El Greco

Abstract

Domenikos Theotokopoulos (c. 1541–1614), known as El Greco, was born on the Greek island of Crete, but he is most renowned for his long career in Spain. El Greco began his professional life as a successful icon painter and, in the first of many journeys, moved from Crete to Venice in 1567 or 1568. There, he remade his art on the examples of Renaissance masters, in particular Titian and Tintoretto. Several contemporaries described him as Titian’s disciple, but it is unclear whether he worked in the master’s studio or merely emulated his style. El Greco relocated to Rome in 1570; for a time he enjoyed the protection of the powerful Roman Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, although he apparently received few commissions in the city. Perhaps hoping to join the many Italian painters working for King Philip II, El Greco traveled to Spain in 1577 and shortly thereafter to Toledo, where he settled definitively in 1583. El Greco’s critical fortunes have changed dramatically over the centuries. His contemporaries differed in their appraisals of his art, recognizing his immense talent but often censuring his pictorial innovations. He won particular admiration as a portraitist and gained renown for his sacred works. At the same time, several of his religious paintings were criticized for contravening the strict standards of decorum that emerged in the wake of the Council of Trent. For much of the 17th and 18th centuries, writers disparaged what they perceived as the extravagance of his late painterly style. El Greco was discovered outside Spain in the 19th century, when Romantic writers characterized him as a rebellious genius, and painters such as Manet embraced his bold color and loose brushwork. Castilian scholars of the early 20th century associated El Greco with a quintessential “Spanishness” (despite his Greek origins) and argued that his painting embodied the mysticism of religious figures such as Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross. Others claimed him as a forerunner of modern art. Overall, the view of the mystical artist endured for decades, even as some scholars proposed spurious theories that El Greco suffered from astigmatism and used madmen as models. In the 1980s, scholarly opinion was transformed following the publication of writings by the painter himself, which demonstrated that he was an intellectual fully schooled in Italian artistic theory. El Greco brought his humanistic learning to bear on sacred and secular imagery in ways that remain to be fully explored.