1541 - April 7, 1614
Birth Place : Chandax, the present day Herakleion
El Greco (probably combination of the Castilian and the Venetian language for "The Greek", 1541– April 7, 1614) was a prominent painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. El Greco never forgot that he was of Greek descent and usually signed his paintings in Greek letters with his full name, Doménicos Theotocópoulos (Greek:Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος), thereby underscoring his origins. He was born in Crete (in the village Fodele or in Candia (now Heraklion), the largest city in the island), but decided to go to Venice to study. In 1577 he emigrated to Toledo, Spain, where he lived and worked until the end of his life.
El Greco is a best known Greek painter in the world. His highly individual dramatic and expressionistic style met with the puzzlement of his contemporaries but gained newfound appreciation in the 20th century. He is best known for tortuously elongated figures and often fantastic or phantasmagorical pigmentation; traits of an art which for certain intellectuals provides an ideal combination of the Eastern tradition of Byzantium and Western civilization. According to the evidence of his time, Doménicos Greco acquired his name, not only because of his place of origin, but also through his sublime art: "Out of the great esteem he was held in he was called the Greek (il Greco)".
Early years and family
El Greco was born in 1541 in Fodele, a village, or in Candia (or Chandax, the present day Herakleion), Crete. He was descended from a prosperous urban Orthodox family, which in all probability had been driven out of Chania to Candia after an uprising against the Venetians in 1526-1528. El Greco's father, Geórgios Theotocópoulos, was a mechant and tax collector. Nothing is known about his mother, just as we have no information concerning his first wife, a Greek; about his later companion, a Spaniard, there are mere speculations. El Greco had an older brother, Manoússos Theotocópoulos (1531-December 13, 1604), a wealthy merchant, who spent the last years of his life (1603-1604) in El Greco's house in Toledo.
El Greco was first trained as an icon painter. Apart from painting, young Doménicos must have studied the classics, ancient Greek and Latin; this would be confirmed later on by his splendid library he left upon his death in Toledo. In Candia there were all the preconditions for the acquisition of a humanictic education, since the city, where the Western and Eastern cultures blended, was a vivid center of artistic activity (In the 16th century approximately two hundred painters were active there, organizing into guilds, based on the Italian model). In 1563, at the age of twenty-two, El Greco is described in a document as a "master", which means he was already officially exercising the profession of painting. Later, in June 1566, as a witness to a contract he would sign his name as Master Menégos Theotocópoulos, painter (μαΐστρος Μένεγος Θεοτοκόπουλος σγουράφος).
In Italy
According to Harold E. Wethey, professor of the History of Art at the University of Michigan, because Crete was then at Venetian possession (the island came under Venetian sway as early as 1211) and El Greco was a Venetian citizen, he decided to go to Venice to study. The exact year in which this took place is not clear; according to archival research of the late 1990s, at the age of twenty-six El Greco had not yet left Candia where his works, created in the spirit of the post-Byzantine painters of the Cretan School, were greatly esteemed. According to other archival material in 18 August 1568 he was in Venice. Knowledge of El Greco's years in Italy is limited. He lived in Venice until 1570 and, according to a letter of the Croatian miniaturist, Giulio Clovio, he entered the studio of Titian, then in his nineties but still vigorous. Clovio characterizes El Greco as "a rare talent in painting".
In 1571, a year after El Greco left Venice, his brother Manoussos was settled in the Italian city. El Greco moved to Rome, where he executed a series of work strongly marked by his Venetian apprenticeship. On September 18, 1572 "Dominico Greco" paid his dues to the guild of St. Luke in Rome as a miniature painter. It is unknown how long the young artist remained in Rome, because he may have returned to Venice (c. 1575-1576), before he left for Spain. In Rome, El Greco was received as a guest at the fabled palace of the Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (Palazzo Farnese), where the young Cretan painter came into contact with the intellectual circles of the city. He also associated with the eminent Roman scholar Fulvio Orsini, whose collection included seven paintings by the artist (The View of Mt. Sinai and the portrait of Clovio are among them).
