Vatican Conservators Uncover an Authentic El Greco Hidden Beneath a Forgery at Castel Gandolfo
A modest oil painting that spent decades hanging in the Pope’s residence has been revealed as an authentic work by El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos, Greek, 1541–1614) after conservators discovered it had been concealed beneath a later forgery. The panel, titled “The Redeemer” (c. 1590–95), is now on view in a focused two-work presentation, “El Greco in the Mirror: Two Paintings in Dialogue,” at the Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo, roughly 17 miles southeast of Vatican City.
The painting entered the Vatican’s collection in 1967, when José María Sánchez de Muniaín Gil — a Spanish official, professor of aesthetics, and author — donated it to Pope Paul VI. For years it was displayed in the Hall of Ambassadors within the papal apartment on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace, largely unexamined.
That changed during a routine condition check, when conservators noted issues that prompted a full restoration and technical study. “Since its arrival in the Vatican, the work had never undergone restoration or scientific studies,” restorer Alessandra Zarelli said in a statement. As treatment progressed, Zarelli and fellow conservator Paolo Violini recognized that the original image of Christ had been covered by an unknown hand: a forger had painted over El Greco’s figure with a substitute version.
Once the overpainting was removed, El Greco’s own paint layers reemerged. In press materials, Zarelli and the project’s director, Fabio Morresi, said that comparative analysis with the artist’s known works supported the conclusion that the Vatican panel is “entirely authentic.”
Curator Fabrizio Biferali, who organized the exhibition, has positioned the rediscovered “Redeemer” within a small cluster of late-16th-century treatments of the same subject. He noted that the Vatican picture should be considered alongside three other versions by El Greco held by Národní Galerie in Prague, the McNay Art Institute in San Antonio, Texas, and the Museo San Telmo in San Sebastián, Spain.
Technical imaging added another layer of intrigue. High-resolution examination revealed two abandoned compositions beneath the surface: one that echoes “Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Lawrence” (c. 1580), and another that evokes “Saint Dominic in Adoration of the Crucifix” (c. 1590). Together, the pentimenti and underlying images offer a rare glimpse into El Greco’s studio habits — how he revised, repurposed, and rethought pictorial ideas on a single support.
Physical evidence suggests the panel may also have been made for mobility and devotion rather than monumental display. Four small holes along the top and bottom edges indicate it could have functioned as “a sort of portable altarpiece,” Biferali said. Based on the findings, the Vatican team dates the work to between 1590 and 1595, more than a decade after El Greco left Italy for Spain.
At Castel Gandolfo, “The Redeemer” is shown in dialogue with a tempera painting of St. Francis of Assisi made around 20 years earlier, shortly after El Greco’s arrival in Rome. The pairing is intended to trace the artist’s stylistic evolution across two distinct moments — from an early, icon-informed approach to the heightened, searching manner of his later religious images — while also honoring Pope Leo XIV and Saint Francis on the 800th anniversary of the saint’s death.
For visitors, the exhibition’s quiet drama lies not only in the rediscovery itself, but in what it implies about the afterlives of paintings: how masterpieces can be misread, altered, and effectively erased, only to return through the slow, exacting work of conservation and close looking.
