El Greco

Greek, 1541 - 1614

Domenikos Theotokopoulos, called El Greco, was born in 1541 in Candia, the capital of Crete. In 1566 he was recorded in Candia as a master painter. El Greco probably went to Italy to master the modern Western Renaissance style. He is documented in August 1568 in Venice, where he remained until the autumn of 1570, when he went to Rome. He was profoundly influenced by the rich colors and the free handling of paint of Venetian painters, but there is no evidence to support the tradition that he was apprenticed to Titian.

In Rome, El Greco resided at least for a while at the Farnese Palace, where he became acquainted with the Farnese librarian, Fulvio Orsini, whose belief in the compatibility of art and scholarship seems to have profoundly influenced him. In 1572, El Greco was admitted to the Academy of Saint Luke as a miniature painter.

Unable to obtain major public commissions in Rome, El Greco signed a contract in 1576 in Rome for altarpieces for the important church of Santa Domingo el Antiguo, Toledo. By July 1577 he had arrived in Toledo, and by September 1579 he had completed nine paintings for Santo Domingo. These works helped to establish his reputation as the most gifted artist in Toledo. The dissatisfaction of Philip II with the Martyrdom of Saint Maurice, which El Greco completed in 1582 for the church of El Escorial, effectively ended any hopes of royal patronage that he may have had. It is perhaps for this reason that he decided to remain in Toledo, where he had come in contact with a group of learned churchmen who appreciated his work. By 1585, El Greco appears to have established a corporate workshop capable of producing altar frames and statues as well as paintings.

The decade 1597 to 1607 was a period of intense activity for El Greco. During these years, the artist and his workshop created pictorial and sculptural ensembles for a variety of religious institutions. Between 1607 and 1608 El Greco was involved in a protracted legal dispute with the authorities of the hospital at Illescas concerning the payment for his work; this dispute greatly strained his financial resources and contributed to the economic difficulties that he experienced until his death in 1614. In 1608 he received his last major altarpiece commission, for the Hospital of Saint John the Baptist, Toledo.
[Brown, Jonathan, and Richard G. Mann. Spanish Paintings of the Fifteenth through Nineteenth Centuries. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1990: 42-43.]

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Close to us, six people, all nude with light skin, stand or lie intertwined with snakes on a bank of rocks in this horizonal painting. Beyond them, the deep, distant landscape has a brown horse, tiny in scale, headed for a city of stone buildings beneath a vivid blue sky filled with twisting white clouds. The people’s bodies are sinewy and elongated, and their skin is painted in tones of ivory white, warmed with peach highlights and streaked with deep gray shadows. At the center, a man with a white beard and white, curly hair lies back on the charcoal-gray rock with his knees bent and his shins splayed out. With his body angled away from us to our right, he holds the body of a long, silvery-gray snake in his left fist, on our right, down by his hip. The snake curves behind the man’s body and he grips the snake behind its head. The man has high cheekbones and sunken cheeks, and rolls his eyes up and back to look at the snake, whose wide-open mouth nearly touches his hair. To our left, a cleanshaven young man stands with his body facing us but he arches back, holding an arcing snake in his hands. The young man’s right hand, on our left, bends at the elbow so he can grasp the snake’s tail and his other arm stretches straight back, holding the snake’s body as it curls around so its fangs nearly reach the young man’s side. To our right, next to the older man, a second, dark-haired young man lies on the rocks with his head toward us. His feet are on the ground, so we look onto the tops of his thighs. He lies with one hand resting on the ground, overhead. Three people seem to float, feet dangling, alongside the right edge of the painting. The person closest to us looks onto the writhing people in profile, back to us. A second person just beyond also looks to our left. A third head turns the opposite direction and looks off to our right. In the distance, the golden-brown horse is angled away from us, one front leg raised, on a path that moves from behind the rocky outcropping to the far-off town. Nestled in a shallow valley, buildings in the town are mostly painted with rose pink and red walls and smoke-gray roofs. The land dips to a deeper, green valley to our right, lining the horizon that comes two-thirds of the way up the composition. The standing people are outlined against the sapphire-blue sky and knotted, gray and white clouds.
El Greco, Laocoön, c. 1610/1614, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1946.18.1

Laocoön

El Greco · c. 1610/1614 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1946.18.1

