El Greco

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  El Greco was once asked what he thought of Michelangelo, the giant of the Sistine Chapel. His answer was startling. "He was a good man," El Greco said, "but he did not know how to paint." This was a Greek-born painter, working far from home, who once offered Pope Pius V a proposal so audacious it bordered on heresy. He volunteered to paint over Michelangelo's Last Judgment entirely, repainting it to suit stricter Catholic thinking. The man who said these things signed his canvases not as El Greco, but with his full birth name in Greek letters, Doménikos Theotokópoulos. He often added the word Krḗs, meaning Cretan in Ancient Greek. So who was this artist whose contemporaries met his work with puzzlement, yet whom Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, would later call "the most extraordinary painter that ever came along back then"? How did a man dismissed for centuries as merely strange, queer, and eccentric become a figure that Picasso, Cézanne, and Jackson Pollock would study like scripture? And why did it take roughly three hundred years for the world to catch up to him?

• 2. Cretan Master

  ›

  In 1563, at the age of twenty-two, a document described El Greco as "maestro Domenigo", a master of the painters' guild. He was already running his own workshop on the island of Crete. He was born in 1541, in either the village of Fodele or in Candia, the Venetian name for the city known today as Heraklion. At that time Crete belonged to the Republic of Venice and stood as the center of Post-Byzantine art. His family was prosperous and urban. They had probably been driven out of Chania to Candia after an uprising against the Catholic Venetians late in the 1520s. His father, Geórgios Theotokópoulos, worked as a merchant and tax collector. His older brother Manoússos, born in 1531, was a wealthy merchant who would spend his final years in El Greco's Toledo home. Candia in the 16th century hummed with artistic life. Around two hundred painters were active there, organized into a guild modeled on the Italian system, in a place where Eastern and Western cultures lived side by side. El Greco trained as an icon painter of the Cretan school. He likely studied the classics of ancient Greece, and perhaps Latin as well. At his death he left a working library of 130 volumes, including the Bible in Greek and an annotated Vasari. In June 1566, as a witness to a contract, he signed himself in Greek as Master Ménegos Theotokópoulos, painter. Near the end of this Cretan period, probably before 1567, he painted his Dormition of the Virgin.

• 3. Disciple In Italy

  ›

  Crete had been a possession of Venice since 1211, so it was natural for the young artist to seek his fortune there. Most scholars agree he reached Venice around 1567. His much older friend Giulio Clovio, the greatest miniaturist of the age, called him a "disciple" of Titian, who was then in his eighties but still vigorous. Clovio described El Greco as "a rare talent in painting". The Venetian painters taught him to build crowded compositions inside landscapes alive with atmospheric light. His figures grew agile and elongated, recalling Tintoretto, while his color framework connected him to Titian. In 1570, El Greco moved to Rome and opened a workshop. On Clovio's recommendation, he was received as a guest at the Palazzo Farnese, which Cardinal Alessandro Farnese had made a center of the city's artistic and intellectual life. There he met the Roman scholar Fulvio Orsini, whose collection would eventually hold seven of his paintings. Clovio once visited him on a summer's day and found him sitting in a darkened room. El Greco preferred the darkness, he said, because daylight disturbed his "inner light". Rome enriched his work with violent vanishing points and figures striking strange, twisting attitudes. These were the marks of Mannerism. His sharp tongue made enemies fast. The architect and writer Pirro Ligorio branded him a "foolish foreigner". Newly found records reveal a clash with Farnese, who forced him to leave the palace. On the 6th of July 1572, El Greco formally complained about this. By the end of that year he had hired assistants and opened his own workshop, with the painters Lattanzio Bonastri de Lucignano and Francisco Preboste among them.

• 4. The King's Rejection

  ›

  In 1577, El Greco migrated to Madrid and then to Toledo, the religious capital of Spain, a city with "an illustrious past, a prosperous present and an uncertain future". The timing seemed perfect. The vast monastery-palace of El Escorial was under construction, and Philip II of Spain struggled to find good artists for its many large paintings. Titian was dead. Tintoretto, Veronese, and Anthonis Mor all refused to come to Spain. When the painter Juan Fernández de Navarrete died in 1579, an opening appeared. Through his friends El Greco met Luis de Castilla, son of the dean of the Cathedral of Toledo. That friendship secured his first large commissions. He arrived by July 1577 and signed contracts for paintings at the church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo and for El Espolio. By September 1579 he had finished nine paintings for Santo Domingo, including The Trinity and The Assumption of the Virgin. El Greco never meant to settle in Toledo permanently. His real aim was to win the king's favor and a place at court. He did secure two royal commissions, the Allegory of the Holy League and the Martyrdom of St. Maurice. But Philip disliked the St. Maurice altarpiece and placed it in the chapter-house rather than its intended chapel. He gave El Greco no further work. The reasons remain unclear. Some scholars suspect Philip disliked living people appearing in a religious scene. The king had decided tastes. A long sought-after Crucifixion by Benvenuto Cellini had also failed to please him and was exiled to a lesser spot. Philip's later experiment with Federico Zuccari fared even worse.

