El Greco

El Greco
Portrait of an Old Gentleman, considered a self-portrait (1595–1600), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Born	Doménikos Theotokópoulos October 1, 1541 Candia, present-day Heraklion (Crete)
Died	April 7, 1614 (aged 72) Toledo
Resting place	Convent of Santo Domingo el Antiguo
Occupation	Painter
Signature

Doménikos Theotokópoulos (Greek: Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος; in Italian and Spanish as Dominico Greco; Candia, October 1, 1541 – Toledo, April 7, 1614), known as El Greco ("the Greek"), was a Cretan painter of the late Renaissance who developed a highly personal style in his mature works.

Until the age of 26 he lived in Crete, where he was a highly regarded master of icons in the post-Byzantine style prevailing on the island. He then lived for ten years in Italy, where he came into contact with Renaissance painters, first in Venice, fully adopting the style of Titian and Tintoretto, and then in Rome, studying the Mannerism of Michelangelo. In 1577 he settled in Toledo (Spain), where he lived and worked for the rest of his life.

His artistic training was complex, acquired in three very different cultural centers: his first, Byzantine training was responsible for important aspects of his style that flourished in his maturity; the second he obtained in Venice from the painters of the High Renaissance, especially Titian, learning oil painting and its range of colors—he always considered himself part of the Venetian school; finally, his stay in Rome allowed him to become acquainted with the work of Michelangelo and with Mannerism, which became his vital style, interpreted in an independent way.

His work consists of large canvases for church altarpieces, numerous devotional paintings for religious institutions, in which his workshop often took part, and a group of portraits considered to be of the highest level. In his first Spanish masterpieces the influence of his Italian masters can be seen. However, he soon evolved toward a personal style characterized by his extraordinarily elongated Mannerist figures with their own illumination—thin, ghostly, highly expressive—in undefined settings and with a range of colors that sought contrasts. This style became identified with the spirit of the Counter-Reformation and grew more extreme in his last years.

He is currently considered one of the greatest artists of Western civilization. This high regard is recent and took shape over the course of the 20th century, changing the assessment of his painting formed in the two and a half centuries following his death, during which he came to be considered an eccentric and marginal painter in the history of art.

Biography

Crete

Saint Luke Painting the Virgin and Child (before 1567). Tempera and gold on panel. El Greco's Cretan period.

Doménikos Theotokópoulos was born on October 1, 1541, in Candia (present-day Heraklion) on the island of Crete, which was then a possession of the Republic of Venice. His father, Geórgios Theotokópoulos, was a merchant and tax collector, and his elder brother, Manoússos Theotokópoulos, was also a merchant.

Doménikos studied painting on his native island, becoming a painter of icons in the post-Byzantine style prevailing in Crete at that time. At the age of twenty-two he was described in a document as "master Domenigo," which means that he was already officially practicing the profession of painter. In June 1566 he signed as a witness to a contract under the name Master Ménegos Theotokópoulos, painter (μαΐστρος Μένεγος Θεοτοκόπουλος σγουράφος). Ménegos was the Venetian dialect form of Doménicos.

The post-Byzantine style was a continuation of the traditional, Orthodox and Greek icon painting dating from the Middle Ages. These were devotional pictures that followed fixed rules. Their figures were copied from very well-established artificial models, which were in no way natural nor did they delve into psychological analysis, with gold as the background of the pictures. These icons were not influenced by the new naturalism of the Renaissance.

At the age of twenty-six he was still living in Candia, and his works must have been highly esteemed. In December 1566, El Greco asked the Venetian authorities for permission to sell a "panel of the Passion of Christ executed on a gold ground" at an auction. This Byzantine icon by the young Doménikos was sold for the price of 70 gold ducats, the same value as a work by Titian or Tintoretto of the same period.

Among the works of this period is the Death of the Virgin (Dormitio Virginis), preserved in the Church of the Dormition in Syros. Two other icons from this stage have also been identified, signed only "Domenikos": Saint Luke Painting the Virgin and The Adoration of the Magi, both in the Benaki Museum in Athens. In these works one can see the artist's incipient interest in introducing the formal motifs of Western art, all of it known through the Italian prints and paintings that reached Crete. The Modena Triptych in the Galleria Estense in Modena, situated between the Cretan and Venetian periods, represents the artist's gradual abandonment of the codes of Eastern art and his progressive mastery of the resources of Western art.

Some historians accept that his religion was Orthodox, although other scholars believe that he belonged to the Cretan Catholic minority or that he converted to Catholicism before leaving the island.

Venice

The Healing of the Blind Man (1567), Dresden. A painting from the Venetian period executed in the tempera technique (the method used in Crete). El Greco quickly assimilated the concepts of Venetian painting.

Adoration of the Magi, 1568. Museo Soumaya. Fundación Carlos Slim, Mexico City, Mexico.

He must have moved to Venice around 1567. As a Venetian citizen, it was natural for the young artist to continue his training in that city. Venice, at that time, was the greatest artistic center in Italy. There the supreme genius of Titian was working intensely, living out his last years amid universal recognition. Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese and Jacopo Bassano were also working in the city, and it seems that El Greco studied the work of all of them.

Brilliant and colorful Venetian painting must have made a strong impact on the young painter, trained until then in the artisanal and routine technique of Crete. El Greco did not do as other Cretan artists who had moved to Venice, the madoneri, who painted in the Byzantine style with Italian elements. From the outset he adopted and painted in the new pictorial language learned in Venice, becoming a Venetian painter. He may have learned in Titian's workshop the secrets of Venetian painting, so different from Byzantine painting: the architectural backgrounds that give depth to compositions, drawing, naturalistic color, and a way of lighting that comes from specific sources.

In this city he learned the basic principles of his pictorial art that remained present throughout his artistic career: painting without preliminary drawing, fixing the composition on the canvas with concise brushstrokes in black pigment, and making color one of the most important resources of his artistic style. In this period, El Greco used prints to work out his compositions.

Among the best-known works of his Venetian period is the Healing of the Man Born Blind (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), in which the influence of Titian can be perceived in the treatment of color and that of Tintoretto in the composition of figures and the use of space.

Rome

Giulio Clovio introduced El Greco into the circle of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in Rome. (Detail of his portrait painted by El Greco around 1571).

The painter then set out for Rome. On his way he must have stopped in Parma to see the work of Correggio, since his laudatory comments about this painter (he called him "a unique figure in painting") show direct knowledge of his art.

His arrival in Rome is documented in a letter of introduction from the miniaturist Giulio Clovio to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, dated November 16, 1570, in which he asked him to take the painter into his palace for a short time until he found other lodging. The letter began thus: "There has arrived in Rome a young man from Candia, a disciple of Titian, who in my judgment ranks among the excellent in painting." Historians seem to accept that the term "disciple of Titian" does not mean that he was in his workshop but that he was an admirer of his painting.

Through the cardinal's librarian, the scholar Fulvio Orsini, he came into contact with the city's intellectual elite. Orsini came to own seven paintings by the artist (View of Mount Sinai and a portrait of Clovio are among them).

El Greco was expelled from the Palazzo Farnese by the cardinal's majordomo. The only known information about this incident is a letter from El Greco sent to Alessandro Farnese on July 6, 1572, denouncing the falsehood of the accusations made against him. In that letter he said: "in no way did I deserve, through no fault of mine, to be then expelled and cast out in this manner." On September 18 of that same year, he paid his dues to the Academy of Saint Luke as a painter of miniatures. At the end of that year, El Greco opened his own workshop and hired the painters Lattanzio Bonastri de Lucignano and Francisco Preboste as assistants. The latter worked with him until the last years of his life.

When El Greco lived in Rome, Michelangelo and Raphael had died, but their enormous influence was still in force. The legacy of these great masters dominated the artistic scene of Rome. The Roman painters of the 1550s had established a style called full Mannerism or maniera based on the works of Raphael and Michelangelo, in which the figures became increasingly exaggerated and complicated until they became artificial, seeking a precious virtuosity. On the other hand, the reforms of Catholic doctrine and practice initiated at the Council of Trent were beginning to shape religious art.

In these stylistically different works, one can see how he adopted the language of the Venetian Renaissance. The first, from the Modena Triptych (Galleria Estense), is a hesitant work from the beginning of his Venetian stay. The second (Thyssen-Bornemisza), (1573–1576), repeats the iconography and composition, recalls Veronese in the figures and Titian in the crisp pavement, in the balanced composition and in the serenity of the scene. The handling of color is already that of a master.

Giulio Mancini wrote years later, around 1621, in his Considerations, among many other biographies, that of El Greco, the first ever written about him. Mancini wrote that "the painter was commonly called Il Greco (The Greek), that he had worked with Titian in Venice and that when he arrived in Rome his works were greatly admired and some were mistaken for those painted by the Venetian master. He also related that it was being considered to cover some nude figures of Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel which Pope Pius V considered indecent, and he (El Greco) burst out saying that if the whole work were torn down, he could do it with propriety and decency and no worse in good pictorial execution... As all the painters and lovers of painting were indignant, he had to leave for Spain..." The scholar de Salas, referring to this comment by El Greco, highlights the enormous display of pride involved in considering himself on the same level as Michelangelo, who at that time was the most exalted artist in art. To understand this statement, it should be noted that there were two schools in Italy with very different criteria: that of the followers of Michelangelo advocated the primacy of drawing in a painting, while the Venetian school of Titian upheld the superiority of color. The latter was defended by El Greco.

