El Greco

El Greco: The Cretan Who Rewired Spanish Painting

Between 1580 and 1582 Philip II of Spain commissioned a large altarpiece of *The Martyrdom of Saint Maurice* for the Escorial, the granite monastery-palace that was the ideological centre of the Catholic world. The king looked at the finished picture, disliked the composition, and had it carried down to the cellars. With that decision the most inventive painter in Spain was permanently locked out of royal patronage — and forced back on a provincial cathedral town where, unsupervised, he produced the strangest body of work in European art before the twentieth century.

A Cretan Master Before Twenty-Five

Doménikos Theotokópoulos was born in 1541 in Candia — modern Iraklion — on Crete, then a possession of the Venetian republic. He trained in the post-Byzantine tradition as a painter of icons, and by 1563 was documented as a master painter. The *Dormition of the Virgin*, painted before 1567 and rediscovered only in modern times, shows him working within traditional formulas: gold ground, simplified modelling of the figures, the hierarchical flatness of the Orthodox image.

This is the fact that explains everything afterwards. Before he saw a single Venetian oil painting, El Greco had already mastered a pictorial system in which space is not measured, bodies are not anatomical, and the point of a picture is theological rather than descriptive. He arrived in the West already fluent in an alternative to the Renaissance.

Venice, Then the Palazzo Farnese

Around 1567 he left for Venice, the capital of the empire that ruled his island, and set about becoming a Western painter. Direct evidence of his teachers is lacking, but he plainly absorbed Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and Bassano; his *Purification of the Temple*, painted before 1570, already shows command of Venetian oil technique and its saturated, light-charged colour.

By 1570 he was in Rome. On 16 November of that year the celebrated miniaturist Giulio Clovio wrote a letter introducing the young Greek to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, who gave him lodging in the Palazzo Farnese and access to one of the great collections of Europe and to a circle of scholars and academics. In 1572 he was admitted to the Academy of Saint Luke as a miniaturist. An enduring anecdote — probably apocryphal, and possibly invented to explain his failure to land a major Roman commission — has him offering to repaint Michelangelo's *Last Judgment* better than it had been done.

Toledo, 1577

He arrived in Toledo in 1577, apparently hoping for work at the Escorial, and never left. His first great commission came from Don Diego de Castilla for the convent church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo. *The Assumption of the Virgin* (1577), nearly four metres high, announced a wholly formed artist.

Then came *El Espolio* — The Disrobing of Christ — for Toledo Cathedral, painted 1577–79, and with it the litigation that would recur throughout his life. He was eventually paid 350 ducats. The frame had cost 570. No single figure says more about the standing of painting in sixteenth-century Spain, or about why El Greco spent so much of his career in court.

The Burial of the Count of Orgaz

*The Burial of the Count of Orgaz* (1586–88), still in the church of Santo Tomé, is his masterpiece and the clearest statement of his method. The lower half is a row of naturalistic portraits of contemporary Toledan gentlemen, ruffed and grave, attending the miracle in which Saints Augustine and Stephen descend to bury a pious nobleman. Above them the picture changes physics entirely: the bodies elongate and twist, the drapery burns, and the clouds bank up in cold, glacial forms. Two orders of reality are stacked in one frame, and the seam between them is the subject. The Prado owns a high-quality copy of the lower portion, painted around 1625, which came from the Jesuit house in Toledo.

A Library and a Household

Around 1578 he formed a lasting relationship with Doña Jerónima de las Cuevas, who bore him a son, Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli (1578–1631), later the inheritor of his workshop. He never married her, but provided for her in his testament.

He was not a naïf. El Greco assembled a substantial library and annotated it with his own reflections on philosophy and classical literature, and his close friends were the intellectual aristocracy of Toledo: the humanist Antonio de Covarrubias, the preacher Fray Hortensio Paravicino, and the poet Luis de Góngora.

The Late Fire

The years 1597 to 1607 were his most productive, and the style hardened into the thing everyone recognises: figures stretched past anatomy, faces stylised yet fiercely expressive, gestures rhetorical, colour acidic and vivid, lit by a strong raking illumination out of dark grounds. The altarpieces for the Hospital of Charity at Illescas (1603–05) brought yet another lawsuit, when the trustees threatened to discharge him for using architectural elements in what they called very novel ways.

The last works go further still. *View of Toledo* (c. 1595) — a city under a bruised, electrical sky — is sometimes called the first expressionist landscape in Western art. *Laocoön* (c. 1610) sets the classical myth against a surreal Toledan skyline. *The Opening of the Fifth Seal* (1612) is the extreme point of his visionary manner. And the portraits — Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara, or Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino (1609) — constitute a landmark in European art for their probing psychological exploration. He died in Toledo on 6 or 7 April 1614.

Why El Greco Is Called a Genius

The particular achievement was synthesis under pressure: he took a Byzantine grammar of sacred images, a Venetian command of colour and oil, and a Roman training in the human body, and welded them into a fourth thing that belonged to no school. The result was a pictorial language capable of representing what cannot be seen. In *The Burial of the Count of Orgaz* he does not symbolise the supernatural, he gives it a different geometry, and puts it in the same frame as observed Toledan faces. As a portraitist he was equally radical, reaching for interior states a century before anyone else attempted it.

The counter-case is unusually strong. His reputation collapsed the moment he died. The workshop under Jorge Manuel churned out derivative versions that further obscured him, and for roughly 250 years he was filed as a provincial eccentric. He was not rediscovered until the late nineteenth century, when the French Impressionists took him up. Twentieth-century scholars then spent decades explaining his elongations away — proposing astigmatism, psychological disorder, or mystical ecstasy — before conceding that his manner eloquently fulfilled the requirements of the Counter-Reformation Church in Spain. That is the honest complication: a painter routinely called a proto-modernist was in fact executing devotional commissions to a doctrinal brief, and the Expressionists, Cubists and Abstract Expressionists who claimed him were partly remaking him in their own image. He also failed commercially where it mattered most, losing the king and litigating repeatedly over fees.

Legacy

He is now recognised as one of the greatest painters who ever worked, and his influence runs through Expressionism, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism. The deeper legacy is a permission. El Greco demonstrated that distortion could be a form of accuracy — that stretching a body might be the only honest way to paint what a body feels in the presence of something enormous.

Achievements

• Notable work: The Resurrection
• Notable work: View of Toledo
• Notable work: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz
• Notable work: The Nobleman with his Hand on his Chest
• Movement: Spanish Renaissance and Mannerism