El Greco's The Entombment of Christ is among the star lots of an old masters sale.

The painting, which measures less than a foot across, is valued at $6m-8m. It will auction at Christie's New York on April 14.

El Greco's work was much admired by modernists like Picasso

It's believed to date to the early 1570s, soon after El Greco arrived in Rome, although the inclusion of a portrait of the painter Titian (who died in 1576) has led some to suggest it could have been painted later, in tribute.

El Greco is often described as one of the most unique voices in renaissance-era art.

His weirdly elongated figures and fixation on the primacy of colour over form made him a big influence on modernist painters such as Cezanne and Picasso.

The record for his work is £9.2m ($13.2m), set for his St Dominic in Prayer at Sotheby's in 2013.

Gaetano Gandolfi's The Birth of Venus is offered with an estimate of $2.5m-3.5m.

The work has only recently been rediscovered, having first been shown in an exhibition in Cento, Italy in 2002.

Diana and Callisto, a work Gandolfi (1734-1802) created as a pendant (paired painting) to this one, holds his auction record.

It made $4.1m at Christie's in 2010.

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