This contrary opinion about Michelangelo is misleading, since El Greco's aesthetics were deeply influenced by Michelangelesque artistic thought, dominated by one cardinal aspect: the primacy of imagination over imitation in artistic creation. El Greco's writings show that he fully shared the belief in an artificial art and the Mannerist criteria of beauty.

Today, his Italian nickname Il Greco has been transformed and he is universally known as El Greco, the Italian article Il being replaced by the Spanish el. However, he always signed his paintings in Greek, usually with his full name Domenikos Theotokopoulos.

The Italian period is considered a time of study and preparation, since his genius did not emerge until his first works in Toledo in 1577. In Italy he received no commission of importance, since he was a foreigner, and Rome was dominated by painters such as Federico Zuccaro, Scipione Pulzone and Girolamo Siciolante, of lesser artistic quality but better known and better placed. In Venice it was much more difficult, because the three greats of Venetian painting, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, were at their peak.

Among the main works of his Roman period are: the Purification of the Temple; several portraits—such as the Portrait of Giulio Clovio (1570–1575, Naples) or that of the governor of Malta Vincentio Anastagi (c. 1575, New York, Frick Collection); he also executed a series of works deeply marked by his Venetian apprenticeship, such as Boy Blowing on an Ember (c. 1570, Naples, Capodimonte Museum) and the Annunciation (c. 1575, Madrid, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum).

It is not known how much longer he remained in Rome. Some scholars argue for a second stay in Venice (c. 1575–1576) before he left for Spain.

In Spain

Arrival in Toledo and first masterpieces

The Trinity (1577–79), which was part of The High Altarpiece of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, his first major commission in Toledo. The influence of Michelangelo is evident.

Adoration of the Name of Jesus, Allegory of the Holy League or The Dream of Philip II, by El Greco.

At that time the Monastery of El Escorial, near Madrid, was being completed, and Philip II had invited the artistic world of Italy to come and decorate it. Through Clovio and Orsini, El Greco met Benito Arias Montano, a Spanish humanist and delegate of Philip II, the cleric Pedro Chacón, and Luis de Castilla, natural son of Diego de Castilla, Dean of the Cathedral of Toledo. El Greco's friendship with Castilla would secure him his first important commissions in Toledo.

In 1576 the artist left Rome and, after passing through Madrid, arrived in Toledo in the spring or perhaps in July of 1577. It was in this city that he produced his mature works. Toledo, besides being the religious capital of Spain, was at that time also one of the largest cities in Europe. In 1571 the city's population was about 62,000 inhabitants.

The first important commissions in Toledo came to him immediately: the high altarpiece and two side altarpieces for the church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo. To these altarpieces belong The Assumption of the Virgin (Art Institute of Chicago) and The Trinity (Museo del Prado). At the same time he was also commissioned to paint The Disrobing of Christ (El Expolio) for the sacristy of the cathedral.

In the Assumption, based on the composition of the Assumption by Titian (church of Santa Maria dei Frari, Venice), the painter's personal style appears, but the approach is fully Italian. There are also references to Michelangelo's sculptural style in The Trinity, with Italian Renaissance overtones and a marked Mannerist style. The figures are elongated and dynamic, arranged in a zigzag. The anatomical and human treatment of figures of a divine character, such as Christ or the angels, is surprising. The colors are acid, incandescent and soft and, together with a play of contrasting lights, give the work a mystical and dynamic air. The turn toward a personal style, distinguishing himself from his masters, begins to emerge in his work, with the use of less conventional colors, more unorthodox groupings of figures and unique anatomical proportions.

The Martyrdom of Saint Maurice (1580–82). Commissioned by Philip II for the Monastery of El Escorial, the painting did not please the Monarch.

These works would establish the painter's reputation in Toledo and gave him great prestige. From the beginning he had the confidence of Diego de Castilla, as well as of clerics and intellectuals of Toledo who recognized his worth. On the other hand, his business relations with his clients were complicated from the outset because of the lawsuit over the value of The Disrobing of Christ, since the Cathedral Chapter valued it at much less than the painter claimed.

El Greco did not plan to settle in Toledo, since his aim was to win the favor of Philip II and make a career at court. In fact, he obtained two important commissions from the Monarch: Adoration of the Name of Jesus (also known as the Allegory of the Holy League or Dream of Philip II) and The Martyrdom of Saint Maurice and the Theban Legion (1578–1582), both still today in the Monastery of El Escorial. In the Allegory he showed his ability to combine complex political iconographies with medieval Orthodox motifs. Neither of these two works pleased the King, so he gave him no further commissions. As Fray José de Sigüenza, a witness to the events, wrote, "the painting of Saint Maurice and his soldiers... did not satisfy His Majesty."

Maturity

The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586–1588, Santo Tomé, Toledo), his best-known work. It depicts a local legend according to which the Count was buried by Saint Stephen and Saint Augustine. In the lower, realistic part, he recreated a burial with the pomp of the 16th century; in the upper, idealized part, he represented Glory and the arrival of the Count's soul.

Lacking royal favor, El Greco decided to remain in Toledo, where he had been received in 1577 as a great painter.

In 1578 his only son, Jorge Manuel, was born. The mother was Jerónima de las Cuevas, whom he never married and who is believed to have been portrayed in the painting The Lady in a Fur Wrap.

On September 10, 1585, he rented three rooms in a palace of the Marquis of Villena, which was subdivided into apartments. He lived there, except for the period between 1590 and 1604, for the rest of his life.

In 1585 the presence of his assistant from the Roman period, the Italian painter Francisco Preboste, is documented, and he had established a workshop capable of producing complete altarpieces, that is, paintings, polychrome sculpture and architectural frames of gilded wood.

On March 12, 1586, he obtained the commission for The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, today his best-known work. The painting, made for the Church of Santo Tomé in Toledo, is still in its original place. It shows the funeral of a Toledan nobleman in 1323 who, according to a local legend, was buried by Saints Stephen and Augustine. The painter anachronistically depicted local figures of his own time in the funeral procession, including his son. In the upper part, the soul of the deceased ascends to heaven, densely populated with angels and saints. The Burial of the Count of Orgaz already shows his characteristic longitudinal elongation of the figures, as well as the horror vacui (fear of empty space), features that would become increasingly pronounced as El Greco grew older. These traits came from Mannerism, and persisted in El Greco's work even though they had been abandoned by international painting some years earlier.

The payment for this painting also gave rise to another lawsuit: the price at which it was appraised, 1,200 ducats, seemed excessive to the parish priest of Santo Tomé, who requested a second appraisal, which was set at 1,600 ducats. The parish priest then asked that this second appraisal not be taken into account, and El Greco agreed to receive only 1,200 ducats. Disputes over the price of his important works were a constant feature of El Greco's professional life and have given rise to numerous theories to explain it.

Saint Jerome (c. 1600). Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando.

The period of his life between 1588 and 1595 is poorly documented. From 1580 onward he painted religious subjects, among which his canvases of saints stand out: Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Francis (c. 1590–1595, Madrid, private collection), The Tears of Saint Peter, The Holy Family (1595, Toledo, Hospital Tavera), Saint Andrew and Saint Francis (1595, Madrid, Museo del Prado) and Saint Jerome (early 17th century, Madrid, private collection). Another Saint Jerome of great quality, dated 1600, is preserved in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, comparable only with the one preserved in the National Gallery of Scotland. He also painted portraits such as The Nobleman with His Hand on His Chest (1585, Madrid, Museo del Prado).

Last period

The Crucifixion, from the Colegio de María de Aragón (1597–1600). This customary iconography was conceived with his elongated figures in a nocturnal and claustrophobic atmosphere. Meier-Graefe highlighted the compositional ellipse formed by the heads, and Gudiol the intense modeling of Christ in a kind of essential solitude.

From 1596 there was a great increase in commissions, which continued until his death. The reasons are several: the reputation the artist had achieved in the preceding years, the prestige and friendship of a group of local patrons who regularly provided him with important commissions and also, from 1600, the participation in the workshop of his son Jorge Manuel, who obtained commissions in the towns near Toledo. The last decade of the 16th century was a crucial period in his art, for it was then that his late style developed.

Although the patrons he had initially sought, King Philip II and the cathedral, who would have provided him with a secure and lucrative position, had failed him, in the end he found his patrons in a group of churchmen whose aim was to propagate the doctrine of the Counter-Reformation, since El Greco's career coincided with the moment of Catholic reaffirmation against Protestantism fostered by the Council of Trent, the official center of Spanish Catholicism being the Archdiocese of Toledo. Thus, El Greco illustrated the ideas of the Counter-Reformation, as can be seen in his repertoire of subjects: depictions of saints, as the Church upheld them as intercessors for mankind before Christ; penitents who emphasized the value of confession, which the Protestants rejected; the glorification of the Virgin Mary, likewise called into question by the Protestants; for the same reason, paintings of the Holy Family were emphasized. El Greco was an artist who served the ideals of the Counter-Reformation through the design of altarpieces that displayed and highlighted the main Catholic devotions.