A light-skinned man wearing a voluminous, ocean-blue, hooded robe sits at a cloth-draped writing table and looks up, fingers splayed over an open book and a pen held in his other hand, in this vertical painting. The man and desk take up most of the composition, which has an arched top. The man’s shoulders and body are angled to our right, and he looks off in that direction in profile. His balding head is rimmed with white hair curving over the large ear we can see, and he has a trimmed white and gray beard and mustache. His prominent nose is pointed, and his lips are closed. Light glints off the robe he wears so it shimmers in shades of topaz, aquamarine, and midnight blue. Voluminous white sleeves emerge under the mantle and are edged with narrow lace cuffs. His left hand, to our right, rests on an open book, which is propped against one or two other tomes. Near the edge of the table, two quills stand in the corners of a lidded inkwell, and a round, silver blotter, shaped like an upside-down chalice, and a lidded silver box sit nearby. The man’s chair has a tall post next to his shoulder to our left with a teardrop-shaped, gold finial. A second post, near his wrist, is lower and topped with a gold orb. The chair is draped in the same deep, raspberry-pink of the square table at which he sits. The tablecloth is edged with a wide band of gold along the bottom, and filigree-like gold decorations line the seams or folds at the corners. Brushstrokes are visible in many areas, especially in the colorfully charged blue and pink fabric. Beyond the man, to our right, a statuette of a person wearing a long, white robe over a white dress holds a baby. The clothing is edged with gold, and she wears a sphere-like gold crown. The baby also wears white and holds up one hand. The statuette stands on a platform supported by S-shaped corbels, and could have a projecting, squared awning over the top. This area is more loosely painted so some details are difficult to make out. In the background to our left, a wooden door stands open next to a dark space just behind the man’s head, so his profile is picked out against the shadow. The floor beneath is earth brown.
El Greco, Saint Ildefonso, c. 1603/1614, oil on canvas, Andrew W. Mellon Collection, 1937.1.83

Saint Ildefonso

El Greco · c. 1603/1614 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1937.1.83

A young woman sitting with a nude infant lying in her lap is flanked on either side by an older woman to our left and an elderly man with a nude young boy to our right in this vertical painting. They all have pale skin tinged with blue. At the center, the young woman, Mary, is draped in a cobalt-blue mantle that partially covers her head and falls to her shoulders to wrap around a dusky rose-pink gown. The mantle is pushed back from one side of her head, revealing dark brown hair. Her right arm embraces the shoulders of the old woman standing next to her, to our left, who leans toward Mary. A tangerine-orange cloak wraps around the older woman and her hair is covered by a white cowl. Both women have long faces and noses with deep set eyes under thick arched brows, and they gaze down at the infant. The mostly bald, pudgy baby lies across a white piece of fabric, two corners of which are held up by the older woman. Another young boy stands alongside Mary to our right. He faces us, holding a basket or glass bowl containing oval-shaped caramel-brown objects the size of figs in one hand. His elongated head is crowned with tawny brown hair, and his face turns away from the infant to gaze off to our right. One finger of his left hand, on our right, rests alongside his rose-red lips. The elderly man stands behind him, leaning over Mary’s shoulder to look at the older woman. We see him from the waist up with a golden-yellow cloak layered over an olive-green vest, and the arm we see is clad in a white sleeve. The group takes up most of the height of the composition and are crowded together against an azure-blue sky swirling with thin gray and white clouds. The scene is painted largely with long strokes of saturated color. The dark gray ground below is painted with sketchy strokes of white, blue, and pink.
El Greco, The Holy Family with Saint Anne and the Infant John the Baptist, c. 1595/1600, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1959.9.4

The Holy Family with Saint Anne and the Infant John the Baptist

El Greco · c. 1595/1600 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1959.9.4

Bibliography

1908

  • Cossío, Manuel B. El Greco. Madrid, 1908. (Rev. ed., Natalia Cossío Jímenez, ed. Barcelona, 1972).

1910

  • San Román y Fernández, Francisco de Borja. El Greco en Toledo. Madrid, 1910.

1962

  • Wethey, Harold E. El Greco and His School. 2 vols. Princeton, 1962 (Spanish ed., Madrid, 1967).

1981

  • Marías, Fernando, and Agustín Bustamente García. Las ideas artísticas de El Greco. Madrid, 1981.

1982

  • El Greco of Toledo. Exh. cat. The Toledo [Ohio] Museum of Art; Prado, Madrid; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Boston, 1982-1983.

1986

  • Mann, Richard G. El Greco and His Patrons. Cambridge, 1986.

1990

  • Brown, Jonathan, and Richard G. Mann. Spanish Paintings of the Fifteenth through Nineteenth Centuries. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1990: 42-43.