El Greco

Spanish painter

• Born: 1541
• Birthplace: Candia, Crete
• Died: April 7, 1614
• Place of death: Toledo, Spain

Adapting principles he learned in Venice and Rome, El Greco achieved a unique artistic style and became Spain’s greatest religious artist and one of the world’s foremost portrait painters.

Early Life

Of the family of El Greco (ehl GRAY-koh), little is known, except that his father’s name was Jorghi and one brother was named Manoussos. Since his knowledge of languages and his wide intellectual interests suggest a good education, El Greco’s biographers have assumed that his Greek family belonged to the middle class. During his boyhood, Crete was a center of Byzantine culture and Greek Orthodox religion. Art on the island was primarily church related, depicting saints in the somber manner of orthodox iconography. Intended to inspire devotion, it often featured stereotypical human forms against a dark and undeveloped background. From a surviving document, it is known that by age twenty-five El Greco was a practicing artist.

For unknown reasons, El Greco left Crete, probably in 1567, for Venice, where he continued his study of painting. There he encountered the warm, rich coloration and carefully balanced perspective of the Venetian school. Biographers have surmised that he became a member of Titian’s workshop. In Venice, he adopted the nickname “Il Greco” (the Greek), later changing the article Il to the Spanish El.

In 1570, El Greco left Venice for Rome, where he came under the influence of the Florentine-Roman school, dominated by the rich artistic legacy of Raphael and Michelangelo. The mannerist influence of Roman painting, which featured elongated human forms, unusual gestures, convoluted and contorted body positions, foreshortening, and half figures, left a lasting impression on El Greco’s work. In 1572, he was admitted to the Roman Academy of St. Luke, the painters’ guild, a membership that entitled him to artistic patronage and contracts. Among the paintings that remain from his Roman experience are an extraordinary portrait of his patron Giulio Clovio, Christ Healing the Blind (1577-1578), and Purification of the Temple (c. 1570-1575), an early work that includes a large group of figures.

According to anecdote, El Greco did not thrive in Rome because he made disparaging remarks about Michelangelo, and, while that cannot be confirmed, his later written comments reveal that he thought Michelangelo’s work defective in coloration. Among his circle of acquaintances in Rome were two Spanish theologians who later became his patrons, Luis de Castilla and Pedro Chacón, both from Toledo. Sometime during the middle 1570’s, he left Rome for Spain, where he hoped to secure patronage and to establish his reputation.

Life’s Work

In 1577, the year of El Greco’s arrival, Toledo reflected the culture of Spain following the Council of Trent, an event that inaugurated the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In art, its canons called for religious themes and events to be related closely to human experience and to embody strong and immediate sensory appeal. The Spanish monarch, Philip II, was intent on preserving Spanish power, prestige, and grandeur, and commissions for artists were readily available. Among El Greco’s early Spanish paintings, The Martyrdom of Saint Maurice (c. 1580) was commissioned by the king for his palace, El Escorial. The painting did not please the royal patron, for he did not regard it as adequately devotional; thereafter, El Greco acquired most of his patronage from Toledo.

Shortly after his arrival in the city, El Greco settled into domestic life. In 1578, his Spanish mistress, Doña Jerónima de las Cuevas, bore his son Jorge Manuel Theotokópoulos, whom he trained as an artist and collaborator. In the Villena Palace, he acquired spacious apartments (twenty-four rooms) and established a workshop employing several assistants. There is some indication that he lived an affluent if not lavish lifestyle. He accumulated a substantial library, largely of classics and Italian literature, and hired musicians to perform during his dinner. His personality was somewhat haughty and contentious, and he often found himself involved in conflicts over the remuneration for his work, which at times resulted in lawsuits.

The workshop and assistants were necessitated by the exigencies of contracts available at the time. The most profitable were for altarpieces, groups of five or six large paintings arranged above and beside the altars of churches and chapels. These paintings required elaborately sculpted bases and frames, and the artist who was prepared to undertake an entire project held an advantage. Contracts were usually specific as to subject, size, and arrangement. Many of El Greco’s best-known paintings resulted from such contracts. His masterpiece The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586), for example, a painting that measures ten by sixteen feet, has never been removed from the Church of Santo Tomé, Toledo.

