Greek painter Domenikos Theotokopuli, called El Greco,…
1570 CE
Greek painter Domenikos Theotokopuli, called El Greco, had probably first apprenticed as a painter of religious pictures in the Greco-Byzantine tradition, before immigrating to Venice, the city of which his native Crete is a dependency.
He apparently arrives in 1570, at the age of twenty-nine, in Rome, where he is introduced as a pupil of the Venetian master Titian.
El Greco probably paints The Dormition of the Virgin, which combines post-Byzantine and Italian mannerist stylistic and iconographic elements, near the end of the his Cretan period.
The Conservatorio di Musica Santa Cecilia (today the world’s oldest music academy) is established in Rome in 1570.
Pope Pius V, who promotes further centralization of ecclesiastical administration in Rome and organizes the league of Christian prince against the Ottoman Turks, is ultimately unsuccessful at diplomacy.
The famously intransigent pontiff’s excommunication of Queen Elizabeth of England in 1570 proves to be a blunder of dramatic proportions.
Images
The Dormition of the Virgin (before 1567, tempera and gold on panel, 61,4 × 45 cm, Holy Cathedral of the Dormition of the Virgin, Hermoupolis, Syros) was probably created near the end of the artist's Cretan period. The painting combines post-Byzantine and Italian mannerist stylistic and iconographic elements.