican, the work had never undergone restoration or scientific studies,” Zarelli said.

Once conservators removed the later paint layers, the Vatican team compared the newly revealed surface with El Greco's established oeuvre. In press materials, Zarelli and the project's director, Fabio Morresi, said that the technical and visual evidence aligned with the artist's known methods and materials, supporting the conclusion that the painting is fully authentic.

High-resolution imaging added another layer of confirmation, exposing two underlying compositions beneath the final image. Those hidden designs relate to extant works by El Greco:“Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Lawrence” (ca. 1580) and“Saint Dominic in Adoration of the Crucifix” (ca. 1590). For scholars, such findings can be as consequential as the attribution itself, offering concrete evidence of how El Greco revised, repurposed, or developed ideas across multiple paintings.

The newly restored“The Redeemer” is currently on view at the Pontifical Villa of Castel Gandolfo in the exhibition“El Greco in the Mirror: Two Paintings in Dialogue.” It is presented alongside a painting of Saint Francis made roughly 20 years earlier, setting up a close comparison between two moments in the artist's career.

The Vatican's announcement also acknowledges the work's complicated modern afterlife. According to the exhibition's press release,“The Redeemer” had already been attributed to El Greco as early as 1970. The same materials suggest the painting may have been“remade” in the 1960s, when demand for El Greco's works was rising, possibly by a forger who had access to a deteriorating and unfinished original.

If that scenario holds, the conservation story becomes more than a straightforward rediscovery: it is also a reminder of how the 20th-century market for Old Masters could reshape objects physically, not just through attribution debates, but through paint itself. For the Vatican, the result is a newly legible work by one of the period's most idiosyncratic painters, returned to view with its history - and its revisions - newly visible.

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