El Greco

Domenikos Theotokopoulos was born on October 1, 1541, in Candia, the Venetian-ruled capital of Crete, known today as Heraklion ^[1]. His father, Georgios, worked as a merchant and tax collector, and the family belonged to the prosperous urban class of the island. Crete had been a possession of the Republic of Venice since the early thirteenth century, and its capital supported a thriving school of icon painters who blended the Byzantine inheritance with elements borrowed from Italian prints and panel paintings ^[2].

The young painter trained within this post-Byzantine tradition. A document of June 1566 records that he was already described as a master, 'maestro Domenigo,' authorized to sell one of his works at auction in Candia, which shows that he had completed his apprenticeship and gained professional standing before he was twenty-five ^[1]. A signed icon of the Dormition of the Virgin, discovered in 1983 on the island of Syros, is generally accepted as a work from this Cretan period and reveals a painter fluent in the flat, gilded language of the icon while already experimenting with Western spatial ideas ^[3].

Anyone asking who was El Greco before Spain should picture this Cretan craftsman: Greek Orthodox in formation, Venetian in citizenship, and ambitious enough to leave a secure local career for the uncertainties of Italy.

By 1567 or 1568 Theotokopoulos had moved to Venice, the natural destination for a Cretan subject of the Republic ^[2]. There he confronted the mature achievements of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, and set about remaking himself as a Western painter. He absorbed the Venetian handling of oil paint, the taste for saturated color, and the dramatic architecture of Tintoretto's compositions. Works from these years, such as versions of Christ Healing the Blind, show him wrestling with perspective and figure groups that no icon workshop had taught him ^[3].

In 1570 he traveled to Rome. The miniaturist Giulio Clovio recommended him to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese as a young Candiote pupil of Titian, and the painter was lodged for a time in the Palazzo Farnese ^[1]. In Rome he studied the legacy of Michelangelo and Raphael, joined the painters' guild of Saint Luke in 1572, and opened his own workshop. Yet commissions were scarce. Later anecdote held that he offended Roman opinion by offering to repaint Michelangelo's Last Judgment with more decorum, a story that, whether accurate or embellished, captures his combative confidence ^[4].

Roman patronage never matched his ambitions. Sometime around 1576 he left Italy for Spain, drawn by reports of the vast decorative program under way at Philip II's palace-monastery of El Escorial ^[2].

The painter reached Toledo by 1577, and the former imperial capital of Castile became his home for the rest of his life ^[1]. Spaniards found his Greek name unpronounceable and called him El Greco, the Greek, though he continued to sign his canvases in Greek letters with his full name, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, often adding the word Kres, meaning Cretan ^[2].

His first Toledan commissions arrived quickly and were substantial. For the church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo he painted a group of altarpieces including a monumental Assumption of the Virgin, now in the Art Institute of Chicago, and for the cathedral he produced El Espolio (The Disrobing of Christ), completed in 1579 ^[3]. The cathedral chapter disputed both the price and certain details of the composition, beginning a pattern of litigation over fees that would recur throughout his Spanish career ^[4].

His one serious bid for royal favor failed. Philip II commissioned The Martyrdom of Saint Maurice for El Escorial, delivered in 1582, but the king declined to install it above the intended altar and never employed the painter again ^[2]. The rejection fixed El Greco's fortunes in Toledo, where the city's clergy, scholars, and religious houses proved far more receptive to his intense and unconventional manner.

Any account of El Greco achievements begins with The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, painted in 1586 to 1588 for the church of Santo Tomé in Toledo, where it still hangs ^[1]. The canvas divides into an earthly funeral, attended by a row of sharply individualized Toledan gentlemen in black, and a heavenly zone where the count's soul rises toward Christ through swirling clouds and elongated saints. Contemporaries admired it immediately, and it remains the work most often cited when the question of what El Greco is famous for arises ^[3].

The mature Toledo decades brought a stream of altarpieces and devotional canvases: the Saint Maurice already mentioned, repeated versions of Saint Francis and of Christ carrying the Cross, the apostle series known as the Apostolados, and late visionary works such as The Opening of the Fifth Seal and the Adoration of the Shepherds he intended for his own burial chapel ^[3]. He also painted one of the earliest independent landscapes in Spanish art, the storm-lit View of Toledo now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York ^[5].

