Rudolf Preimesberger: El Greco – The missing Face and its Substitution

What El Greco's actual face really looked like remains a mystery. Although there have been numerous attempts to identify his visage, we have to agree with Nicos Hadjinicolaou's judgement that "we do not have at our disposal even one confirmed self-portrait". This lecture discusses this situation and looks at the case of the Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586–1588) in Santo Tomé in Toledo.

Rudolf Preimesberger received his doctorate in 1962 from the University of Vienna with a study on Genoese Baroque sculpture. He worked in research and teaching in Rome, Munich, Zurich and Berlin and was Professor of Art History at the Freie Universität of Berlin until 2001. In a series of contributions, he addressed problems of Italian art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the contest of the arts, and the modalities of the relationship between word and image. In 1999, together with Hannah Baader and Nicola Suthor, he edited the anthology Porträt. Geschichte der klassischen Bildgattungen in Quellentexten und Kommentaren 2.