Free; ticket required

In this lecture, Charles Barber investigates how El Greco’s Greek identity has shaped both the conception and reception of his work. First trained in the tradition of Byzantine icon painting found on Crete, El Greco developed an understanding of his own art as a form of early modern Greek painting in the course of his life. This individual manner, which is so attractive to our own era, was set aside from the story of Spanish painting written in the 17th and 18th centuries as an eccentric and alien path that was not to be followed. 

Barber is the Donald Drew Egbert Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. A specialist on Byzantine art, his research and publications range from late Antiquity until the early modern period. His major publications have focused on the intellectual history of the icon.