He was a penetrating portraitist. The Nobleman with his Hand on his Chest in the Museo del Prado and the portrait of the inquisitor Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara show his ability to combine austere Spanish formality with psychological alertness ^[5]. Beyond painting, he worked as an architect and sculptor, designing complete altarpiece frames and retables for his commissions, and Spanish documents describe him as an architectural drafter as well as a painter ^[2].

El Greco never married. In Toledo he formed a lasting relationship with Jerónima de las Cuevas, and their son Jorge Manuel Theotokopoulos, born in 1578, trained in his father's workshop and later practiced as a painter and architect in his own right ^[1]. Why the couple did not wed is unknown; scholars have speculated about an earlier marriage in Crete or Italy, but no document settles the question ^[4].

The painter lived in rented apartments in the palace of the Marquis of Villena, keeping a large household and, according to early accounts, hiring musicians to play while he dined, a detail that fed his reputation for extravagance ^[4]. He assembled a substantial library, unusual for a painter of the period. The inventory drawn up after his death listed works in Greek, Italian, and Spanish, including Aristotle, Vitruvius, and Vasari, and his surviving annotations in copies of Vasari's Lives and Daniele Barbaro's edition of Vitruvius reveal a sharp, independent theorist of art ^[6].

His circle included the leading intellectuals of Toledo. The poet Luis de Góngora composed a sonnet on his tomb, and the preacher and writer Hortensio Félix Paravicino, whose portrait El Greco painted around 1609, praised him in verse, writing that Crete gave him life and Toledo a better homeland ^[3].

The final fifteen years of his life were among his most productive and his most radical. Working increasingly with the assistance of Jorge Manuel and the workshop, he undertook large altarpiece programs for the Colegio de Doña María de Aragón in Madrid, the Hospital de la Caridad at Illescas, and the Hospital de San Juan Bautista (Tavera) in Toledo ^[3]. The Illescas commission triggered a long and bitter lawsuit over valuation that drained his finances, and despite steady work he remained burdened by debt ^[4].

The late style pushed his tendencies to their extreme. Figures stretched further, flames of drapery and cloud dissolved into flickering brushwork, and color turned cold and strange. Canvases such as The Vision of Saint John, Laocoön (his only surviving mythological subject, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington), and the late Adoration of the Shepherds abandon naturalism for an art of ecstatic distortion ^[5]. Some early writers blamed failing eyesight or astigmatism for these forms; modern scholarship treats them instead as deliberate expressive and spiritual choices consistent with his own theoretical notes ^[6].

El Greco died in Toledo on April 7, 1614, at the age of seventy-two, and was buried in the church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, the site of his first great Spanish commission; his remains were later transferred and their final location is uncertain ^[1]. Jorge Manuel compiled inventories of the studio that record dozens of finished and unfinished canvases, a key source for reconstructing his output ^[2].

For more than two centuries after his death, El Greco's reputation languished. Spanish academic taste dismissed his distortions as eccentric or even as evidence of madness, and outside Toledo his works were little known ^[4]. The turn came in the nineteenth century, when Romantic travelers and French painters, among them Delacroix and later Manet, encountered his canvases and championed their intensity ^[5].

The rediscovery accelerated around 1900. The Spanish painter Ignacio Zuloaga and the scholar Manuel Bartolomé Cossío, whose 1908 monograph gave the artist his first serious catalogue, presented El Greco as a proto-modern visionary ^[6]. Picasso studied him closely; the compressed, angular figures of the Demoiselles d'Avignon period owe a debt to The Opening of the Fifth Seal, and Expressionists such as Franz Marc and the painters of Der Blaue Reiter claimed him as an ancestor ^[5].

Today his paintings anchor collections at the Prado, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery in London, and the Museo del Greco in Toledo, a house museum founded in 1911 ^[7]. Among the enduring El Greco facts is the singularity of his position: a Greek icon painter who mastered Venetian color and Roman design, then fused all three in Counter-Reformation Spain into a style that belonged to no school and anticipated art made three hundred years after his death ^[3].