The painter's fame attracted many clients who requested replicas of his best-known works. These copies, produced in large quantities by his workshop, still create confusion today in his catalogue of authentic works.

In 1596 he signed the first important commission of this period, the altarpiece for the church of an Augustinian seminary in Madrid, the Colegio de doña María de Aragón, paid for with funds that this lady specified in her will. In 1597 he committed himself to another important work, three altarpieces for a private chapel in Toledo dedicated to Saint Joseph. To these altarpieces belong the paintings Saint Joseph with the Christ Child, Saint Martin and the Beggar and The Virgin and Child with Saints Agnes and Martina. His figures are increasingly elongated and twisted, his paintings narrower and taller; his highly personal interpretation of Mannerism reaches its culmination.

Immaculate Conception, Oballe Chapel in Toledo (1608–13).

Through his son, in 1603 he obtained a new contract to execute the altarpiece of the Hospital de la Caridad in Illescas. For unknown reasons he agreed that the final appraisal would be made by appraisers appointed by the Hospital. They set a greatly reduced price of 2,410 ducats, which provoked a long lawsuit that reached the Royal Chancery of Valladolid and the Papal Nuncio in Madrid. The dispute ended in 1607 and, although intermediate appraisals of around 4,000 ducats were made, in the end an amount similar to the one initially set was paid. The Illescas setback seriously affected El Greco's finances, and he had to resort to a loan of 2,000 ducats from his friend Gregorio de Angulo.

At the end of 1607, El Greco offered to finish the chapel of Isabel de Oballe, which had been left unfinished due to the death of the painter Alessandro Semini. The artist, by then 66 years old, undertook at no additional cost to correct the proportions of the altarpiece and to replace a Visitation. The Immaculate Conception for this chapel is one of his great late works; the elongations and contortions had never before been so exaggerated or so violent, and the elongated shape of the painting matches the figures rising toward heaven, far from natural forms.

His last important altarpieces included a high altarpiece and two side altarpieces for the chapel of the Hospital Tavera, contracted on November 16, 1608, with a five-year deadline for completion. The Fifth Seal of the Apocalypse, a canvas for one of the side altarpieces, shows El Greco's genius in his last years.

In August 1612, El Greco and his son agreed with the nuns of Santo Domingo el Antiguo to have a chapel for the family burial. For it, the artist painted The Adoration of the Shepherds. It is a masterpiece in all its details: the two shepherds on the right are very elongated, and the figures express amazement and adoration in a moving way. The light stands out, giving each figure importance in the composition. The nocturnal colors are brilliant, with strong contrasts between orange-red, yellow, green, blue and pink.

He died on April 7, 1614, at the age of seventy-three, and was buried in Santo Domingo el Antiguo. A few days later, Jorge Manuel made a first inventory of his father's few possessions, including the finished works and those in progress that were in the workshop. Later, on the occasion of his second marriage in 1621, Jorge Manuel made a second inventory which included works not recorded in the first. The family tomb had to be moved before 1619 to San Torcuato, due to a dispute with the nuns of Santo Domingo, and was destroyed when the church was demolished in the 19th century.

His life, full of pride and independence, always tended toward the consolidation of his particular and strange style, avoiding imitations. He collected valuable volumes, which formed a marvelous library. A contemporary described him as a "man of eccentric habits and ideas, tremendous determination, extraordinary reticence and extreme devotion." For these or other characteristics, he was a respected voice and a celebrated man, becoming an unquestionably Spanish artist. Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino, a preacher and poet of the Spanish 17th century, wrote of him in a well-known sonnet: "Crete gave him life, and his brushes / Toledo a better homeland, where he begins / to attain eternities through death."

Artistic analysis

Style and pictorial technique

The Purification of the Temple

Three versions painted in Venice (1570), Rome (1571–1576) and Toledo (1610–1614) in which his evolution can be observed. The first incorporates warm Venetian coloring and Tintoretto's women. In the second, the groups of figures have acquired hierarchy and the more Roman architecture is better integrated thanks to the light. In the last, the figures are typically El Greco's, the painting is narrower and divided into a lower zone with figures and an upper one of ethereal architecture.

El Greco's training enabled him to achieve a combination of Mannerist design and Venetian color. In Italy, however, artists were divided: the Roman and Florentine Mannerists defended drawing as paramount in painting and extolled Michelangelo, considering color inferior, and denigrated Titian; the Venetians, on the other hand, pointed to Titian as the greatest and attacked Michelangelo for his imperfect mastery of color. El Greco, as an artist trained in both schools, stood in the middle, recognizing Titian as the artist of color and Michelangelo as the master of design. Even so, he did not hesitate to harshly discredit Michelangelo for his treatment of color. But scholars agree that this was a misleading criticism, since El Greco's aesthetics shared Michelangelo's ideals of the primacy of imagination over imitation in artistic creation. His fragmentary writings in the margins of various books indicate his adherence to Mannerist theories, and make it possible to understand that his painting was not the fruit of spiritual visions or emotional reactions, but that he sought to create an artificial and anti-naturalistic art.

Adoration of the Shepherds (1612–1614), one of his last compositions, intended for his funerary chapel. His final style is dramatic and anti-naturalistic, intensifying the artificial and unreal elements: very long bodies with small heads illuminated with strong, harsh lights.

But his Venetian apprenticeship also had important consequences for his conception of art. The Venetian artists had developed a way of painting clearly different from that of the Roman Mannerists: richness and variety of color, the preponderance of naturalism over drawing, and the manipulation of pigment as an expressive resource. The Venetians, in contrast to the polished finish of the Romans, modeled figures and objects with a sketch-like technique that achieved great depth and brilliance in the colors. El Greco's brushwork was also strongly influenced by the Venetian style, as Pacheco noted when he visited him in 1611: he retouched his paintings again and again until achieving an apparently spontaneous, sketch-like finish, which for him signified virtuosity. His paintings display a multitude of brushstrokes not blended on the surface, which observers of the time, such as Pacheco, called cruel blotches. But he did not only use the Venetian palette and its rich, saturated tones; he also used the strident and arbitrary colors favored by the painters of the maniera, shrill yellow-greens, orange-reds and bluish grays. He expressed the admiration he felt for Venetian techniques as follows in one of his writings: "The imitation of colors I hold to be the greatest difficulty..." It has always been recognized that El Greco overcame this difficulty.

In the thirty-seven years that El Greco lived in Toledo, his style was profoundly transformed. He went from an Italianate style in 1577 to evolving by 1600 into a very dramatic, personal and original one, systematically intensifying the artificial and unreal elements: small heads resting on ever longer bodies; increasingly strong and harsh light, bleaching the colors of the garments; and a shallow space overcrowded with figures, giving the sensation of a flat surface. In his last fifteen years, El Greco took the abstraction of his style to unsuspected limits. His last works have an extraordinary intensity, to the point that some scholars looked for religious reasons, assigning him the role of visionary and mystic. He managed to imbue his works with a strong spiritual impact, achieving the aim of religious painting: to inspire emotion and also reflection. His dramatic and, at times, theatrical presentation of subjects and figures were vivid reminders of the glories of the Lord, of the Virgin and of His saints.

El Greco's art was a synthesis between Venice and Rome, between color and drawing, between naturalism and abstraction. He achieved a style of his own that implanted Venetian techniques in Mannerist style and thought. In his notes to Vitruvius he left a definition of his idea of painting:

Painting […] is the moderator of everything that is seen, and if I could express in words what the painter's seeing is, sight would seem a strange thing for how much it concerns many faculties. But painting, being so universal, becomes speculative.

The question of to what extent, in his profound Toledan transformation, El Greco drew on his earlier experience as a painter of Byzantine icons has been debated since the beginning of the 20th century. Some art historians have asserted that El Greco's transformation was firmly rooted in the Byzantine tradition and that his most individual characteristics derive directly from the art of his ancestors, while others have argued that Byzantine art cannot be related to El Greco's late work. Álvarez Lopera points out that there is a certain consensus among specialists that in his mature work he occasionally used compositional and iconographic schemes deriving from Byzantine painting.

Laocoön (1614): a free interpretation, with Toledo in the background, of the Greek sculptural group Laocoön and His Sons. In his evolution he progressively elongated the figures, making them more sinuous and seeking twisted and complex poses.

For Brown, the role played by the painter's Toledan patrons is of great importance: learned men who knew how to admire his work and who were capable of following and financing him in his incursion into unexplored artistic spheres. Brown recalls that he painted his last, highly unconventional pictures to adorn religious institutions governed by these men. Finally, he points out that these men's adherence to the ideals of the Counter-Reformation allowed El Greco to develop an enormously complex style of thought that served to represent religious subjects with enormous clarity.

