El Greco

Initially a painter of icons in the Orthodox Byzantine tradition, Doménikos Theotokópoulos, known as El Greco — Italian for ‘The Greek’ — was born in 1541 on the Venetian island of Crete. He is best known, though, as a leading Mannerist painter of religious scenes in Spain.

El Greco’s life and work were ruled by his devout devotion, painting because ‘the spirits whisper madly inside my head.’ His use of elongated figures, fantastical pigmentations and complex and often overwhelming compositions project the divine experiences of his subjects — his aim was to depict a higher, imagined realm of spirituality. These abstracted visions established a new means of visual representation that broke from the Renaissance and looked forward to modern art, especially Expressionism and Cubism, in the way that El Greco reconsidered form and figure beyond literal reality.

Around 1567, El Greco relocated from Crete to Venice, learning perspective and figuration in the workshop of Titian. Three years later he secured quarters in the palace of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in Rome. There he began to formulate his own style, rejecting proportion and balance in favour of strange angles and clashing colours that distorted his pictures, whilst giving them psychological drama and spiritual pulse. This radical shift, coupled with El Greco’s criticisms of the recently deceased Michelangelo, however, cost his commissions — he wasn’t tasked with a single altarpiece during his six-year-long stay.

In 1577 El Greco moved to Spain. In 1579, he received a royal commission from Philip II for The Martyrdom of Saint Maurice, however the king rejected the painting. The artist settled in Toledo, where he finally found success amongst a sympathetic circle of friends and patrons; among his late masterpieces are The Disrobing of Christ, an altarpiece for Toledo Cathedral, and The Burial of Count Orgaz for the church of Santo Tomé.

Following El Greco’s death in Toledo in 1614, his highly individualistic art was widely received with reluctance, confusion and as standing in opposition to the Baroque. He had no followers. In the 19th century, however, the French Romantics heralded him an eccentric visionary. In 1920 the British critic Rodger Fry described him as ‘an old master who is not merely modern, but actually appears a good many steps ahead of us, turning back to show us the way.’