The clearest evidence that El Greco painted a genuine self-portrait comes not from a surviving canvas but from a letter: Giulio Clovio, the miniaturist who introduced El Greco to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in Rome, wrote an introductory letter describing a self-portrait by the young painter that astonished all the painters of Rome^[1]. No painting matching that description has been identified among surviving works, leaving El Greco's actual self-portrait, by contemporary testimony one of his most impressive early achievements, entirely lost.

Of the relatively small number of portraits associated with El Greco's years in Italy, only Clovio's own portrait carries an attribution that cannot reasonably be questioned; El Greco signed it prominently, in Greek, behind the sitter's figure^[1]. Other portraits from the same period rest on far shakier ground: a portrait of Cardinal Charles de Guise, now in Zurich, receives only tentative endorsement from scholars as El Greco's work, and a portrait of the Knight of Malta Vincenzo Anastagi, now in the Frick Collection in New York, may date from after El Greco's dismissal from the Farnese court in the 1570s, though even this attribution is not fully secure^[1].

A comparable case is the so-called Portrait of an Architect, probably dating to around 1575 or 1576, which shows an unidentified man in a three-quarter bust, dressed in a black robe and white collar, gesturing outward with one hand resting on a bound book, a pose and costume that conveys elevated social and intellectual status rather than a specific, documented occupation^[1]. Some scholars have proposed the architects Giacomo della Porta or Andrea Palladio as possible sitters, but nothing in the painting conclusively identifies either his name or his profession, a gap that may have been intentional on El Greco's part, favouring generic status over documentary specificity^[1].