ABSTRACT
In 1960, the El Greco scholar Rodolfo Pallucchini published a short study on a previously unknown portrait by the Cretan artist, which, he claimed, depicted Meletios Vlastos (Plate 13).1 This portrait was located, and may indeed still be located, in a private collection in Paris, and Pallucchini, who was able to inspect it, stated that he could clearly read the signature of the artist, written in capitals: ΔΟΜΗΝΙΚΟΣ ΘΕΟΤΟΚΟΠΟΥΛΟΣ. He does not say whether he was also able to read the inscription containing the name of the sitter for the portrait; he simply reports a piece of information supplied by his friend Stephan Bourgeois to the effect that there was still legible on the back of the picture ‘una vecchia inscrizione . . . che reca appunto il nome “M. VLASTOS”’. Pallucchini accepts the authenticity of the signature of the artist and is in no doubt that the portrait is a work of El Greco. He compares it with other portraits of undoubted authenticity by El Greco and makes a number of general stylistic observations. The most important of these observations was originally made by Robert Lebel, the man who, as Pallucchini tells us, first brought to his attention the existence of the painting: the portrait of Meletios Vlastos bears a strong resemblance to Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus.2 Pallucchini attempts also to give a date for the work, placing it before El Greco’s departure for Rome while he was still working with Titian, that is, some time between 1567 and 1570. However, he also gives another view, expressed by Bourgeois, namely that El Greco painted the portrait after Vlastos’s death in 1573, perhaps during a return visit to his native Crete in c. 1574-1575. Pallucchini goes on to say that Bourgeois intended to publish a study with evidence supporting this view, although as far as I know this study never in fact appeared. Curiously, Pallucchini does not reject this latter view, but rather states that it has ‘a certain attractiveness, given that the static nature of the portrait tends to make one think that the figure is rather an idealized, post mortem, model’, clearly because, as he explains earlier, ‘the face [of the sitter] is waxen: the sharp and somewhat hard lines give the impression of a man with a strong will, gazing into the void’.3 I do not know how many other portraits have been made after the death of the person portrayed on the basis of memory alone, but, if this somewhat unlikely theory is true in the present case, there is no need to assume that El Greco returned to Candia in order to make the portrait, since if he was relying on memory he could have painted it anywhere.
