ABSTRACT
In attempting to recover historical fact, research needed to turn its attention to the milieu, life and career of El Greco in his Cretan period. In other words, it was necessary to investigate the vast archives of Venetian-ruled Crete, today preserved in the state archives of Venice. Until the foundation of the Greek Institute for Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies in Venice, Greek scholars had not made any systematic exploration of the archives’ contents. An amateur scholar, Konstantinos D. Mertzios, who was a resident of Venice, for a long time failed, despite admirable efforts, to uncover anything in the archives relating directly to the life of El Greco apart from a few documents concerning the artist’s brother Manousos.1 At last, in 1961, after decades of thankless searching, he finally found what he had been looking for: the first archival evidence for the presence of El Greco in Crete. At the First International Congress of Cretan Studies, Mertzios announced his discovery: the name of Domenikos Theotokopoulos – unfortunately not in the artist’s own hand – serving as a witness’s signature on a contract for the sale of a house, dated 6 June 1566, in the notarial register of Michael Maras, a notary public working in Candia: ‘maistro Menegos Theotokopoulos sgourafos’.2 This piece
1 K.D. Mertzios, Θωμᾶς Φλαγγίνης καὶ ὁ Μικρὸς Ἑλληνομνήμων, Πραγματεῖαι τῆς Ἀκαδημίας Ἀθηνῶν, vol. 1, Athens 1939, 186-202; idem, ‘Νέαι εἰδήσεις περὶ Κρητῶν ἐκ τῶν ἀρχείων τῆς Βενετίας. Β´: Μανοῦσος Θεοτοκόπουλος’, Κρητικὰ Χρονικά 2 (1948), 141-52; idem, ‘Φραγκῖσκος Μανούσου Θεοτοκοπούλου’, Ἠπειρωτικὴ Ἑστία 7 (1958), 643 (=Ὁ Μικρὸς Ἑλληνομνήμων 2, Ioannina 1960, 13).