The 17th-century historian Giulio Mancini expressed El Greco's belonging to the two schools, Mannerist and Venetian. He placed El Greco among the artists in Rome who had initiated an "orthodox revision" of Michelangelo's teachings, but he also pointed out the differences, stating that as a disciple of Titian he was sought after for his "resolute and fresh" style, as opposed to the static manner then prevailing in Rome.

His treatment of figures is Mannerist: in his evolution he not only elongated the figures but made them more sinuous, seeking twisted and complex poses—the figura serpentinata. This was what Mannerist painters called the "fury" of the figure, and they considered the undulating form of a flame to be the most appropriate for representing beauty. He himself considered elongated proportions more beautiful than life-size ones, as can be inferred from his own writings.

Another characteristic of his art is the absence of still life. His treatment of pictorial space avoids the illusion of depth and landscape; he usually set his subjects in undefined spaces that appear isolated by a curtain of clouds. His large figures are concentrated in a reduced space close to the picture plane, often crowded together and overlapping.

His treatment of light is very different from the usual. In his paintings the sun never shines; each figure seems to carry its own light within or to reflect light from an unseen source. In his last paintings the light becomes stronger and brighter, to the point of bleaching the underlying colors. This use of light is consistent with his anti-naturalism and his increasingly abstract style.

The art historian Max Dvořák was the first to relate El Greco's style to Mannerism and anti-naturalism. Today El Greco's style is characterized as "typically Mannerist."

El Greco also excelled as a portraitist, being able to represent the features of the sitter and to convey his character. His portraits are fewer in number than his religious paintings. Wethey says that "by simple means, the artist created a memorable characterization that places him in the highest rank of portraitists, alongside Titian and Rembrandt."

In the service of the Counter-Reformation

Detail of Christ Embracing the Cross (1580–85). Christ is idealized without suffering, emphasizing the meaning of salvation. He is shown serene and triumphant, looking up to heaven; the cross does not seem heavy. These were the ideals of the Counter-Reformation.

El Greco's patrons were for the most part learned churchmen connected with the official center of Spanish Catholicism, which was the Archdiocese of Toledo. El Greco's career coincided with the culminating moment of Catholic reaffirmation against Protestantism, so the paintings commissioned from him by his patrons followed the artistic directives of the Counter-Reformation. The Council of Trent, concluded in 1563, had reinforced the articles of faith. The bishops were responsible for ensuring compliance with orthodoxy, and the successive Archbishops of Toledo imposed obedience to the reforms through the Council of the Archdiocese. This body, with which El Greco was closely connected, had to approve all artistic projects in the diocese, which had to adhere faithfully to Catholic theology.

El Greco was at the service of the theses of the Counter-Reformation, as is evident from his thematic repertoire: a large part of his work is devoted to the representation of saints, whose role as intercessors for man before Christ was defended by the Church. He emphasized the value of confession and penitence, which the Protestants disputed, with many depictions of penitent saints and also of Mary Magdalene. Another important part of his work exalts the Virgin Mary, whose divine motherhood was denied by the Protestants and defended in Spain, in view of the great devotion she enjoyed in Spanish Catholicism.

Culture

As for El Greco's erudition, two inventories of his library drawn up by his son Jorge Manuel Teotocópuli have survived: one made a few days after the painter's death and another, more detailed, made on the occasion of his marriage. He owned 130 volumes (fewer than the five hundred that Rubens had, but more than the average painter of the time), a not inconsiderable number that made its owner a philosopher and cosmopolitan painter and, contrary to the commonplace, less Neoplatonic than Aristotelian, since he owned three volumes by the Stagirite and none by Plato or Plotinus. Some of his books are carefully annotated, such as the Treatise on Architecture by Vitruvius and the famous Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters and Sculptors by Giorgio Vasari. Naturally, Greek culture predominates, and he maintained a taste for contemporary Italian reading; the section of religious books is not very extensive, after all (11, and unannotated). He considered painting a speculative science and had a particular fixation on architectural studies, which demolishes the cliché that El Greco forgot perspective when he arrived in Spain: for every treatise on painting he had four on perspective.

Workshop production

Detail of Saint Andrew and Saint Francis (1595).

Detail of Saint Ildefonsus (1603).

In addition to the paintings by his own hand, there is a significant number of works produced in his workshop by assistants who, under his direction, followed his sketches. It is estimated that the workshop canvases number around three hundred, and some studies still accept them as autograph works. These works are executed with the same materials, with the same procedures and following his models; the artist participated in them partially, but most of the work was done by his assistants. Logically, this production does not have the same quality as his autograph works. In reality, he had only one disciple of note, Luis Tristán (Toledo, 1585 – id. 1624).

The painter organized his production at different levels: he carried out the major commissions entirely himself, while his assistants produced more modest canvases, with iconographies intended for popular devotion. This organization of production, encompassing works entirely by the master's hand, others with his partial intervention and a last group done entirely by his assistants, made it possible to work at several price levels, since the market of the time could not always pay the master's high fees.

In 1585 he began selecting types and iconographies, forming a repertoire on which he worked repeatedly in an increasingly fluid and dynamic style. The popular success of his devotional paintings, much sought after by his Toledan clientele for chapels and convents, led him to develop several subjects. Some were of special interest, and he repeated numerous versions of them: Saint Francis in ecstasy or receiving the stigmata, the Magdalene, Saint Peter and Saint Paul, the Holy Face or the Crucifixion.

In Toledo there were thirteen Franciscan convents, which is perhaps why one of the most demanded subjects was Saint Francis. Around a hundred paintings of this saint came out of El Greco's workshop, of which 25 are recognized as autograph, the rest being works in collaboration with the workshop or copies of the master. These images, dramatic and simple, very similar to one another, with only small variations in the eyes or hands, were very successful.

The subject of the repentant Magdalene, a symbol of the confession of sins and of penitence in the Counter-Reformation, was also in great demand. The painter developed at least five different types of this subject, the first based on Titianesque models and the last entirely personal.

Clients from Toledo and other Spanish cities came to the workshop, attracted by the painter's inspiration. Between 1585 and 1600 numerous altar paintings and portraits came out of the workshop, intended for churches, convents and private individuals. Some are of great quality; others, simpler, are works by his collaborators, although almost always signed by the master.

From 1585, El Greco kept on his Italian assistant Francisco Preboste, who had worked with him since the Roman period. From 1600, the workshop occupied twenty-four rooms, a garden and a courtyard. In these early years of the century, the presence in his workshop of his son and new assistant Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli, then twenty years old, became significant. His disciple Luis Tristán also worked in the workshop, as well as other collaborators.

Francisco Pacheco, painter and father-in-law of Diego Velázquez, described the workshop he visited in 1611: he mentioned a large cabinet full of clay models made by El Greco and used in his work. He was surprised to see in a storeroom small-format oil copies of everything El Greco had painted in his life.

One of the most characteristic productions of the workshop in the late period are the cycles of the Apostles, depicted at half-length or three-quarter length with their corresponding symbols. Sometimes they were depicted in pairs. They are ascetic figures, with gaunt and elongated silhouettes, reminiscent of Greek icons.

Sculpture and architecture

At that time in Spain the main form of church decoration was the altarpiece, which consisted of paintings, polychrome sculptures and an architectural structure of gilded wood. El Greco set up a workshop where all these tasks came to be carried out, and he took part in the architectural design of several altarpieces. His studies of the architecture of the period are documented, but his work as an architect is limited to his participation in some altarpieces commissioned from him.

Pacheco, on his visit to the workshop in 1611, mentioned the small models of plaster, clay and wax made by El Greco, which he used to prepare his compositions. From the study of the contracts El Greco signed, San Román concluded that he never carved the altarpieces, although in some cases he provided the sculptor with drawings and models for them. Wethey accepts as sculptures by El Greco The Imposition of the Chasuble on Saint Ildefonsus, which was part of the frame of The Disrobing of Christ, and the Risen Christ that crowned the altarpiece of the Hospital de Tavera.

In 1945, the Count of las Infantas acquired the sculptures of Epimetheus and Pandora in Madrid and showed that they were the work of El Greco, since there are stylistic relationships with his pictorial and sculptural production. Xavier de Salas interpreted these figures as representations of Epimetheus and Pandora, seeing in them a reinterpretation of Michelangelo's David with slight variations: more elongated figures, a different position of the head and the legs less spread apart. Salas also pointed out that Pandora corresponds to an inversion of the figure of Epimetheus, a characteristic feature of Mannerism. Puppi considered that they were models for determining the most suitable position of the figures on the right of the painting of the Laocoön.

Historical recognition of his painting

Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino (1609).

El Greco's art has been appreciated in very different ways throughout history. Depending on the period, he has been described as a mystic, a Mannerist, a proto-Expressionist, a proto-modern, a lunatic, an astigmatic, the quintessence of the Spanish spirit and a Greek painter.

