Painter of the Bible
El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos)
El Greco — Domenikos Theotokopoulos, born in 1541 in Candia (Heraklion) on Venetian-ruled Crete, trained in the late Byzantine icon tradition before he ever picked up a Western brush — moved through Venice, Rome, and Mad…
Life & work
El Greco — Domenikos Theotokopoulos, born in 1541 in Candia (Heraklion) on Venetian-ruled Crete, trained in the late Byzantine icon tradition before he ever picked up a Western brush — moved through Venice, Rome, and Madrid, and spent the second half of his life in Toledo, where he died in 1614. He took his nickname (the Greek) from the Spaniards he never quite became, and across forty years of work he produced a body of religious painting that no school can claim and almost no follower could continue.
In Venice in the late 1560s he absorbed the color of Titian and the energy of Tintoretto. In Rome in the 1570s he saw Michelangelo's Last Judgment and apparently dismissed it (a remark that did him no favors). He failed to win a court commission from Philip II at the Escorial in 1580 and turned permanently to Toledo, the old Castilian Spanish capital, where local clergy and noble patrons absorbed his largest output.
The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, painted in 1586–88 for the small church of Santo Tomé in Toledo and still hanging there, is the most concentrated single statement of his religious vision. Below the cloth-of-gold horizon line, fifteen Toledan dignitaries gather in mourning around the body of a fourteenth-century knight; above the line, a heavenly court receives his soul through angels, the Virgin, and Christ. The combination of dense, observed earthly portrait with a column of weightless, elongated celestial figures is unrepeatable.
His Christ paintings — the Disrobing of Christ (Toledo Cathedral, 1577–79), the Driving the Money-Changers from the Temple (multiple versions), the Christ Healing the Blind, the Pentecost, the Resurrection, and his many Crucifixions — share the same elongation, the same icy ultramarine and lake-red palette, the same turbulent sky. He painted apostle cycles for the Hospital de Tavera and the Hospital de la Caridad in Illescas, and toward the end of his life the Vision of Saint John (Met) and the Opening of the Fifth Seal — works that left a measurable mark on Picasso's Blue Period and Demoiselles d'Avignon three centuries later.
He was forgotten by the European mainstream for nearly two centuries; the Romantic and modern revival of his reputation, beginning with German critics in the 1850s and consolidating with Cézanne and Picasso in the 1900s, restored him as one of the great religious painters of any tradition.
Notable works in detail
The Disrobing of Christ (El Espolio)
The Disrobing of Christ, called El Espolio, painted by El Greco between 1577 and 1579 for the high altar of the sacristy of Toledo Cathedral and still hanging in the cathedral today, is among the founding works of his Toledo period and one of the great Spanish religious paintings of the entire sixteenth century. The composition shows Christ at the center of a dense crowd, his hands bound at his waist, an executioner reaching from behind to pull off his red robe in preparation for the Crucifixion; the three Marys stand in the lower-left foreground watching the carpenter prepare the holes in the cross. El Greco's characteristic vertical elongation of the figures, his deep saturated chromatic palette of crimson, ultramarine, and pale silver-grey, and his nervous staccato brushwork all reach mature statement in this canvas. A protracted legal dispute followed the delivery of the painting — the cathedral chapter wanted to lower the price on the grounds that the heads of three Marys appeared above Christ's head, which the canons considered theologically improper — and El Greco won.
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Pentecost, painted by El Greco around 1600 for the church of the Augustinian college in Madrid (the Colegio de Doña María de Aragón) and now in the Prado in Madrid, depicts the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles fifty days after the Resurrection as recorded in Acts 2. El Greco stages the scene in a small enclosed upper chamber with the Virgin at the center surrounded by the twelve apostles in the standing ring; the Holy Spirit descends as a dove on a single shaft of light from above; tongues of flame appear on each apostle's head. The composition is built on a strict vertical axis — the dove, the light, the Virgin, the central foreground figure — and the chromatic palette of deep crimson, gold, and electric ultramarine is characteristic of El Greco's mature Toledo manner. The painting is one of the principal El Greco religious works in any Spanish collection and a defining example of his late-Mannerist religious style.
Saint Jude Thaddeus, painted by El Greco around 1612 in his Toledo workshop and now in the Museo del Greco in Toledo, is one of the surviving panels from the Apostolado — the late series of half-length apostle portraits El Greco painted between roughly 1605 and his death in 1614. The series shows each of the twelve apostles in a similar three-quarter-length format, holding the attribute associated with his particular tradition (Peter with the keys, Paul with the sword, Andrew with the X-cross, and so on). Saint Jude Thaddeus holds the carpenter's saw with which, according to one of the apostle traditions, he was martyred. The chromatic palette of pale silver-grey, deep crimson, and pale flesh against a dark neutral ground is the late-Greco signature; the figure is unmistakably elongated, the head tilted slightly, the eyes lifted into the middle distance with the characteristic almost-trance-like quality that marks the late religious paintings.
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