El Greco case, Philip's dissatisfaction ended any hopes of royal patronage El Greco may have had. Lacking the favor of the king, El Greco was obliged to remain in Toledo, where he had been received in 1577 as a great painter. According to Hortensio Félix Paravicino, a 17th-century Spanish preacher and poet, "Crete gave him life and the painter's craft, Toledo a better homeland, where through Death he began to achieve eternal life." In 1585, he appears to have hired an assistant, Italian painter Francisco Preboste, and to have established a workshop capable of producing altar frames and statues as well as
Dormition of the Virgin (El Greco) that was discovered in 1983 in the church of the same name in Syros. Marina Lambraki-Plaka believes that such a connection exists. Robert Byron, according to whom the iconographic type of the "Dormition" was the compositional model for "The Burial of the Count of Orgaz", asserts that El Greco as a genuine Byzantine painter worked throughout his life with a repertoire of components and motifs at will, depending on the narrative and expressive requirements of the art. Dormition of the Virgin (El Greco) El Greco painted his Dormition of the Virgin near the end of his Cretan period, probably before