The Adoration of the Shepherds
1900 - 1930. Oil on canvas.Room 040
The renewed admiration for El Greco in the late 19th century increased the demand for his paintings, encouraged the production of fakes and enabling poor older copies to pass for autograph works. The Cretan artist’s custom of replicating his compositions with variants incited the introduction to the surrogates of fraudulent differences with respect to the original works. Such is the case of this work, whose X-radiograph moreover reveals a figure from a period later than El Greco.