The few contemporaries who wrote about El Greco acknowledged his technical mastery, but his singular style baffled them. Francisco Pacheco, a painter and theorist who visited him, could not accept El Greco's disdain for drawing and for Michelangelo, but he did not exclude him from the great painters. Toward the end of the 17th century this ambiguous assessment turned negative: the painter Jusepe Martínez, who knew the works of the best Spanish and Italian Baroque painters, considered his style capricious and extravagant; for Antonio Palomino, author of the main treatise on Spanish painters until it was superseded in 1800, El Greco was a good painter in his early works when he imitated Titian, but in his late style "he tried to change his manner, with such extravagance that he came to make his painting contemptible and ridiculous, both in the disjointedness of the drawing and in the harshness of the color." Palomino coined a phrase that remained popular well into the 19th century: "What he did well, no one did better; and what he did badly, no one did worse." Outside Spain there was no opinion about El Greco, since all his work was in Spain.

Detail of the Saint Peter from the Oballe Chapel (1610–13).

The poet and critic Théophile Gautier, in his book on his celebrated journey to Spain in 1840, formulated his important revision of the value of El Greco's art. He accepted the generalized opinion of him as extravagant and somewhat mad, but gave it a positive rather than a pejorative connotation, as it had had until then. In the 1860s Eugène Delacroix and Jean-François Millet already owned authentic works by El Greco. Édouard Manet traveled to Toledo in 1865 to study the work of the Greek painter, and although he returned deeply impressed by the work of Diego Velázquez, he also praised the Cretan painter. Paul Lefort, in his influential history of painting of 1869, wrote: "El Greco was neither a madman nor the unbridled eccentric he was thought to be. He was a bold and enthusiastic colorist, probably too given to strange juxtapositions and unusual tones, who, adding daring upon daring, finally managed first to subordinate and then to sacrifice everything in his search for effects. Despite his errors, El Greco can only be considered a great painter." For Jonathan Brown, Lefort's opinion opened the way for considering El Greco's style as the work of a genius, not that of a lunatic who only passed through intervals of lucidity.

In 1907 Manuel Bartolomé Cossío published a book about him that marked an important advance in knowledge of the painter. He compiled and interpreted everything published until then, made known new documents, produced the first outline of the painter's stylistic evolution, distinguishing two Italian and three Spanish stages, and compiled the first catalogue of his works, which included 383 paintings. He presented a Byzantine painter trained in Italy, but Cossío was not impartial when he held that El Greco, during his stay in Spain, had assimilated Castilian culture, asserting that he was the one who reflected it most deeply. Cossío, conditioned by the nationalist ideas of Spanish Regenerationism of the early 20th century, presented an El Greco imbued with and influenced by the Castilian soul. Cossío's book acquired great prestige, was for decades the reference book, and is responsible for the general view of El Greco as an interpreter of Spanish mysticism.

In 1910 San Román published El Greco en Toledo, making known 88 new documents, among them the inventory of the painter's possessions at his death, as well as other very important ones on the main works. San Román established the basis of documentary knowledge of the Spanish period.

El Greco's fame began at the start of the 20th century with the first recognition by European and American institutions, as well as by the artistic avant-gardes. The idea of El Greco as a precursor of modern art was developed especially by the German critic Meier-Graefe in his book Spanische Reise, where, analyzing the work of the Cretan, he considered that there were similarities with Paul Cézanne, Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas, and he also believed he saw in El Greco's work an anticipation of all the inventions of modern art. He influenced the work of the Polish painter Władysław Jahl, who was part of the Ultraist avant-garde in Madrid; Salvador Viniegra, Azorín and Pío Baroja devoted several articles to him, and the latter devoted several passages to him in his novel Camino de perfección (pasión mística) (1902), as did other prominent authors of the Generation of '98.

The Portuguese physician Ricardo Jorge put forward the hypothesis of madness in 1912, believing he saw in El Greco a paranoiac, while the German Goldschmitt and the Spaniard Beritens defended the hypothesis of astigmatism to account for the anomalies of his painting.

By around 1930 the painter's stay in Spain was already known through documents and the study of the stylistic evolution of the Toledan period was beginning; however, little was known of the earlier periods.

Between 1920 and 1940 the Venetian and Roman periods were studied. The discovery of the signed Modena Triptych showed the transformation from the Cretan style to the language of the Venetian Renaissance, and in the period after the Second World War a multitude of Italian paintings were erroneously attributed to him, with up to 800 paintings coming to be included in his catalogue. Gregorio Marañón devoted his last book to him, El Greco y Toledo (1956).

In 1962 Harold E. Wethey considerably reduced this figure and established a convincing corpus amounting to 285 authentic works. The value of Wethey's catalogue is confirmed by the fact that in recent years only a small number of paintings have been added to or removed from his list.

The extensive commentaries on art written by the painter himself, recently discovered and made known by Fernando Marías Franco and Agustín Bustamante, have helped to show that the painter was an intellectual artist immersed in the artistic theory and practice of the Italian 16th century.

El Greco in literature

The influence of El Greco's figure and work on Spanish and world literature is undoubtedly formidable. The very extensive chapter that Rafael Alarcón Sierra devotes to the study of this influence in the first volume of Temas literarios hispánicos (Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza, 2013, pp. 111–142) does not even exhaust the subject. If Goya was discovered by the Romantics and Velázquez is considered a master by the painters of Naturalism and Impressionism, El Greco is seen as "a precedent for Symbolists, Modernistas, Cubists, Futurists or Expressionists, and, as with the former, an inexhaustible source of inspiration and study [...] in the visual arts, literature and art history, where a new category is created to be able to explain his anti-classical and anti-naturalistic work: Mannerism."

In the 16th century, the praises bestowed by poets such as Hortensio Félix Paravicino, Luis de Góngora, Cristóbal de Mesa and José Delitala y Castelví stand out; in the 17th, those of the poets Giambattista Marino and Manuel de Faria y Sousa, as well as those of the chroniclers Fray José de Sigüenza and Fray Juan de Santa María and those of the writers of treatises on painting Francisco Pacheco and Jusepe Martínez; in the 18th century, those of the critics Antonio Palomino, Antonio Ponz, Gregorio Mayáns y Siscar and Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez and, in the 19th century, Eugenio Llaguno. When the Spanish Gallery opened at the Louvre in 1838 there were nine works by El Greco, and Eugène Delacroix owned a copy of the Disrobing of Christ. Jean-François Millet acquired a Saint Dominic and a Saint Ildefonsus. Charles Baudelaire admired The Lady in a Fur Wrap (which Théophile Gautier compared with the Mona Lisa and which some today consider to be by Sofonisba Anguissola); Champfleury thought of writing a work about the painter, and Gautier praised his paintings in his Voyage en Espagne, where he declares that in his works there reigns "a depraved energy, a sickly power, which betray the great painter and the mad genius." In England, William Stirling-Maxwell championed El Greco's early period in his Annals of the Artists of Spain, 1848, 3 vols. Countless foreign travelers stopped before his works and commented on them, while the Spaniards, in general, forgot him or repeated the 18th-century clichés about the artist; and although Larra and Bécquer mention him in passing, it is with great incomprehension, although the latter had planned a piece, "La locura del genio," which was to be an essay on the painter, according to his friend Rodríguez Correa. He was indeed appreciated by the historical novelist Ramón López Soler in the prologue to his novel Los bandos de Castilla. But critics such as Pedro de Madrazo began to reassess his work in 1880 as a very important precedent of the so-called Spanish school, although until 1910 he still appeared assigned to the Venetian school and he did not have a room of his own until 1920. In France, Paul Lefort (1869) included him in the Spanish school, and he was one of the idols of the circle of Édouard Manet (Zacharie Astruc, Millet, Degas). Paul Cézanne made a copy of The Lady in a Fur Wrap, and Toulouse-Lautrec would paint his Portrait of Romain Coolus in the manner of El Greco. The German Carl Justi (1888) also considered him one of the precedents of the Spanish school. The American painter John Singer Sargent owned one of the versions of Saint Martin and the Beggar. The writers of Decadentism turned El Greco into one of their fetishes. The protagonist of Huysmans's À rebours (1884) decorates his bedroom exclusively with paintings by El Greco. Théodore de Wyzewa, a theorist of Symbolism, considered El Greco a painter of dreamlike images, the most original of the 16th century (1891). Later the Decadent Jean Lorrain followed that inspiration in describing him in his novel Monsieur de Bougrelon (1897).