The works painted by El Greco in Italy are in the Venetian Renaissance style of the 16th century. His agile, elongated figures are reminiscent of Tintoretto, while the chromatic framework connect him to Titian. His stay in Rome also left its traces on his art. Traits of his art, such as the violent perspective vanishing points or the strange attitudes struck by the figures with their repeated twisting and turning and the tempestuous gestures, show how quickly El Greco assimilated the teachings of Mannerism. El Greco's preference for artificial light (The Venetian painters taught him to organize his multi-figured compositions in landscapes vibrant with atmospheric light) is illusrated in the following story of this period: When the Cretan artist was still in Rome, Clovio went to visit him on a summer's day but found him sitting in a dark room, because El Greco found the darkness more conducive to thought than the light of the day, which disturbed his "inner light". El Greco is also said to have dismissed Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, while lavishing praise on Correggio and Parmigianino.
In Spain
Emigration to Toledo
In 1577 El Greco emigrated to Toledo (at the time the religious capital of Spain) where he produced his mature works. In Rome El Greco had earned the respect of certain intellectuals, but had not become widely known. During that period, a new horizon for artists had opened in Spain, where the palace of El Escorial was practically completed and Philip II of Spain, the most powerful patron of the time, had issued an invitation to the artistic world of Italy to come and decorate it. Through Clovio and Orsini El Greco must have met Benito Arias Montano, a Spanish humanist and delegate of Philip, Pedro Chacón, a clergyman , and Luis de Castilla, son of Diego de Castilla, the dean of the Cathedral of Toledo. El Greco's friendship with Castilla would secure his first large commissions in Toledo. In 1576, he signed contracts for the monumental group that was to adorn the church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo at El Escorial (42 km northwest of Madrid) and for the renowned El Espolio. By July 1577 he had arrived in Toledo and by September 1579 he had completed nine paintings for Santo Domingo, including The Trinity and The Assumption of the Virgin. These works would come to impose themselves and to confirm the painter's reputation in Toledo.
El Greco did not plan to settle permanently in Toledo, since his final aim was to win the favor of Philip and to make his mark in his court. And indeed he did manage to secure two important commissions from the monarch: the Allegory of the Holy League and the Martyrdrom of St. Maurice. The King did not like these works and the contact with the court was not continued. According to Marina Lambraki-Plak, director of the Greek National Gallery, and Jonathan Brown, professor of the History of Art at New York University, believe that Philip did not care for the works of El Greco, because they violated a basic rule of the Counter-Reformation, namely that in the image the content was paramount and not the style.
Mature works and later years
Therefore, El Greco was obliged to remain in Toledo where his fame was secure. In 1585 he appears to have established a corporate workshop capable of producing altar frames and statues as well as paintings. In 1586 he obtained the commission for The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, now his best known work. The decade 1597 to 1607 was a period of intense activity for the Cretan artist. During this period several major commissions came El Greco's way in the last 15 years of his life and his workshop created pictorial and sculptural ensembles for a variety of religious institutions. Among his major commissions of these years were three altars for the Chapel of San José in Toledo (1597–99), three paintings (1596–1600) for the Colegio de Doña María de Aragon, an Augustinian monastery in Madrid, and the high altar, four lateral altars, and the painting “St. Ildefonso” for the Hospital de la Caridad (Hospital of Charity) at Illescas (1603–05).
In 1604 the rooms of his house had risen to twenty-foor. Between 1607-1608 El Greco was involved in a protracted legal dispute with the authorities of the Hospital of Charity at Illescas concerning the payment of his work, which included painting, sculpture and architecture; this dispute contributed to the economic difficulties he experienced until the end of his life. In 1608 he received his last major commission for the hospital of Saint John the Baptist in Toledo.
