El Greco's icons have never made easy bedfellows with the rest of the artist's output, neither with his Italian paintings, nor with those made in Toledo. They are small in scale and cleave mostly to a conservative style that the artist himself appeared to repudiate once he moved to Italy, home of the so-called modern style. What to do with these awkward reminders that the artist was trained to paint in a way that was radically different from any of the contemporary art he would encounter either in Italy or in Spain? Some have argued in recent decades that El Greco's training as an icon painter in Crete had a continuing and long-lasting impact on his mature style, but without saying why this may have happened. Or, the Byzantine foundation has been thought of mostly in rather narrow terms, focusing on the specifically Cretan traditions in which he was schooled, or on isolated iconographic and stylistic motifs. Eager to distance the artist from Greek nationalist rhetoric that accompanied his revival in the nineteenth century, some scholars have no truck whatsoever with the notion that El Greco should have maintained an allegiance to a manner he seemed so comprehensively to have shrugged off during the near decade he spent in Italy. I will argue here that El Greco's mature work maintained a strong connection with his Byzantine roots.