El Greco’s total output is estimated at 285 paintings, although the number attributed to him has ranged upward to 850. A firm figure is not easily ascertained for several reasons. First, he often produced several versions of the same subject, and these can easily be misclassified as copies or imitations. Second, his workshop produced smaller-scale copies of his better-known works for sale to clients, and these can easily be mistaken for originals. Third, paintings by an obscure contemporary, named Doménikos, have been confused with those of El Greco. Finally, after his death, his associates continued to paint in his style, and some of their paintings have been misattributed to him.

A number of paintings represent portraits of his contemporaries, usually Spanish clergy, gentry, and nobility. El Greco, however, was primarily a religious painter. His normal subjects are Christ and the Holy Family, New Testament scenes, miracles from the New Testament and from the early Christian era, saints, and significant rites. While some are epic in scale, presenting views of heaven, earth, and hell, and including divine, angelic, and human figures, others portray single saints or clergymen.

El Greco considered himself a learned painter as opposed to an artisan; thus, he sought to formulate a theory of painting and to apply it. Spanish artist Francisco Pacheco mentions his writings on painting, sculpture, and architecture, though none exists today. Yet some evidence of El Greco’s aesthetic judgment may be gleaned from extant marginalia in books he owned. In practice, he consciously attempted to combine the rich coloration of the Venetian school with the mannerist style of the Florentine-Roman school. These two cultural influences, combined with the canons of religious art of the Counter-Reformation and his iconographic background, represent the dominant influences on his artistic production. Although nothing in El Greco’s art is entirely original, the combination of disparate influences creates a strong impression of originality and even of eccentricity.

In exploring the prominent features of his work, one may consider composition, color, and illumination. Except for the early paintings, incorporating architectural forms and views of Toledo, the paintings usually have a shallow background. Distant perspective is interrupted by a wall or draperies, or by the darkened, cloudy sky so prevalent in his work. In general, dimensions are handled aesthetically, not naturalistically, creating within a single painting a combination of flatness and depth.

The focus of most of El Greco’s paintings is the human form, whether in portraits or in the epic paintings featuring numerous individuals. The body is often elongated, perhaps the most characteristic feature of his composition, as if to intimate that the character has striven to surpass human limitations. Often, the heads, with gaunt and angular faces, appear too small for the long bodies. Following the mannerist tradition, El Greco often foreshortens some figures, includes half figures that are cut by the edges, and places human forms in curved positions, contributing to a geometric pattern in the painting as a whole. In addition, arms and legs are sometimes positioned at unusual angles, creating effects of imbalance and distortion.

Viewing El Greco’s human forms, one is drawn to their faces and hands, their most expressive elements. The hands are sometimes pointing, sometimes clasped, sometimes at rest, but always refined, graceful, and expressive. The faces usually angular, unlined, and elongated reveal a limited range of human expression. El Greco’s gaunt faces carry a serious cast, accompanied by the appropriate religious emotions. His subjects are grave, restrained, reserved, devout, and penitent. In some paintings, the eyes peer upward toward heaven with a facial expression mingling devotion, fear, and hope. In others, they look directly at the viewer, but somehow past him or her, as if to perceive a spiritual world that remains invisible to others. It may be that the contrast between the extravagant gestures in the paintings and the taut control of the faces represents El Greco’s most compelling technique of composition. The restraint and self-control evident in the faces suggest that the individual will has been conquered, and the gestures denote a spiritual significance that transcends time.

A painter whose early experience was with the dark tones of Orthodox iconography must have found the bright colors of the Venetian school highly pleasing. El Greco sought to use a range of colors to enliven religious art, though the bright reds and blues of his early paintings darken during the course of his career. His preferred colors are blue, red, yellow, yellow green, and slate gray, though his use of neutral tones appears to increase with time.

As critics have observed, El Greco’s treatment of illumination, like his handling of dimensions, is aesthetic rather than naturalistic. Typically, light from an undetermined source is directed toward the most significant portions of a painting. In The Trinity (1577-1579), for example, God the Father embraces the crucified Christ. Christ’s body is illuminated from a source to the left and behind the viewer, while, at the same time, light radiates outward from heaven behind the Father’s head. At times, El Greco’s illumination has the yellowish-green cast of early morning or of light breaking through a darkened, cloudy, windswept sky, creating heightened tones not of the familiar world.

