This first chapter studies El Greco's conceptualization of sacred prototypes within his paintings of Christ as Savior and several editions of the Veronica. I argue that he took these iconic prototypes and advanced their sacred implications according to his dual identity: as an artist who was both inescapably attached to his Byzantine heritage and simultaneously self-consciously infatuated with his ascendancy as a Spanish modernist. In the historically informed age of the Counter Reformation, the premium placed on referential efficacy provided a basis for innovative narrative structures on the part of artists. With his overwhelming creative force and imagination, El Greco acquitted himself more typically, rather than atypically. His interpretation of the traditional notions of icon and prototype reflects upon a retrospective mode of image production and fleshes out his painting's material quality. The effort to transmit to his contemporaries the likeness of the icon collapses linear time and reauthorizes the icon for the West, implicitly contributing to the call for authenticity which was the general tenor of Counter Reformation art production. This chapter contends that he restaged the icon as a work of art with reinforced devotional efficacy and aesthetic meaning to respond to new parameters of the artifact's materiality; concomitantly, he addressed the temporal claim to authenticity that was advised by Counter Reformation scholars and ecclesiastical patrons, who regarded the authority of icons as a historical document.

In Rome and Venice, where El Greco was apprenticed, and in Toledo, where he matured following his permanent relocation to Spain in 1577, motivation for the creation of devotional art departed from the principles of Byzantine art that informed El Greco in his homeland of Crete. Western religious painting seldom used indistinguishable likeness as the principal criterion for the depiction of sacred characters from Byzantium. Notable exceptions were the popular replications of Christ's acheiropoieta (the miraculously produced icons of Christ such as the Mandylion of Edessa and the Veil of Veronica) within novel compositions using various media and materials. In the West in particular, painters shifted from a Byzantine focus on verisimilitude to a focus on aesthetic attitudes for achieving illusionistic effects, the representation of beauty, and the relative merits of form and color. This chapter concentrates on El Greco's critical response to the Italian and Spanish painting traditions, the historical vocabularies against which he pitted a reconciliation between Byzantine message and Western style.