Authentic El Greco painting discovered under layers of poorly painted paint Automatic translate

A small wooden panel that had hung in the papal apartments for decades has turned out to be one of the most unexpected discoveries in the modern history of restoration. The Vatican Museums have announced that the painting " The Redeemer " (El Redentor), long dismissed as a mediocre work of unknown provenance, is a genuine work by Doménikos Theotokópoulos, the artist known to history as El Greco .

A painting that no one has studied

The painting entered the Vatican collection in 1967, presented to Pope Paul VI by Spanish official and art historian José María Sánchez de Munyaín Gil. Following its transfer, it was placed in the Hall of Ambassadors in the Apostolic Palace — the very room where popes receive official delegations. Despite its prominent location, the work remained largely unnoticed for nearly six decades.

"Since its arrival at the Vatican, this work has undergone neither restoration nor scientific study," explained restorer Alessandra Zarelli. The painting was perceived as unfinished and clearly touched by someone else’s hand, but no one questioned whose hand it was and why.

A routine inspection of the collection’s condition changed everything. Restorers Zarelli and Paolo Violini, working in the Vatican Museums’ Painting and Wood Restoration Laboratory, noticed problems with the condition and decided to conduct a full-scale study. It soon became clear: they weren’t looking at a single painting, but several layers of paint, applied at different times.

The forger and his work

What restorers discovered beneath the top layer of paint can be called a pictorial palimpsest — a term used by Vatican officials in official documents. An unknown forger painted his own image of Christ directly over El Greco’s original, crudely copying the composition but significantly coarsening the brushwork.

According to researchers, this likely occurred in the 1960s. During that period, El Greco’s works soared in price: by then, the artist had been reimagined as a precursor of Expressionism and Cubism, and demand for his paintings had skyrocketed. Along with the demand, the number of forgeries also increased — sometimes even deliberate "improvements" of genuine, but damaged, works.

The Vatican believes the forger must have had access to the original, which was then in a state of progressive deterioration. Rather than replacing the painting with a copy, he painted his image directly over the original — covering it but physically preserving it. It was this paradox that ultimately allowed restorers to restore the original.

Peeling off layers

The restoration work was led by master restorer Paolo Violini; the scientific analysis was coordinated by Fabio Morresi, director of the Scientific Research Office. Specialists methodically removed later layers of paint, gradually revealing the original painting — "elements whose existence no one was initially certain of," as the Vatican Museums described the process.

After completing the cleaning, the team compared the exposed surface with other documented works by the artist. The technical and visual data matched his known methods and materials — this, according to Zarelli and Morresi, confirmed the work’s full authorship.

X-ray and infrared studies revealed another unexpected fact: two earlier drawings by El Greco himself were discovered beneath the final layer of the painting. One is associated with his composition "The Appearance of the Virgin to Saint Lawrence" (c. 1580), the other with "Saint Dominic in Prayer before the Crucifix" (c. 1590). It appears that the wooden panel served as a kind of working surface for the artist: he successively developed various ideas on it before painting the final image of Christ.

Small format with a big history

"The Redeemer" is an oil on wood panel, measuring 45 x 29 centimeters. It dates from approximately 1590–1595, a period when El Greco had already established himself firmly in Toledo and was producing the most mature works of his career.

Small holes along the top and bottom edges of the panel led researchers to believe that the painting may have originally been used as a portable folding altarpiece — an object of personal devotion rather than a ceremonial icon. Such portable altarpieces were common in the late 16th century and often accompanied aristocrats and clergy on their travels.

In 1970, the work was already attributed to El Greco, as mentioned in the official exhibition materials. However, at that time, this attribution remained unsupported by scholarly research, and the painting continued to remain in obscurity.

El Greco: An Artist Beyond Categories

Doménikos Theotokópoulos was born in 1541 on the island of Crete — then a Venetian possession, not Greek, as his birthplace sometimes refers to. He studied in Venice, presumably in the workshops of Titian and Tintoretto, then worked in Rome, and around 1577 moved to Toledo, where he spent the rest of his life. He died there in 1614.

His paintings didn’t fit into the accepted canons of either the Italian Renaissance or the Spanish Baroque. Elongated figures, sharp contrasts of cool blue and hot yellow, and exaggerated facial expressions — all of this made his works strange to his contemporaries and prophetic to posterity. Critics of the 19th and 20th centuries saw him as a precursor to Cézanne, Picasso, and the German Expressionists — which explains the sharp rise in interest in him in the middle of the last century.

Paintings by El Greco

Religious imagery occupied a central place in his practice. His cycle of Christ images — "Savior of the World," "Redeemer," and various versions of "The Agony in the Garden" — constitutes a significant part of his oeuvre. "Redeemer," from the Vatican collection, fits seamlessly into this series, although it remained hidden for a long time in the very place where it would seem to attract attention.

Exhibition at Castel Gandolfo

Since March 14, 2026, the restored painting has been on display at the Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo, the country residence of the pontiffs, located approximately 27 kilometers southeast of Rome. The exhibition is titled "El Greco in the Mirror: Two Paintings in Dialogue" and will run until June 30, 2026.

Displayed next to "The Redeemer" is another work by the same artist, "Saint Francis," a tempera on wood measuring 28 x 20 centimeters, dating to around 1570. This early work was loaned by the A. and M. A. Pagliara Foundation at the Suor Orsola Benincasa University of Naples. It was most likely painted during El Greco’s stay in Rome, before his final move to Spain.

A comparison of the two paintings, separated by approximately twenty years, allows us to trace how the artist’s hand changed: from a still tangible Italian influence - with the presence of Brother Leo next to Saint Francis, as is customary in Titian - to a more concentrated, mystically rich image, characteristic of the Toledo period.

The exhibition is also dedicated to the memory of Pontiff Leo XIV and coincides with the eight hundredth anniversary of the death of Saint Francis of Assisi — a circumstance that lends additional symbolic logic to the selection of works.

Market, counterfeits and physical intervention

The story of the "Redeemer" raises questions that extend far beyond a single discovery. In the 20th century, attribution disputes surrounding El Greco were conducted primarily on paper — through catalogs, expert opinions, and court cases. The case of the Vatican painting demonstrates that manipulations were sometimes far more straightforward: simply a new layer of paint was applied over the original.

The forger — whoever they were — didn’t destroy the original or replace it with another object. They took advantage of the painting’s already perceived damage and low value and painted over it, creating something similar enough to avoid question. This type of intervention — where the original work remains physically intact beneath a layer of foreign paint — is rare in the history of restoration, but precedents are known.

This is precisely why the result of the Vatican restoration turned out to be especially rare: specialists managed not only to confirm the attribution, but literally to remove someone else’s face from the painting and return it to the author’s.