Despite his success as a painter and his many large commissions, El Greco did not attain wealth, though numerous contemporaries praised his genius. He died in Toledo on April 7, 1614, and was interred in the Church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, which he had decorated.

Significance

El Greco’s mannered style, his unusual handling of illumination, and his intensely religious subjects proved difficult for succeeding ages to appreciate. Because his paintings were not seen outside Spain and because Spain possessed no critical tradition in art, he became a forgotten artist in the rest of Europe. Although El Greco was capable of finely detailed drawing, he was inclined to leave large portions of his paintings indistinct, producing a blurred effect. This tendency is pervasive in the later paintings, especially those dealing with miracles and mystical events. During the late nineteenth century, he was discovered by the French Impressionist Édouard Manet, who saw in El Greco an earlier practitioner of Impressionist aesthetics. Like the Impressionists, and like the expressionists as well, he freely altered reality in order to enhance aesthetic effect.

Once his artistic power became recognized and widely acclaimed, art critics sought to account for him through a number of highly speculative theories: that he was a mystic, that he elongated figures because of astigmatism, or that he was quintessentially Spanish. More systematic and careful scholarship has demonstrated that El Greco derived from his study and experience, largely of Italian painting, the characteristic elements of his art. To be sure, he combined the influences of Italy in an unusual and highly original way and adapted his painting to the Spanish Counter-Reformation. He is now recognized as among some half dozen of the world’s greatest portrait painters and as Spain’s greatest religious artist.

Bibliography

Alvarez Lopera, José. El Greco: Identity and Transformation Crete, Italy, Spain. New York: Abbeville, 1999. Catalog of a major European exhibition of the artist’s work includes eight essays by major scholars on various aspects of the artist’s evolution and the importance of the various cultures in which he worked and evolved.

Brown, Jonathan, ed. Figures of Thought: El Greco as Interpreter of History, Tradition, and Ideas. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1982. An illustrated collection of six essays by El Greco scholars. Centers on individual paintings and portraits. The final essay explores the artist’s legal entanglements over the remuneration for his works.

Davies, David, ed. El Greco. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. This catalog of a joint exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and London’s National Gallery includes important interpretive and historical essays as well as reproductions and analysis of the specific paintings in the exhibition.

Guinard, Paul. El Greco. Translated by James Emmons. Lausanne, Switzerland: Skira, 1956. In this small book with fifty-three high-quality color reproductions, Guinard presents a biographical and critical study attempting to correlate the painter with his milieu. Back matter includes commentary on the artist by six contemporaries, biographical sketches of twenty-five contemporaries, and an annotated bibliography.

Marías, Fernando. El Greco in Toledo. London: Scala, 2001. Detailed analysis of El Greco’s Toledo paintings, both landscapes and cityscapes. Emphasizes El Greco’s originality, not merely in his art but also in his conception of what it meant to be an artist, within a Spanish culture that still considered painters to be craftsmen rather than creative intellectuals. Includes color illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.

Theotocopuli, Domenico [El Greco, pseud.]. El Greco. Edited by Léo Bronstein. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1950. This work offers reproductions in color of approximately forty of El Greco’s better-known paintings, with evaluation and analysis. The comments, written for the nonspecialist, emphasize technique and appreciation.

Theotocopuli, Domenico [El Greco, pseud.]. El Greco. Edited by Maurice Legendre. New York: Hyperion Press, 1947. Primarily a volume of reproductions, most in black and white. Offers a brief, interesting, and highly conjectural assessment of the artist’s life, work, and philosophy, plus an extended unannotated bibliography.

Theotocopuli, Domenico [El Greco, pseud.]. El Greco of Toledo. Boston: Little, Brown, 1982. A catalog of the 1982-1983 international El Greco exhibit. Includes numerous color and black-and-white reproductions and three valuable scholarly essays concerning the history of Toledo, El Greco’s career and life, and the altarpieces that he completed.

Wethey, Harold E. El Greco and His School. 2 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962. Applying sound scholarly research, Wethey explores questions of authenticity in an effort to establish El Greco’s canon. He describes each painting and provides a complex classification according to subject matter. His biographical account of El Greco places heavy emphasis on the Venetian period. The work is comprehensive, reliable, and highly detailed indispensable for serious students.