El Greco:The first master of Spanish art
(...yes, he was Greek)
Spanish art was trundling along without great distinction
in the later 16thcentury when El Greco rocked up in
Toledo and gave the nation its first bona fide
brushstroke hero. A Cretan, who moved to Italy
and fell under the spell ofTitian in Venice and
Michelangelo in Rome, he headed for Spain in 1577,
probably hoping to get some work from Felipe II.
A commission was given but the King was unimpressed
by the results. Instead, El Greco spent his career
painting for the Church and the nobility inToledo.
He manipulated the Mannerist style into elongated
faces and lean, twisted bodies, sketching a highly
individual anguished spirituality that didn’t really fit
with anything that had gone before.El Greco’s religious figures often appear in an almost
trance-like state, caught up in the spiritual mood of
the moment.El Entierro del Conde de Orgaz(1586),
an altarpiece for the church of SantoTomé inToledo,
reveals his grasp of gaunt faces, gazing rapt at the
heavens. El Greco’s portraits, including those of himself,
bore similarly stretched, agitated faces.
He apparently said that colour was the most central
element of his work, more important than form.
His later work, notablyVista deToledo(c.1610),
capturing the town in its landscape, swirls with
the free, interpretive brushstrokes that would return
triumphantly to art three centuries later: the
Impressionists, Cezanne and Picasso would all
namecheck El Greco. However, in the short term,
after he died inToledo in 1614, aged over 70,
El Greco’s idiosyncratic painting fell off the radar in
a country that was embracing Baroque Naturalism.116- Identity: the
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In 1950 Picasso made
a direct, Cubist copy
of a portrait El Greco
completed of his
son, Jorge Manuel
Theotokopoulos, in
around 1600.
El Greco junior’s
miraculous conception
No record of the
mother to El Greco’s
son remains. Some say
she was the wife of an
aristocrat, others that
she was hidden because
she was Jewish and
would face expulsion
if discovered. Another
explanation came
from the notoriously
homophobic Ernest
Hemingway who insisted
that El Greco was gay.
Chiaroscuro:
Light relief from Italy
El Greco was among
the first to use the
Italian technique of
chiaroscuroin Spanish
art. Essentially, the term
refers to a bold contrast
between light (chiaro)
and dark (scuro).
El Greco used it adroitly
inLa Adoración de los
Pastores(c.1613),
contrasting the gloomy
background with an
incandescent baby
Jesus.