European and Spanish exhibitions followed one another from the London exhibition of 1901 (Exhibition of Spanish Art at the Guildhall) to the tercentenary of 1914: Madrid, 1902; Paris, 1908; Madrid, 1910; Cologne, 1912. In 1906 the French magazine Les Arts devoted a monographic issue to him. In 1910 the 2nd Marquis of Vega-Inclán opened the El Greco House-Museum in Toledo. His market value was by then so high that several Grecos from Spanish private collections were sold and ended up abroad. At the beginning of the 20th century he was fully recovered by the Catalan modernista painters: Santiago Rusiñol (who passed on his enthusiasm to the Belgian Symbolists Émile Verhaeren and Théo van Rysselberghe), Raimon Casellas, Miquel Utrillo, Ramón Casas, Ramón Pichot and Aleix Clapés, as well as other related artists, such as Ignacio Zuloaga (who passed on his enthusiasm for the Cretan to Maurice Barrès, who wrote Greco, or the Secret of Toledo, and to Rainer María Rilke, who devoted a poem to his Assumption in Ronda, 1913) and Darío de Regoyos. Zuloaga's nocturnal, candlelit visit to the Burial of the Lord of Orgaz is recounted in chapter XXVIII of Camino de perfección (pasión mística) by Pío Baroja, and Azorín also has words for the painter in La voluntad and in other works and articles. Picasso took into account the Vision of the Apocalypse in his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Interest in the man from Candia also reached Julio Romero de Torres, José Gutiérrez Solana, Isidro Nonell, Joaquín Sorolla and many others. Emilia Pardo Bazán would write a "Carta al Greco" in La Vanguardia. The writers of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza spread their admiration for El Greco, especially Francisco Giner de los Ríos and Manuel Bartolomé Cossío, the latter through his El Greco (1908). El Greco's presence is important in the Toledo portrayed by Benito Pérez Galdós in his novel Ángel Guerra, and the comparison of his characters with portraits by El Greco is frequent in his novels. So too with Aureliano de Beruete, Jacinto Octavio Picón, Martín Rico, Francisco Alcántara and Francisco Navarro Ledesma. Eugenio d'Ors devoted space to El Greco in his famous book Tres horas en el Museo del Prado and in Poussin y el Greco (1922). Amado Nervo wrote one of his best short stories inspired by one of his paintings, Un sueño (1907). Julius Meier-Graefe devoted Spanische Reise (1910) to him and August L. Mayer El Greco (1911). Somerset Maugham described him with admiration through the main character and chapter 88 of his novel Of Human Bondage, 1915; in his essay Don Fernando, 1935, he tempered his admiration and divined a presumed homosexuality as the origin of his art, as did, incidentally, Ernest Hemingway in chapter XVII of Death in the Afternoon (1932) and Jean Cocteau in his Le Greco (1943).

Kandinsky and Franz Marc (who produced Agony in the Garden under his influence) considered him a proto-Expressionist. As Romero Tobar states, the late production of the Cretan painter impressed August Macke, Paul Klee, Max Oppenheimer, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Ludwig Meidner, Jacob Steinhardt, Kees van Dongen, Adriaan Korteveg and Max Beckmann. Hugo Kehrer devoted his Die Kunst des Greco (1914) to him, and finally the Austrian art historian Max Dvorak defined him as the foremost representative of the aesthetic category of Mannerism. Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, after a lecture in Buenos Aires in 1910, devoted to him the chapter "El quietismo estético" of his La lámpara maravillosa. Miguel de Unamuno devoted several poems of his Cancionero to the man from Candia and wrote a passionate article about him in 1914. Juan Ramón Jiménez devoted several aphorisms to him. The critic "Juan de la Encina" (1920) set José de Ribera and El Greco against each other as "the two extremes of the character of Spanish art": strength and spirituality, the petrified flame and the living flame, which he completed with the name of Goya. In that same year of 1920 his popularity led the Swedish ballet of Jean Börlin to premiere El Greco in Paris, with music by Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht and sets by Moveau; also in that year Félix Urabayen published his novel Toledo: piedad, in which he devoted a chapter to him speculating on his possible Jewish origin, a theory put forward by Barrès and later taken up by Ramón Gómez de la Serna—El Greco (el visionario de la pintura)—and Gregorio Marañón (Elogio y nostalgia de Toledo, only in the 2nd ed. of 1951, and El Greco y Toledo, 1956, where he further maintains that he drew inspiration from the inmates of the famous Toledo Asylum for his Apostles), among others. And in the first chapters of Don Amor volvió a Toledo (1936) he criticizes the sale of the Grecos of Illescas and the theft of some of his paintings from Santo Domingo el Antiguo. Luis Fernández Ardavín recreated the story of one of his portraits in his most famous verse drama, La dama del armiño (1921), later brought to the screen by his brother Eusebio Fernández Ardavín in 1947. Jean Cassou wrote Le Gréco (1931). Juan de la Encina published his El Greco in 1944. In exile, Arturo Serrano Plaja, having protected some of his paintings during the war, wrote his El Greco (1945). He was also written about by Miguel Hernández, Valbuena Prat, Juan Alberto de los Cármenes, Enrique Lafuente Ferrari, Ramón Gaya, Camón Aznar, José García Nieto, Luis Felipe Vivanco, Rafael Alberti, Luis Cernuda, Concha Zardoya, Fina de Calderón, Carlos Murciano, León Felipe, Manuel Manrique de Lara, Blanca Andreu, Hilario Barrero, Pablo García Baena, Diego Jesús Jiménez, José Luis Puerto, Louis Bourne, Luis Javier Moreno, José Luis Rey, Jorge del Arco, José Ángel Valente... Notable are the Siete sonetos al Greco by Ezequiel González Mas (1944), the Conjugación lírica del Greco (1958) by Juan Antonio Villacañas and El entierro del conde de Orgaz (2000) by Félix del Valle Díaz. Furthermore, Jesús Fernández Santos won the Ateneo de Sevilla prize with his historical novel El Griego (1985).

Outside Spain, and apart from those already mentioned, Ezra Pound mentions El Greco in his Art Notes and Francis Scott Fitzgerald at the end of his The Great Gatsby (1925). Paul Claudel, Paul Morand and Aldous Huxley wrote about the man from Candia, and the German Stefan Andres devoted to him his novel El Greco Paints the Grand Inquisitor, in which Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara appears as a metaphor for Nazi oppression. An El Greco enthusiast is one of the characters of L'Espoir (1938) by André Malraux, and another character in Madrid is in charge of protecting the Grecos brought from Toledo. In one of the essays of his The Voices of Silence (1951), reviewed by Alejo Carpentier, Malraux interprets the painter. The aforementioned Ernest Hemingway considered View of Toledo the best painting in the entire Metropolitan Museum in New York and devoted a passage to it in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Nikos Kazantzakis, Donald Braider, Jean Louis Schefer...

Pictorial work

Part of his best work is included here to give an overview of his pictorial style, of his artistic evolution, and of the circumstances that surrounded his works, both in their execution and in their later fortunes. He was a painter of altarpieces, so this section begins with the altarpiece of Santo Domingo, the first one he conceived. El expolio, one of his masterpieces, shows his first style in Spain, still influenced by his Italian masters. The Burial of the Count of Orgaz is the landmark work of his second period in Spain, the so-called period of maturity. The altarpiece of Doña María marks the beginning of his last style, a radical turn for which he is universally admired. The Illescas painting explains how his late style became increasingly stylized. Two of his well-known portraits are then included. The section ends with the Vision of the Apocalypse, which shows the extreme expressionism of his last compositions.

The main altarpiece of Santo Domingo el Antiguo

Main article: Main altarpiece of Santo Domingo el Antiguo

Main altarpiece of Santo Domingo el Antiguo (1577) and its principal canvas of the Assumption of the Virgin.

In 1576, a new church was built at Santo Domingo el Antiguo with the estate of the late Doña María de Silva, intended to be her burial place.

El Greco had just arrived in Spain, and during his stay in Rome he had met Luis de Castilla, the brother of the testamentary executor who built Santo Domingo. It was this brother who contacted El Greco and who spoke favorably of the painter's quality.

In all there were nine canvases, seven in the main altarpiece and two more in two side altars. Of these, only three original paintings remain in the altarpiece today. The others have been sold and replaced by copies.

El Greco had never before faced such an ambitious task: paintings of large dimensions had to be conceived, each of the respective compositions had to be fitted in, and all of them had to be harmonized as a whole. The result was highly acclaimed and brought him immediate fame.

In the principal canvas, The Assumption, he established a pyramidal composition between the two groups of apostles and the Virgin; to do so he needed to highlight her and reduce the importance of the angels. There is a tendency toward horror vacui: including the greatest possible number of figures and the fewest environmental elements. Gestures and attitudes are emphasized. This aspect was always one of his great concerns: to endow his figures with eloquence and expression. He achieved it by incorporating and building up, over the course of his career, a repertoire of gestures whose expressiveness he must have known well.

El expolio

El expolio (1577-1579, Toledo Cathedral).

Main article: El expolio

The chapter of Toledo Cathedral must have commissioned El expolio from El Greco on July 2, 1577. It was among his first works in Toledo, together with the paintings for the altarpiece of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, when he had just arrived from Italy. The subject of this painting is the initial moment of the Passion in which Jesus is stripped of his garments. The painter drew inspiration from a text by Saint Bonaventure, but the composition he devised did not satisfy the chapter. In the lower left he painted the Virgin, Mary Magdalene and Mary of Clopas, although the Gospels do not record that they were there, while in the upper part, above the head of Christ, he placed a large part of the group escorting him, drawing inspiration from ancient Byzantine iconography. The chapter considered that both aspects were "improprieties that obscured the story and diminished Christ." This was the cause of the first lawsuit the painter had in Spain. The appraisers named by El Greco asked for 900 ducats, an excessive sum. The painter ended up receiving 350 ducats in payment, but he did not have to change the figures that had caused the conflict.

