Christ Healing the Blind by El Greco

Christ Healing the Blind, painted by El Greco around 1570, is one of the rare surviving works from the artist's brief, restless years in Italy. Before the stormy skies of Toledo and the impossibly long saints, a young painter from Crete was absorbing Tintoretto's drama and Titian's color in Venice, then angling for a place in Rome. This canvas holds the last trace of that journey before he left Italy for good.

Watch where the crowd is not. The miracle fills the foreground with a tight knot of figures and saturated robes: the cobalt of Christ's mantle, the ochre of the kneeling blind man. But look through the colonnade to the far background. Two tiny silhouetted figures move under the arches alone. They shift the scale of the painting. The healing is not a private tableau. It is a public event, set inside a functioning Roman city that goes about its business just beyond the frame.

El Greco made this painting hoping to prove himself in Italy. It did not work. He alienated Roman patrons, left, and his Italian-period works fell into obscurity for centuries. His fame was built later, on the altarpieces of Spain. This painting sat unrecognized, attributed to other hands, until scholarship in the twentieth century pulled it back into the light.

The name hiding in plain sight. Spend a moment with those two distant figures under the arches. The whole history of the artist's reputation was once just as small and easy to miss.