Few artists among the Old Masters produced work as startlingly fresh to contemporary eyes as Doménikos Theotokópoulos (1541–1614), a Greek transplant to the Iberian city of Toledo who’s better known by his Spanish nickname, El Greco.
Though he’s associated with Mannerist painting, which upended the equilibrium of Renaissance proportionality and illusionistic space, nothing quite compared to El Greco’s facture, whose brush marks, often broad and clearly visible, depicted attenuated figures that seemed to flicker like candles in the wind. He also tended to compress background and foreground, flattening his compositions into all-over schemes.
Moreover, he frequently abjured naturalistic color, imparting a bluish tint to flesh, for instance, while using fabric to introduce areas of bold hues whose highlights registered more like zig-zagging marks than as folds in cloth. It’s no surprise, then, to learn that while El Greco’s work puzzled some of his coevals, it had a huge impact on modern painters like Picasso.
El Greco’s idiosyncratic methods speak to the artistic traditions he absorbed to earn his singular place in the canon. He was born in Crete when it was a vassal state of Venice known as the Kingdom of Candia. Like all Cretan artists, he was trained in the Byzantine icon tradition, which featured otherworldly, elongated figuration and flat, gilded backdrops.
At 26 he left for Venice, where he encountered the work of Tintoretto, who was known as Il Furioso for his fast, bold brushwork. Moving then to Rome, where he crossed paths with the Mannerists, and finally to Spain, El Greco synthesized the styles of the Byzantine, Venetian, and Roman schools to produced paintings so ahead of their time, they wouldn’t be fully appreciated for 300 years.
You’ll see for yourself in our tour of El Greco masterpieces.
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The Disrobing of Christ (El Expolio) (1577–79), Sacristy of Toledo Cathedral, Toledo, Spain
Like most artists of the period, El Greco depended on the largesse of the Church, and this piece, begun the year he arrived in Toledo, became his first major commission (arranged with the help of Luis de Castilla, a friend from Rome whose father was an important church official). Painted for the room in Toledo’s cathedral where priests changed into their vestments, the painting pictures Christ about to be stripped naked for crucifixion. More than half of this 9-by-5-foot composition is taken up by Christ’s figure as the panel’s vertical axis. Wearing a vermillion robe, he explodes from the scrum of figures around him with an ecstatic force typical of El Greco’s work.
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The Nobleman With His Hand on His Chest (c. 1580), Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
This likeness of a Spanish aristocrat is the best known of a series of six paintings depicting high-status men attired in black with white ruffs. Like some of the others, the subject is unknown, and speculation as to who he is ranges from Antonio Pérez, secretary to King Philip II, to Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote. Whoever he was, his melancholic expression and delicate gesture of placing of his hand over his heart make for a powerful study in emotional vulnerability well ahead of its time. The Nobleman was also the direct inspiration for Amedeo Modigliani’s 1913 portrait, Paul Alexandre in Front of a Stained Window.
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Burial of the Count Orgaz (1586–88), Santo Tomé, Toledo, Spain
Among El Greco’s masterpieces, this painting for the church of Santo Tomé in Toledo sits near the top of the list. Measuring 15 by 11 feet, it’s his largest, and it relays a miracle said to have transpired at the funeral of Count Orgaz, a city official who died 1323.
According to the story, Saint Stephen and Saint Augustine descended from heaven to personally lay him to rest. They’re seen in the foreground, ablaze in golden robes. Behind them, a line of solemn male witnesses, representing the spiritual redemption awaiting the devout, divides Christ’s celestial realm from the ceremony’s terrestrial setting.
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View of Toledo (1599–1600), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Looking like it was made in the 20th rather than the 17th century, this cityscape of El Greco’s adopted home shows why his work had such an impact on modern art, especially Expressionism. In his brooding depiction of Toledo’s eastern half as ostensibly seen from the north, he ignores the city’s actual layout by placing the spire of Toledo’s cathedral next to its fort, the Alcazar—an impossibility from that vantage point. The composition dissolves into near abstraction as a swirl of green, brown, and black hills butts up against a furiously painted black sky, where a light breaking through dark clouds suggests the presence of the divine.
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Christ Driving the Money Changers From the Temple (1600), National Gallery, London
Beginning in 1568, while he was living in Venice and working under the influence of Tintoretto, El Greco painted at least four versions of this key event in Christ’s life. This iteration is one of the most in keeping with El Greco’s style as most people think of it: fewer figures are involved, and they’re pressed closer to the picture plane.
On the right, a colonnaded hallway in the 1568 original has been elided, and Christ has been shifted to dead center with the action swirling around him. El Greco depicts him as wild-eyed and determined, as if he’d been seized by a mission from God.
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The Vision of Saint John (1608–14), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Part of an altarpiece for the church of the hospital of Saint John the Baptist in Toledo, this painting, made toward the end of El Greco’s life, is frequently mistaken for the work of a modern artist; indeed, Picasso borrowed its background group of female nudes for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). It depicts a chapter in Revelations in which the breaking of seven seals on a scroll precipitates various types of bad news, with the fifth broken seal unleashing the souls of martyrs demanding vengeance for their deaths. The eponymous vision does not refer to Saint John himself but to the hospital bearing his name.
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Laocoön (1610–14), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
In 1506 a Greco-Roman sculpture of the mythological figures of Laocoön and his two sons being tortured by the gods was unearthed in Rome and became an immediate sensation. It’s easy to see why its writhing figurative trio would be catnip to artists of the day, and El Greco was likewise taken by its compositional potential. Laocoön was a Trojan who, warning that the famed wooden horse was a trick, hurled a spear at it to prove it was hollow. But since the Greeks had dedicated the horse to Athena, the gods became angry, sent venomous snakes down to kill him and his sons. El Greco places the scene just outside of Toledo as a metaphor, perhaps, for the Spanish Inquisition.