The work is documented since the seventeenth century in the collections of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome and it is very likely that it was commissioned directly from the Cretan artist by Cardinal Alessandro: the painter had in fact arrived in Rome from Venice in 1570 and had been recommended to the highest prelate by the illuminator Giulio Clovio, at that time in the service of the Farnese family, and had immediately found a great admirer in the cultured librarian of the cardinal, the very erudite Fulvio Orsini. In the group of characters on the left there are undoubtedly some portraits, which have been identified by some scholars as effigies of members of the Farnese family, characters that are not found on the other two versions of this same subject that El Greco painted (one in Dresden, dating back to first stay in Venice, and the other in New York, considered to belong at the time of his arrival in Spain). The subject, among other things, is perfectly suited to a cardinalate commission: the parable of Christ who restores sight to the blind was, in an era of profound religious crisis and a real split in Christian Europe, now divided between Catholics and Protestants, a clear allegory of the role of the Church of Rome which, like Christ, alone can open our eyes to the true faith. The painter's palette and in general the whole composition of the painting are still strongly influenced by the Venetian examples of Tintoretto.