Cossío made the following analysis of this painting in his celebrated book on the painter:

• The artist had to represent Christ not as God but as man and innocent victim of human passions. He concentrated all the elements, principal and secondary, which had been scattered in his earlier paintings, into a single action around the protagonist. He surrounded him with a tightly packed group of hard, somber heads, each with a personality of its own. He introduced two different episodes at his feet, closing off the scene at the bottom. These are the man preparing the cross and, opposite him, the three Marys watching him sorrowfully.

• "The unity of composition is so perfect that all the interest is absorbed by the figure of Christ." The master knew how to create this effect by establishing a circular composition around Jesus.

• Everything that is not the protagonist is darkened and subdued, while Christ is illuminated and stands out. Thus the illuminated face of Christ and his red tunic form a very strong contrast with the dark faces of those around him and with the gray tonality that dominates the painting.

Detail of El expolio. The Cathedral Chapter found it theologically incorrect that the heads of the escort rose above that of Christ. El Greco drew inspiration from Byzantine icons. Note the contrast between the stillness and melancholy of the Savior's face and the somber faces surrounding him.

El Greco and his workshop painted several versions of this same subject, with variations. Wethey catalogued fifteen paintings on this subject and another four half-length copies. He saw the artist's hand in only five of these works and considered the other ten to be workshop productions or later copies of small size and poor quality.

The Burial of the Count of Orgaz

Main article: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz

The church of Santo Tomé housed the remains of the Lord of Orgaz, who had died in 1323 after a life very generous in donations to religious institutions in Toledo. According to a local legend, the Lord of Orgaz's charity had been rewarded at the moment of his burial, when Saint Stephen and Saint Augustine miraculously appeared and placed his body in the tomb.

The contract for the painting, signed in March 1586, included a description of the elements the artist was to depict: "In the lowest part... there is to be painted a procession of how the priest and the other clerics who were performing the offices to bury Don Gonzalo de Ruiz de Toledo, Lord of the town of Orgaz, and Saint Augustine and Saint Stephen came down to bury the body of this knight, the one holding his head and the other his feet, laying him in the tomb, and representing around them many people who were watching, and above all this there is to be made an open heaven of glory..."

Detail of the earthly part: he depicted a 14th-century burial witnessed by men dressed in the manner of the 16th century. They appear to have been portraits of people living in Toledo. Only Antonio de Covarrubias, a friend of the painter, has been identified. The reason for mixing the 14th and 16th centuries could be to express that charity was important both in the past and in the present. The boy pointing out the miracle to the viewer is believed to have been the painter's son, Jorge Manuel.

The altarpiece of Doña María de Aragón

Main article: Altarpiece of Doña María de Aragón

In 1596 El Greco received the commission for the altarpiece of the church of the seminary college of the Encarnación in Madrid, better known by the name of its patroness, Doña María de Aragón. It was to be completed in three years and was valued at more than sixty-three thousand reales, the highest price he received in his life. The college was closed in 1808 or 1809, since two decrees of Joseph Bonaparte reduced the existing convents and later suppressed the religious orders. The building was converted into a hall of the Cortes in 1814, the present-day Spanish Senate, and the altarpiece was dismantled during that period. After several moves (during one of them it was in the house of the Inquisition), it ended up in the Museo de la Trinidad, created with works of art seized under the Confiscation Law. That museum was merged with the Prado Museum in 1872, and for that reason five of its canvases are there. During these moves, the sixth canvas, The Adoration of the Shepherds, was sold and is currently in the National Museum of Art of Romania in Bucharest.

The lack of documents about it has given rise to different hypotheses about the paintings that comprise it. In 1908 Cossío linked The Baptism, The Crucifixion, The Resurrection and The Annunciation. August L. Mayer proposed in 1931 the connection between the preceding canvases and The Pentecost and The Adoration of the Shepherds of Bucharest. In 1943 Manuel Gómez Moreno proposed a gridded altarpiece made up of these six paintings, without arguing the case. But for some specialists The Resurrection and The Pentecost would not have formed part of it, since they corresponded to different stylistic formulations.

In 1985 a document from 1814 appeared with the register of the works deposited in the house of the Inquisition, which mentions "siete quadros de pinturas originales de Domenico Greco que estaban en el Altar Mayor" (seven pictures of original paintings by Domenico Greco that were in the High Altar). This information has strengthened Gómez Moreno's hypothesis of an altarpiece of three vertical sections on two levels, assuming that the seventh would have been on a third level in the manner of an attic.

The subjects, except The Pentecost, had already been treated earlier, some of them in his Italian period. According to Ruiz Gómez, these subjects are taken up again with great originality, showing his most expressionist spirituality. From this moment on his work takes a very personal and disconcerting path, distancing itself from the naturalistic style that was beginning to dominate at that time. The scenes are set in claustrophobic spaces, enhancing the verticality of the formats. A spectral light highlights the unreality of the figures, some of them in very pronounced foreshortening. The cold, intense and contrasting color, applied with ease to his powerful anatomical constructions, shows what would become his late style.

Main chapel of the Hospital de la Caridad of Illescas

The Annunciation, Hospital de la Caridad, Illescas.

Main article: Main chapel of the Hospital de la Caridad of Illescas

In 1603 he received the commission to execute all the decorative elements of the main chapel of the church of the Hospital de la Caridad in Illescas, which included altarpieces, sculptures and four paintings. El Greco developed an iconographic program that exalted the Virgin Mary. The four paintings have a similar pictorial style, three of them being circular or elliptical in format.

The Annunciation seen at right is circular in format and is a reworking of the one he painted for the College of Doña María de Aragón. While maintaining the types and gestures of the earlier College of María de Aragón, the painter advances in his late expressionism; his figures are more flame-like and agitated, with a more unsettling inner force.

Portraits

Main article: Portraits by El Greco

The Nobleman with his Hand on his Chest (1580).

Detail of the Portrait of an Elderly Gentleman
(1587-1600).

From his beginnings in Italy, El Greco was a great portrait painter. The composition and style were learned from Titian: the placement of the figure, normally half-length, and the neutral backgrounds. His best portraits, from his maturity in Toledo, follow these criteria.

The Nobleman with his Hand on his Chest is one of the artist's most important portraits and a symbol of the Spanish gentleman of the Renaissance. The rich sword, the hand placed on the chest with a solemn gesture, and the relationship the gentleman establishes with the viewer by looking him in the eyes, made this portrait the reference point for what were considered the essences of Spanishness, of the honor of Castile.

It is an early work by El Greco, painted when he had just arrived in Spain, since its execution is close to Venetian manners. The canvas has been restored on different occasions, during which losses of color were retouched, the background was repainted and the sitter's clothing had been retouched. The 1996 restoration proved very controversial, because by removing the overpainting of the background and of the clothing, it changed the image of this figure that had been projected for a long time.

In the Portrait of an Elderly Gentleman the identity of the sitter is unknown, and its high pictorial quality and psychological penetration are emphasized. For Ruiz Gómez, what stand out are his honey-colored eyes and kindly, somewhat lost expression in his gaunt face, with his long, thin nose, slightly deviated to the right, and the thin lips, the graying mustache and goatee. A kind of aura separates the head from the background, blurring the outline and giving it movement and vivacity. Álvarez Lopera underlined the accentuation of the traditional asymmetries of El Greco's portraits and described the sinuous line that orders this face, from the central lock of hair, passing through the nose and ending at the tip of the chin. Finaldi sees in the asymmetry a double emotional perception: the right side slightly smiling and lively, the left side withdrawn and pensive.

The Vision of the Apocalypse

Main article: The Vision of the Apocalypse

The Vision of the Apocalypse (1609-1614). It represents the summit of his late expressionism. The painting was cut down and does not correspond to the framing devised by El Greco. Saint John, kneeling in a violent gesture, is extremely out of proportion. In the background, naked martyrs and the tunics they gather form an expressionist frieze that anticipates 20th-century painting.

This canvas was commissioned from him in 1608; it is one of his last works and shows his most extreme style. At the painter's death in 1614, it had still not been delivered. The painting was to be placed in an altarpiece in the chapel of the Hospital de Tavera in Toledo. During the 1958 restoration by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, following its purchase, it was found that it had been cut not only at the top, where the edge was frayed, but also on its left side. According to Álvarez Lopera, if it had the same measurements as the painting of the other side altarpiece, The Annunciation, of 406 x 209 cm, the part cut off at the end of the 19th century would be the upper part, 185 cm high, and the left cut 16 cm wide, the original proportions being approximately twice as high as wide.