In Toledo El Greco would set up his houshold; the contracts that have survived mention him as the tenant from 1585 of a complex consisting of three apartments which belonged to the Marquis de Villena. The inventory of the household goods does not retain however the memory of a wealthy mansion. Within this setting, which was also used as his workshop, he passed the rest of his life, painting and studying. It is not confirmed whether he lived with his Spanish female companion, whom he probably never married, Jerónima de Las Cuevas, mother of his only son, Jorge Manuel (Γιωργής Μανουήλ), born in 1578.
Doménicos Theotocópoulos, generally known as El Greco, died on April 7, 1614.
Re-evaluation of his art
No sooner had he died than El Greco became incomprehensible, enigmatic and he had no important followers. Only his son and a few unknown painters produced weak copies of El Greco's works. The master was disdained by the next generations after his death, because his work was opposed in many respects to the principles of the early baroque style which came to the fore near the beginning of the 17th century and soon supplanted the last surviving traits of the 16th century Mannerism. Later 17th and early 18th century Spanish commentators praised his skill but criticized his antinaturalistic style and his complex iconography. Acislo Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco, a Spanish painter and writer on art, described his mature work "contemptible and ridiculous". Other commentators, such as Céan Bermúdez, argued that El Greco made his works so eccentric that he became ridiculous and worthy of scorn. In this book El Greco is established as the founder of the Spanish School and as the conveyor of the Spanish soul.
This situation was not rectified until Romanticism fashioned a new taste. To Theophile Gautier, a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and literary critic, El Greco was the precursor of the European Romantic movement in all its craving for the strange and the exteme. French Romantic writers praised his work for the "extravagance" and "madness" which had disturbed 18th century commentators. During the operation of the Spanish Museum in Paris El Greco became the ideal romantic hero and all the romantic strereotypes (the gifted, the misunderstood, the marginal, the one who lost his reason because of the scorn of his contemoraries) were projected on him. The critic Zacharie Astruc and the scholar Paul Lefort helped to promote a widespread revival of interest in his painting. In the 1890's, Spanish painters then living in Paris adopted him as their guide and mentor. In 1908 Manuel B. Cossio, who regarded El Greco's style as a response to Spanish mysticism, published the first comprehensive catalogue of El Greco's works. Julius Meier-Graefe, an important researcher of French impressionism travelled in Spain in 1908 and put down his experiences in The Spanische Reise', the first book which established El Greco as a great painter of the past. In El Greco's work, Meier-Graefe found foreshadowings of modernity. To the Blaue Reiter group in Munich in 1912, El Greco typified that mystical inner construction that it was the task of their generation to rediscover. To the English artist and critic Roger Fry in 1920 El Greco was the archetypal genius who did as he thought best "with complete indifference to what effect the right expression might have on the public." Fry described El Greco 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".
El Greco's re-evaluation was not limited to just scholarship. The expressiveness and the colors of the Cretan artist influenced Eugène Delacroix and Édouard Manet. The first painter who appears to have noticed the structural code in the morphology of the mature El Greco was Paul Cézanne, one of the forerunners of cubism. The symbolists and Pablo Picasso during his blue period drew on the cold tonality of El Greco, utilizing the anatomy of his ascetic figures. The expressionists would focus on the expressive distortions of El Greco. According to Franz Marc, one of the principal painters of the German expressionist movement, "we refer with pleasure and with steadfastness to the case of El Greco, because the glory of this painter is closely tied to the evolution of our new perceptions on art". Jackson Pollock, an American painter and representative of the abstract expressionist movement was also influenced by El Greco. Pollock completed by 1943 sixty individual drawing compositions after El Greco and possessed three books on the Cretan master.
The early cubist inquiries of Picasso were to uncover other aspects in the work of El Greco: the structural analysis of his compositions, the multi-faced refraction of form, the interweaving of form and space, and the special effects of highlights. Several traits of cubism, such as the materialistic rendering of time and the distortions, have their analogies in El Greco's work. According to Picasso, El Greco's structure is cubist. In February 22, 1950, Picasso commenced on his series of "paraphrases" of other painters' works and he began with The Portrait of a Painter after El Greco
Technique and style
Fundamental principles of El Greco's style were the primacy of the imagination over the subjective character of creation. According to Lambraki-Plaka "intuition and the judgement of the eye are the painter's surest guide".
