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El Greco and the Art between Crete and Venice From 30 April to 29 September 2025 Venice, Doge’s Palace – Doge’s Apartments
Curated by Chiara Squarcina, Katerina Dellaporta, Andrea Bellieni This project arose from an idea of the former Greek ambassador to Italy Themistoklis Demiris and the architect Gherardo degli Azzoni Avogadro Malvasia. A few years ago in Greece they envisaged a major exhibition of Venetian-Cretan art, with immediate scholarly and institutional support from Venice. The purpose is to showcase a fruitful period of a very special artistic union between Greece and Venice, in its turn a participant in the Italian Renaissance. The topic is present in scholarship but still unfamiliar and almost unknown to the general public. At the crossroads of the Byzantine and Venetian figurative cultures, it involves topics related to the arts in Venice’s overseas possessions from the second half of the 15th century to the second half of the 17th, with eclectic artists who could equally produce paintings in the different modes of expression, the evolution of the themes represented and their adaptation to the tastes of clients. The emphasis is placed on the discovery of the Renaissance in Greece in the development of art in the last years of the rule of the Palaiologos family, not so much on Venice’s mastery of the sea, or even the continental dialectics between Crete and Greece, as underlined by the presence in the exhibition of paintings by El Greco, projected into a European creative environment that transcends the period when they were produced. Many works by the Venetian-Cretan school are still owned by families with ties to the city of Venice, often those that originally commissioned them. Numerous paintings are preserved in Venice by the Museo Correr and the Museo delle Icone at the Istituto Ellenico di Studi Bizantini e Postbizantini, as well as in private collections in Italy and abroad. Also of special interest will be the comparison between the different visions of the creation of art in East and West: in the West the painter raised his art to God; in the East it was God who guided the painter’s hand. In every Venetian aristocratic residence, above its owner’s bed, there was a Greek icon which, by its hieratic character, was believed to offer special protection to the different generations. The exhibition will be held in the Doge’s Palace, given the importance of Venice’s close ties with Crete, Constantinople and Greece, forming a further bond between the two European countries.
opening hours 9.00 – 19.00 (last admission at 18.00) Every day From 30 April to 29 September 2025