It represents the moment of the Apocalypse when God shows Saint John in a vision the opening of the seven seals: "When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the testimony they gave. And they cried out with a loud voice, saying: 'How long, O Lord, holy and true, will you not judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?' And each of them was given a white robe and they were told to rest a little while longer..." (Revelation 6:9-11).

The painting, in its current state after the cut, is dominated by the gigantic figure of Saint John. The resurrected are seven, the magic number of the Apocalypse, the same number used by Dürer and other authors when depicting this same passage.

For Wethey, color is of great importance in this painting. There is the luminous blue of Saint John's garment, in which white lights are reflected, and, as a contrast, a pink mantle at his feet. On the left, the naked martyrs have a background with a pale yellow mantle, while the bodies of the women are of a great whiteness that contrasts with the yellowish male bodies. Green mantles with yellow highlights form the background of the three nudes on the left. The martyrs form an irregular group in an undefined pale blue space over reddish ground, all in an atmosphere of dark clouds that produces a dreamlike impression.

With El Greco, the personal religious meaning of his work is unknown, as is the reason for his final evolution toward this anti-naturalistic and spiritualist painting in which, as in this Vision of the Apocalypse, he systematically violated all the laws established by Renaissance rationalism. Wethey considered that this late mode of expression of El Greco was related to early Mannerism. Dvořák, the first to associate firmly the Cretan's anti-naturalism with Mannerism, held that this anti-naturalism, just as happened to Michelangelo or Tintoretto in their final works, was a consequence of the world in crisis that arose from the collapse of Renaissance optimism and its faith in reason.

In film

• The film El Greco, from 1966, directed by Luciano Salce.
• The film El Greco, from 2007, directed by Yannis Smaragdis.

See also

• Cretan school
• El Greco Museum
• Neoplatonism

Notes and references

General note: Very few facts and documents are known from his Byzantine and Italian period.

References

View of Toledo (c. 1596–1600). A landscape accentuating the differences in elevation, with gloomy buildings in a hallucinatory atmosphere. It has been compared with The Tempest by Giorgione.

Fable (1600). A genre painting of which several versions exist. In those from the Spanish period he added the man and the monkey. The boy lighting a candle may be a reconstruction (ekphrasis) of the subject painted by Antiphilus of Alexandria in the 4th century and described by Pliny the Elder.

Bibliography

• Álvarez Lopera, José (sa). El Greco. Estudio y Catálogo (in español). Fundación de Apoyo a la Historia del Arte Hispánico. ISBN 84-933914-6-8. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
• — (2007). El Greco. Catálogo de obras originales (in español). Vol. II, tomo I. Fundación de Arte Hispánico. ISBN 978-84-935054-3-1.
• — (2005). "El Greco: From Crete to Toledo". In Tazartes, M. (ed.). El Greco. translated into Greek by Sofia Giannetsou. Explorer. ISBN 960-7945-83-2.
• — (2005). "De Creta a Toledo. La doble transformación del Greco". In Tazartes, M. (ed.). El Greco (in español). Unidad Editorial. ISBN 84-89780-99-4.
• Buendía, José Rogelio (1988). "El Greco, humanismo y pintura". El Greco (in español). Sarpe. ISBN 84-7700-088-3.
• Brown, Jonathan (1982). "El Greco and Toledo". El Greco of Toledo (catalogue). Little Brown. ASIN B-000H4-58C-Y.
• —; Mann, Richard G. (1997). "Tone". Spanish Paintings of the Fifteenth Through Nineteenth Centuries. Routledge (UK). ISBN 0-415-14889-8.
• — (1982). "El Greco y Toledo". El Greco de Toledo (in español). Alianza Editorial. ISBN 84-206-9015-5.
• — (1982). "El Greco, el hombre y los mitos". El Greco de Toledo (in español). Alianza Editorial. ISBN 84-206-9015-5.
• Byron, Robert (October 1929). "Greco: The Epilogue to Byzantine Culture". Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs. 55 (No.319). The Burlington Magazine Publications. {{cite journal}}: |issue= has extra text (help)
• Constantoudaki, Maria (1975–1976). "D. Theotocópoulos, from Candia to Venice (in Greek)". Bulletin of the Christian Archeological Society. 8 (period IV): 55–71.
• Cossío, Manuel Bartolomé (1965). El Greco (in español). Espasa Calpe Argentina. ISBN 84-7254-514-8.
• Davies, David (1999). "La ascensión de la mente hacia Dios: la iconografía religiosa del Greco y la reforma espiritual en España". El Greco. Identidad y transformación (in español). Skira editore y Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza. ISBN 88-8118-473-7.
• Fernádez, Francisco de San Román (1927). "De la Vida del Greco — Nueva Serie de Documentos Inéditos". Archivo Español del Arte y Arqueología (in español). 8: 172–184.
• Gudiol, José (1982). El Greco. Ediciones Poligrafa. ISBN 84-343-0031-1.
• — (September 1962). "Iconography and Chronology in El Greco's Paintings of St. Francis". Art Bulletin. 44 (No.3). College Art Association: 195–203. {{cite journal}}: |issue= has extra text (help)
• Lambraki-Plaka, Marina (1999). El Greco-The Greek. Kastaniotis. ISBN 960-03-2544-8.
• Marias, Fernando (1999). "El Greco's Artistic Thought". El Greco, Identity and Transformation edited by Alvarez Lopera. Skira. ISBN 88-8118-474-5.
• Mayer, August L. (January 1939). "Notes on the Early El Greco". Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs. 74 (No.430). The Burlington Magazine Publications: 28–29+32–33. {{cite journal}}: |issue= has extra text (help)
• Mertzios, K. D. (1961–1962). "Selections of the Registers of the Cretan Notary Michael Maras (1538–1578) (in Greek)". Cretan Chronicles. 2 (No.15–16): 55–71. {{cite journal}}: |issue= has extra text (help)
• Panayotakis, Nikolaos M. (1986). "The Cretan Period of the Life of Doménicos Theotocópoulos". Festschrift In Honor Of Nikos Svoronos, Volume B. Crete University Press.
• Pijoan, Joseph (March 1930). "El Greco — A Spaniard". Art Bulletin. 12 (No.1). College Art Association: 12–19. doi:10.2307/3050759. {{cite journal}}: |issue= has extra text (help)
• Procopiou, Angelo (March 1952). "El Greco and Cretan Painting". Burlington Magazine. 94 (No.588). The Burlington Magazine Publications: 74+76–80. {{cite journal}}: |issue= has extra text (help)
• Puppi, Lionello (1999). "El Greco en Italia y el arte italiano". El Greco. Identidad y transformación (in español). Skira editore y Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza. ISBN 8881184737.
• Ruiz Gómez, Leticia (2007). El Greco (in español). Museo Nacional del Prado. ISBN 978-84-8480-135-1.
• Salas, de, Xavier; Marías, Fernando (1992). El Greco y el arte de su tiempo: las notas de El Greco a Vasari (in español). Madrid: Real Fundación de Toledo. ISBN 84-604-2605-X.
• Sigüenza, Fray José de (1927). Fundación del monasterio de El Escorial por Felipe II (in español). Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra.
• Scholz-Hansel, Michael (1986). El Greco. Taschen. ISBN 3-8228-3171-9.
• Sethre, Janet (2003). "El Greco". The Souls of Venice. McFarland & Company. ISBN 0-7864-1573-8.
• Tazartes, Mauricia (2004). "La vida y el arte; Las Obras Maestras". El Greco (in español). 2005 Unidad Editorial. ISBN 84-89780-99-4.
• Wethey, Harold E. (1967a). El Greco y su escuela, tomo I (in español). Madrid: Ediciones Guadarrama.
• — (1967b). El Greco y su escuela, tomo II (in español). Madrid: Ediciones Guadarrama.

Online bibliography

• Berg, Liisa. "El Greco in Toledo". Archived from the original on October 31, 2006. Retrieved October 14, 2006.
• "El Greco". The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Department of European Paintings. Retrieved October 17, 2006.
• Irving, Mark (February 8, 2006). "How to Beat the Spanish Inquisition". The Independent on Sunday. Archived from the original on October 13, 2007. Retrieved December 17, 2006. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
• McGarr, Simon. "St Francis Receiving The Stigmata". Archived from the original on February 7, 2007. Retrieved November 24, 2006.
• Romaine, James. "El Greco's Mystical Vision". Archived from the original on December 14, 2006. Retrieved November 24, 2006.

External links

• El Greco 2014 Archived May 20, 2016, at the Wayback Machine Website on the celebration of the 4th centenary of El Greco
• El Greco at the Hospital Tavera Fundación Casa Ducal de Medinaceli
• Church of Santo Tomé, where The Burial of the Count of Orgaz is preserved.
• Chapel of the Hospital de la Caridad in Illescas
• Website on El Greco's work in Illescas
• El Greco de Toledo (video of an RTVE program), by Santiago Amón
• El Greco
• The music of El Greco and Carles Magraner in Hoy es Arte
• El Greco's musical journey by Capella de Ministrers Archived March 13, 2016, at the Wayback Machine
• Digitized works by El Greco in the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica of the National Library of Spain