Artistic beliefs
Basis for the scholars' conclusions about El Greco's aesthetics are the notes written in his own hand in the margins of two books that came from his library. El Greco discarded classicist criteria, such as measure and proportion. He believed that grace is the supreme quest of the artistic form. But the painter achieves grace only if he manages to solve the most complex problems with obvious ease.
El Greco regards color as the most important and the most ungovernable element of painting. He declared that color had primacy over drawing, which is why his opinion on Michelangelo was that "he was a good man, but he did not know how to paint". This is verified by Francisco Pacheco, a painter and theoretician who visited El Greco in 1611. Pacheco was startled by the painter's technique: "If I say that Domenico Greco sets his hand to his canvases many and many times over, that he worked upon them again and again, but to leave the colors crude and unblent in great blots as a boastful display of his dexterity?" Pachero affirms that "El Greco believed in constant repainting and retouching in order to make the broad masses tell flat as in nature".
Further assessments
El Greco's works are all very intense to the viewer. The strong spiritual emotion transfers from painting directly to the audience. According to Pacheco, El Greco's perturbed, violent and at times seemingly careless in execution art was due to a studied effort to acquire a freedom of style.
Extreme distortion of body characterizes El Greco's last works—for example, the “Adoration of the Shepherds” (Prado Museum, Madrid), painted in 1612–14 for his own burial chapel. The brilliant, dissonant colours and the strange shapes and poses create a sense of wonder and ecstasy, as the shepherd and angels celebrate the miracle of the newly born child
“View and Plan of Toledo” (1610–14; Greco House and Museum, Toledo) is almost like a vision, all of the buildings painted glistening white. An inscription by the artist on the canvas explains quite fancifully that he had placed the Hospital of San Juan Bautista on a cloud in the foreground so that it could better be seen and that the map in the picture shows the streets of the city. At the left, a river god represents the Tagus, which flows around Toledo, a city built on rocky heights. Although El Greco had lived in Italy and in Rome himself, he rarely used such classical Roman motives.
El Greco often produces an open pipe between Earth and Heaven in his paintings. The Annunciation is one example of this spiritual conduit being present. The people, clouds, and other objects in many of his paintings open away from a central, empty passageway between the ground and the upper spiritual firmament. This is sometimes a subtle concavity in fabrics that implies a ghostly passageway that leads vertically from the people at the bottom to the angels at the top of the paintings. In other paintings, this central cylinder of open space is very prominent, providing a distinctive visionary style, due to the deep insights of the pious painter. These paintings imply that El Greco, himself, can see the holy path from common human existence toward a very real Heaven.
Based on the notes written in El Greco's own hand and on his unique style, some modern scholars rekindle, enhanced and documented, the older theory concerning the Byzantine origins of El Greco's art. The discovery of the Dormition of the Virgin on Syros, an authentic and signed work from the painter's Cretan period, also contributed to the rekindling of this theory. The iconographic type of the Dormition was suggested as the compositional model for the Burial of the Count of Orgaz for quite some time.
“View and Plan of Toledo” (1610–14; Greco House and Museum, Toledo) is almost like a vision, all of the buildings painted glistening white. An inscription by the artist on the canvas explains quite fancifully that he had placed the Hospital of San Juan Bautista on a cloud in the foreground so that it could better be seen and that the map in the picture shows the streets of the city. At the left, a river god represents the Tagus, which flows around Toledo, a city built on rocky heights. Although El Greco had lived in Italy and in Rome himself, he rarely used such classical Roman motives.
