WARSAW It was discovered more than 40 years ago in a rural Polish parish but today the El Greco masterpiece, the Ecstasy of St Francis, still awaits the recognition worthy of a Spanish renaissance master.

“This painting is still ignored by European and American art historians,” says Izabella Galicka, 78, who discovered the painting.

“An El Greco in Poland? Found in a priest`s quarters in the countryside? It just seems too improbable,” said Galicka, summing up the views she believes many hold.

“It`s a great pity as this valuable canvas deserves recognition,” added Galicka, now retired from her position at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN).

No world-class El Greco specialist has ever visited the tiny provincial museum of the Siedlce diocese in eastern Poland where the painting has been on display for the last four years.

El Greco and his students painted more than a hundred different scenes of St Francis. The canvas discovered in Poland dated between 1575 and 1580 shows the saint with the stigmata.

Scouring the Polish countryside for works of art in 1964, Galicka and colleague Hanna Sygietynska found the canvas in the tiny rural parish of Kosow Lacki.

“If a door had not been left ajar that day we would never have noticed it,” she recalled.

“Sooty and darkened by time, the painting was hanging on a wall over a sofa in a priest`s small chamber.

“Good Lord! I exclaimed when I saw it. Straight away I knew it was a masterpiece. The stroke of the brush, the gaze of the subject, the colours, all like El Greco.”

Initially the two women identified the canvas measuring 104 x 75 centimetres as belonging to the El Greco school. But following a comparative study, they boldly theorised the painting was indeed the work of the master himself.

Their thesis was confirmed in 1974. Conservation work by the renowned Polish-born art restorer Bohdan Marconi revealed the authentic signature of Domenikos Theotokopoulos, the real name of El Greco, an ethnic Greek born in Crete.

It was covered by a layer of paint on which an art dealer trying to pass the painting off as a work of the Dutch master Van Dyck had clumsily forged the signature “Van Dijck,” sometimes used by the artist himself, said Galicka.—AFP