El Greco

For the first time in Milan, a large and unprecedented exhibition project dedicated to the great painter known as El Greco: from Wednesday 11 October 2023 to Sunday 11 February 2024, the spaces on the first floor of Palazzo Reale will welcome the unpublished exhibition project El Greco, promoted and produced by the Municipality of Milan Culture, Palazzo Reale and MondoMostre, with the contribution of the Spanish Embassy in Italy, curated by Juan Antonio García Castro, Palma Martínez - Burgos García and Thomas Clement Salomon.

The exhibition, which boasts prestigious international loans, is an opportunity to present the work of the Cretan artist in the light of the latest research on his work: El Greco in fact proposes a profound and innovative historical-critical reflection, whose strengths are from the careful reconsideration of the impact of Italian models in the artist's training and from the proposal of an interpretation of the results of El Greco's activity in the last Toledan period in terms of conscious recovery of a compositional setting in the broader Byzantine sense.

The exhibition itinerary is divided into sections designed so as to keep constantly in focus the artist's relationship with the places where he lived in order to offer visitors a precise historical-biographical reconstruction with great clarity and immediacy of impact, at the same time establishing a series of stringent comparisons with the great Roman and Venetian painting, bringing out the powerful theme of the labyrinth to underline how El Greco's life was a sort of immense bildungsroman that took place among the cultural capitals of the Mediterranean.

For the realization of this exhibition project, major museums have lent authentic masterpieces for this exhibition, including the famous San Martino and the beggar and the Laocoon from the National Gallery in Washington, the Portrait of Jeronimo De Cevallos from the Prado Museum, the two Annunciations of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, the San Giovanni and San Francesco of the Uffizi Galleries. Moreover, the exhibition boasts the presence of extraordinary works from ecclesiastical institutions that arrive in Italy for the first time, such as the Martyrdom of San Sebastiano from the Cathedral of Palencia, the Expulsion of the merchants from the temple of the Church of San Ginés in Madrid and the Coronation of the Virgin of Illescas.