The Painted Gold

El Greco and Painting between Crete and Venice: When icons meet the lagoon: a journey of light, faith, and encounters between cultures

Liviana Martin

The title alone is enough to capture the imagination, even before stepping into the halls of the Doge’s Palace, where the exhibition will remain open until September 29. Gold and painting, Crete and Venice, icons and the Renaissance: an interweaving of words announcing a story of encounters, contaminations, and even conflicts. What the visitor finds is not merely a display of artworks, but the narrative of journeys, of seas crossed, of identities in transformation. The story begins with Cretan icons – rigorous and luminous – and reaches the metamorphosis of Domenikos Theotokópoulos, known as El Greco, who left Candia in search of fortune and ended up inventing a language that still eludes any classification.
From 1212, Crete belonged to Venice. The Serenissima ruled it and exploited its strategic role in the Mediterranean, but it was not only about soldiers and trade: the island was also a cultural laboratory. It breathed Byzantine incense and traded wine, oil, pottery, weapons, and textiles. Meanwhile, its painters kept one eye on the sacred models of the Orthodox tradition and the other on Venetian canvases that spoke of color and freedom. Icons traveled like precious goods, destined for churches and households, and on their journeys absorbed Western details, small stylistic variations that in time would become revolutions.
Among the protagonists of this season stands Mikael Damaskinós, a key figure of the Cretan School. A traveling artist, he spent long periods in Venice, where he absorbed the lessons of the great masters without ever abandoning the Byzantine rigor he carried with him. His canvases display an extraordinary ability to merge the luminosity of gold with the narrative vitality of Venetian art. He was not merely a bridge between two worlds, but a model followed by entire generations of Cretan painters: his skill in contaminating icon and profane painting paved the way for the stylistic freedom that would culminate in El Greco himself. In Damaskinós one perceives the energy of a tradition renewing itself, a master who conveyed to others the certainty that East and West were not opposing poles but two currents running through the same river.
It is in this world that El Greco was born in 1541. Son of the Cretan school, trained among gildings and rigid post-Byzantine rules, he was not content with repetition. He wanted more, and in 1567 he arrived in Venice, capital of reflections, glass, and painting vibrating with light. Here he studied Titian, observed Tintoretto, and nourished himself on compositions that seemed like a theater in perpetual motion. In Rome he added more ingredients: the mannerist drawing, daring invention, the sense of space as tension. And yet he never ceased to be what he was: a Cretan, a painter of icons. His strength lay precisely there, in transforming an ancient heritage into a new language.
The exhibition presents him without isolating him: El Greco is the culmination of a collective story, not the solitary meteor he is often imagined to be. Alongside him came to Venice Damaskinós and many others who sought to blend sacred gold with profane painting, to make the barrier between East and West more porous. Seen in sequence, his works build a crescendo: gold that evolves from a static background into vibration; figures that shift from rigid icons into bodies moved by an inner wind; narratives that transform from liturgy into vision.
I have already written about his peculiar style in the pages of New Art Examiner, stressing that his originality is not whim but method. Venice confirms this intuition: El Greco’s ‘peculiarity’ is born of friction, not isolation. It is the ability to remain faithful to an inner code while everything around changes, to transform gold into energy and dogma into movement.
Leaving the exhibition, one feels they have witnessed a dance of civilizations. Crete and Venice are not mere geographic coordinates: they are two worlds that for centuries looked at each other, imitated, courted, and sometimes challenged one another. Gold, in this story, is not decorative luxury but a shared language, a code of faith and power that becomes living matter in the hands of a painter who never stopped traveling, even when he settled in Toledo. And the curious reader, like the visitor, realizes that El Greco is not only a great artist of the past, but the symbol of how fertile the encounter between different peoples can be: art is born precisely there, where borders become crossings, where identities mix, where gold is not only precious – but thinks.

The Painted Gold. El Greco and Painting between Crete and Venice Doge’s Palace, Doge’s Apartments, Venice
Curated by Chiara Squarcina, Katerina Dellaporta, Andrea Bellieni
Until September 29, 2025