Why Is El Greco Famous? Toledo, Stretched-Out Saints and a Painter Centuries Ahead
El Greco was a Cretan painter who made Toledo his home. Why his stretched figures and wild colors puzzled Spain and later inspired Picasso.
El Greco is famous because he painted like no one else of his time: long, twisting figures, flickering, almost unreal colors and an intense spiritual mood that mixed the icon tradition of his native Crete with Italian Renaissance painting. His contemporaries were often puzzled, but in the 20th century he was hailed as a forerunner of both Expressionism and Cubism and placed among the greatest painters of all time.
Why is he called El Greco?
His real name was Doménikos Theotokópoulos, and he lived from 1541 to 1614. "El Greco" is simply Spanish for "The Greek", a nickname. He himself usually signed his paintings with his full name in Greek letters, often adding the word Krḗs, "Cretan". In other words, even after decades in Spain he kept announcing where he came from. When he died, two Greek friends witnessed his will; he never lost touch with his Greek roots.
From icon painter in Crete to Venice and Rome
He was born on Crete, which then belonged to the Republic of Venice and was the center of what is called Post-Byzantine art. His father was a merchant and tax collector, and the young Doménikos first trained as an icon painter in the Cretan school, in a town where around two hundred painters were active.
At about 26 he moved to Venice, as other Greek artists had done, and in 1570 he went on to Rome, where he opened a workshop. In Italy he absorbed Mannerism and the color of the Venetian Renaissance, above all from Titian and Tintoretto. He was not shy. Michelangelo was already dead, but his reputation was overwhelming; El Greco nevertheless dismissed Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel and even offered Pope Pius V to paint over the whole work. It did not make him friends in Rome.
Toledo: the city that made him
In 1577 he moved to Toledo, in Spain, and stayed there until his death. His real goal was the court of King Philip II, who was struggling to find good painters to decorate the enormous monastery-palace of El Escorial. El Greco did receive two royal commissions, including the Martyrdom of Saint Maurice, but the king disliked it and never hired him again.
Spain's loss at court was Toledo's gain. By September 1579 he had finished nine paintings for the church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, which established his reputation in the city. He lived in some style, sometimes hiring musicians to play while he dined, and his son Jorge Manuel, born in 1578, became a painter who assisted him and carried on the workshop.
The Burial of the Count of Orgaz
On 12 March 1586 he received the commission for The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, now his best-known work. It was painted for the church of Santo Tomé in Toledo and still hangs where it was made for. It shows the funeral of a Toledan nobleman who died in 1323 and who, according to local legend, was buried by Saint Stephen and Saint Augustine themselves.
The painting is split in two. Below, the mourners are men of El Greco's own day, painted as portraits, including his son. Above, the dead man's soul rises into a heaven crowded with angels and saints. The upper half already shows his signature stretched figures and a fear of empty space that grew stronger as he aged.
Why are his figures so long?
El Greco deliberately rejected classical rules of measure and proportion. For him imagination and intuition came first, and the highest goal of art was grace. His tortuously elongated figures and strange, sometimes phantasmagorical colors are what he is best known for.
People have looked for other explanations. One popular theory claimed he had an eye problem, perhaps astigmatism, that made him see bodies longer than they were; another writer even blamed marijuana. Whatever the truth, the stretching fits the art he believed in: grace and imagination over measurement, built on Byzantine icons and Italian Mannerism.
View of Toledo and the late works
Besides altarpieces, he painted portraits such as The Nobleman with his Hand on his Chest (1585), now in the Prado. His stormy landscape View of Toledo is one of his most famous images, and Ernest Hemingway considered it the best painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The decade from 1597 to 1607 was a time of intense activity, with several major commissions and a workshop producing paintings and sculpture for religious institutions. He fell seriously ill while working on a commission for the Hospital de Tavera and died on 7 April 1614, aged 72; he was buried in Santo Domingo el Antiguo, the church where his Spanish career had begun.
Forgotten, then rediscovered
In his own time El Greco was mostly ignored, and his dramatic style seemed strange for centuries. The modern world changed that. Thanks to critics such as Julius Meier-Graefe and artists such as Picasso, Franz Marc and Kandinsky, in less than fifty years he was proclaimed one of the greatest painters ever.
Picasso studied El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal while he was working on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and scholars have since pointed out the links between the two works. Salvador Dalí counted him among his "Five Spanish Immortals", next to El Cid, Velázquez, Cervantes and Don Quixote. A New York Times critic summed it up neatly: to Greeks he became the quintessential Greek painter, and to the Spanish the quintessential Spaniard.
Learn with El Greco: English expressions
| Expression | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| ahead of his time | having ideas too modern for his era | El Greco was centuries ahead of his time. |
| break the rules | ignore the usual standards | He broke the rules of proportion on purpose. |
| make a name for yourself | become well known | He made a name for himself in Toledo, not at court. |
| an acquired taste | something you learn to like slowly | His stretched saints are an acquired taste. |
| stand the test of time | stay valued for a long time | His paintings have stood the test of time. |
Practice: Describe an artist or musician you think was ahead of their time in three sentences, using "break the rules" and "stand the test of time".