El Greco often produces an open pipe between Earth and Heaven in his paintings. The Annunciation is one example of this spiritual conduit being present. The people, clouds, and other objects in many of his paintings open away from a central, empty passageway between the ground and the upper spiritual firmament. This is sometimes a subtle concavity in fabrics that implies a ghostly passageway that leads vertically from the people at the bottom to the angels at the top of the paintings. In other paintings, this central cylinder of open space is very prominent, providing a distinctive visionary style, due to the deep insights of the pious painter. These paintings imply that El Greco, himself, can see the holy path from common human existence toward a very real Heaven.
Based on the notes written in El Greco's own hand and on his unique style, some modern scholars rekindle, enhanced and documented, the older theory concerning the Byzantine origins of El Greco's art. The discovery of the Dormition of the Virgin on Syros, an authentic and signed work from the painter's Cretan period, also contributed to the rekindling of this theory. The iconographic type of the Dormition was suggested as the compositional model for the Burial of the Count of Orgaz for quite some time.[31]
The English art historian David Davies seeks the roots of El Greco's style in the intellectual sources of his Greek-Christian education and in the world of his recollections from the liturgical and ceremonial aspect of the Orthodox Church. Davies believes that the religious climate of the Counter-Reformation and the aesthetics of mannerism acted as catalysts to activate his individual technique. According to Davies, "El Greco sought to convey the essential or universal meaning of the subject through a process of redefinition and reduction. In Toledo, he accomplished this by abandoning the Renaissance emphasis on the observation and selection of natural phenomena. Instead he responded to Byzantine and sixteenth-century Mannerist art in which images are conceived in the mind". The same scholar asserts that Platonism and Neo-Platonism (not that of the Renaissance but the ancient one), Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (who was included in his library), texts of the Church fathers and liturgical texts offer the keys to the understanding of El Greco's style. Fernando Marias and Agustín Bustamante García, the scholars who transcribed El Greco's hand-written notes, connect the power that the painter gives to light with the ideas underlying Christian Neo-Platonism. According to Wethey, in El Greco's last works "the devotional intensity of mood reflects the religious spirit of Roman Catholic Spain in the period of the Counter-Reformation".
Architecture and sculpture
El Greco in his lifetime was highly esteemed as an architect and sculptor. He usually designed complete altar compositions, working as architect and sculptor as well as painter, for instance at the Hospital de la Caridad. For Espolio the master designed the original altar of gilded wood which has been destroyed, but his small sculptured group of the Miracle of St. Ildefonso still survives on the lower centre of the frame.
His most important architectural structure was the church and Monastery of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, of which he executed the whole architecture, sculpture and painting. El Greco is regarded as a painter who incorporated architecture in his painting. He is also credited with the architectural frames to his own paintings in Toledo. Pacheco charecterized him as "a writer of painting, sculpture and architecture".
In the marginalia El Greco inscribed in his copy of Daniele Barbaro's translation of Vitruvius' De Architectura, the Cretan artist refuted Vitruvius' attachment to archaeological remains, canonical proportions, perspective and mathematics. He also saw Vitruvius's manner of distorting proportions in order to compensate for distance from the eye as responsible for creating monstrous forms. El Greco aversed to the very idea of rules in architecture; he believed above all in the freedom of invention and defends novelty, variety and complexity. These ideas were, however, far too expreme for the architectural circles of his era and had no immediate resonance.
Fame and impact of his art
Michael Kimmelman, a review author of The New York Times, stated that "to Greeks [El Greco] became the quintessential Greek painter; to the Spanish, the quintessential Spaniard". According to Lambraki-Plaka, El Greco is not loved just by experts and art lovers but also by ordinary people, as was proved by the campaign to raise the funds for the purchase of Saint Peter, a painting by the Cretan master.Within the general consensus as to the impact of El Greco, Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, said in April 1980 that El Greco was "the most extraordinary painter that ever came along back then" and that he was "maybe three or four centuries ahead of his time".
In 1998 the Greek electronic composer and artist Vangelis published El Greco, a symphonic album inspired by El Greco. This album is an expansion of an earlier album by Vangelis, Foros Timis Ston Greco.
Articles source : WikiPedia
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