• 5. A Toledo Life

  ›

  From 1585 onward, surviving contracts list El Greco as the tenant of a complex of three apartments and twenty-four rooms belonging to the Marquis de Villena. He lived there in considerable style, sometimes hiring musicians to play while he dined. These rooms served as both his home and his workshop. On the 12th of March 1586 he won the commission for The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, now his most famous work. The years from 1597 to 1607 were a period of intense activity. He took on three altars for the Chapel of San José in Toledo, three paintings for an Augustinian monastery in Madrid, and a major ensemble for the Hospital of Charity at Illescas. The municipal personnel who recorded the commission for The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception described him as "one of the greatest men in both this kingdom and outside it". Money troubled his final years. Between 1607 and 1608 he fought a long legal dispute with the authorities at Illescas over payment, work that spanned painting, sculpture, and architecture. He shared his life with a Spanish companion, Jerónima de Las Cuevas, whom he probably never married. She was the mother of his only son, Jorge Manuel, born in 1578, who became a painter, assisted his father, and repeated his compositions for years after inheriting the studio. While working on a commission for the Hospital de Tavera, El Greco fell seriously ill and died a month later, on the 7th of April 1614. Two Greek friends witnessed his last will. He was buried in the Church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, aged 72.

• 6. Color And Distortion

  ›

  El Greco believed color held primacy over form, calling it the most important and the most ungovernable element of painting. Francisco Pacheco, a painter and theoretician who visited him in 1611, wrote that he liked "the colors crude and unmixed in great blots as a boastful display of his dexterity". El Greco discarded classicist measure and proportion. He held that grace is the supreme quest of art, achieved only by solving the most complex problems with ease. His mature works dramatize rather than describe, transferring strong spiritual emotion directly to the viewer. His preference for exceptionally tall, slender figures led him to disregard the laws of nature, stretching his compositions ever further, especially for altarpieces. For The Immaculate Conception in Toledo, he asked to lengthen the altarpiece itself by another 1.5 feet, arguing that otherwise the form would be reduced, "which is the worst thing that can happen to a figure". His handling of light was equally distinctive. The art historian Jonathan Brown observed that "each figure seems to carry its own light within or reflects the light that emanates from an unseen source". For his materials he favored fine canvas and a viscous oil medium, working with azurite, lead-tin-yellow, vermilion, madder lake, and red lead, while seldom using costly natural ultramarine. He also excelled as a portraitist. Harold Wethey ranked him with Titian and Rembrandt for his ability to record not only a sitter's features but their character. One innovation, the interweaving of form and space across the whole surface, would re-emerge three centuries later in the works of Cézanne and Picasso.

• 7. From Scorn To Genius

  ›

  "Sunk in eccentricity" was the verdict that, over time, hardened into the word "madness". The generations right after El Greco's death disdained him. His antinaturalistic style ran against the early baroque, and he had no important followers beyond his son and a few unknown painters making weak copies. Spanish commentators such as Antonio Palomino and Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez called his mature work "contemptible", "ridiculous" and "worthy of scorn". The rescue came with Romanticism in the late 18th century. The French writer Théophile Gautier saw El Greco as the ideal romantic hero, the gifted, the misunderstood, the mad, and praised his later technique openly. In 1908, the Spanish art historian Manuel Bartolomé Cossío published the first comprehensive catalogue of his works, presenting him as the founder of the Spanish School. That same year, Julius Meier-Graefe traveled to Spain expecting to study Velázquez and instead became fascinated by El Greco. Meier-Graefe wrote that "all the generations that follow after him live in his realm". Yet competing theories turned strange. The ophthalmologists August Goldschmidt and Germán Beritens argued that El Greco painted elongated figures because of vision problems such as astigmatism, while the physician Arturo Perera blamed the use of marijuana. The historian Eric Storm called the rediscovery one of the most important events of its kind in art history. In less than fifty years, he noted, El Greco was proclaimed one of the greatest painters ever.

• 8. Brothers Across Centuries

  ›

  Pablo Picasso once declared that El Greco's structure is Cubist. While working on his Proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Picasso visited his friend Ignacio Zuloaga and studied El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal, which Zuloaga had owned since 1897. Decades later, on the 22nd of February 1950, Picasso opened his series of paraphrases of other painters with The Portrait of a Painter after El Greco. The pull reached across movements and centuries. Diego Velázquez borrowed from his compositions and absorbed his use of color, his superb blacks and whites and his subtle tones of rose and blue. Francisco Goya inherited his tendency to give the body to spiritual forces. Paul Cézanne was, in Brown's words, his "spiritual brother despite the centuries which separate them". To the Blaue Reiter group in Munich in 1912, El Greco stood for the mystical inner construction they hoped to rediscover. Franz Marc tied the painter's glory to the evolution of their new perceptions on art. By 1943, Jackson Pollock had completed sixty drawing compositions after El Greco and owned three books on the Cretan master. The reach went beyond painters. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke based a set of poems on El Greco's Immaculate Conception. The Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, feeling a deep affinity, titled his autobiography Report to Greco. Salvador Dali counted him among the "Five Spanish Immortals". Long after his death, his canvases drew darker attention too. In 2015, his Portrait of a Gentleman, looted by the Nazis from the collector Julius Priester in 1944, was returned to his heirs after surfacing at auction with a fake provenance that one expert said had been "scrubbed".