For roughly 150 years it was venerated as a sacred image by the faithful of Syros without anyone knowing who had made it.
In 1983, an archaeologist named Georgios Mastoropoulos examined it closely and found, at the base of the central candelabrum in the composition, a signature. It read: Doménicos Theotokópoulos.
The painter we know as El Greco.
How it got there
The painting was probably brought to Syros by Psarian refugees — Greeks fleeing the destruction of the island of Psara during the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s.
Some accounts associate it with a monastery on Psara dedicated to the Dormition of the Virgin.
The complete journey of the painting, from Crete to Psara to Syros, is not fully documented — but its presence in the Syros church and its authorship are now beyond scholarly dispute.
After the signature was found, the painting was transferred to the Byzantine Museum in Athens for conservation and then returned to the church, where it has remained ever since.
The painting itself
The Dormition of the Virgin was painted around 1565-1566, at the end of El Greco’s Cretan period — just before he left for Venice, probably around 1567.
It is tempera and gold on panel, executed in the tradition of the Cretan school of icon painting, in which El Greco received his initial training.
The composition follows the established Byzantine iconographic pattern closely — Mary lying on her bier, the apostles gathered in grief, Christ at the center holding her soul as a swaddled child — but already shows something that pure Byzantine painting would not contain: a loosening of the traditional austerity, a trace of Italian Renaissance influence absorbed from engravings circulating in Venetian-controlled Crete.
The mixture is subtle and very precisely calibrated. It is the work of a young painter at the threshold of a transformation he has not yet fully undergone.
What is the Dormition of the Virgin?
Why it matters
The discovery of El Greco’s signature on the Syros painting was one of the most consequential moments in 20th-century art history scholarship. Before 1983, El Greco’s Cretan period was poorly documented and largely theoretical.
The Syros painting changed that. It led directly to the authentication of three other early works — the Modena Triptych, St. Luke Painting the Virgin and Child, and The Adoration of the Magi — and reshaped the entire scholarly understanding of his formation.
What the painting demonstrates is that the artist who would later produce the dramatic, elongated figures and visionary compositions of Toledo had begun his career fully embedded in the Byzantine and Cretan icon-painting tradition, while already absorbing the influence of the Italian Renaissance.
That dual formation — Byzantine depth, Renaissance dynamism — is the key to everything El Greco would later become.
Scholars have also noted a direct compositional connection between the Syros Dormition and El Greco's masterpiece in Toledo, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586). The structure of the two paintings — the body laid out below, a heavenly scene above, figures gathered in witness — follows the same logic.
The Byzantine iconography of the Dormition of the Theotokos that the young painter absorbed in Crete became, two decades later and half a continent away, the compositional skeleton of the painting considered his greatest achievement.
Still in use
The Dormition of the Virgin has not been moved to a museum. It remains in the Church of the Dormition of the Virgin in Hermoupolis, Syros, where it retains its function as an object of veneration. Generations of worshipers looked at it without knowing who had painted it.
They continued to look at it after they found out. The painting is, in that sense, what El Greco made it to be: an icon — an object of encounter, not merely of contemplation — that happens also to be a document of one of the most extraordinary artistic journeys in the history of Western art.