El Greco

c.1541 - 1614 • Spanish • Painter • Mannerist

"I was greatly surprised-forgive me this anecdote which I am not relating out of envy-when, having asked Dominico Greco in the year 1611: "Which is the more difficult, drawing or coloring?" he answered: "Coloring."" - Francesco Pacheo, 1649

Because he was from Crete, which was under Venetian rule, Theotokopoulos, who trained in VENICE, was called El Greco-the Greek. After ro years in Venice he went to Rome, and then, around 1576, settled in Toledo, a major center of learning and of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Mysticism permeates his works, tremors of an ethereal and visionary spiritualism echoing the Spanish priest Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits in r 5 34 and a Counter-Reformation leader. This emotional content, though not characteristic of MANNERISM, El Greco uses with many of its conventions: attenuate,ed figures and strong, artificial color, often with metallic and acidic hues. The Burial of Count Orgaz (1586-88) is a masterpiece that illustrates how important it is to understand a work in its intended setting: The painting, which shows the body of the count being lowered into a tomb, was made for an alcove in a church above the count's actual final resting place. The lower section of the picture, where the earthly burial is portrayed, uses earlier artistic conventions, with the figures more or less lined up across the canvas. The upper two-thirds, showing the count transported to heaven, uses the exaggeration of Mannerism. Thus, as one stood in front of the grave itself, one would look at a painting that links the temporal and the eternal. Though he had little influence on his own century, or indeed for the next three, in the 20th century echoes of El Greco's style are found in the work of PICASSO. He also became a point of reference for EXPRESSIONISM. The oddness of El Greco's figures was once attributed to a presumption that he had distorting eyesight (an astigmatism). Today it is understood to have derived from the artist's early study of BYZANTINE art.