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El Greco (Spanish, 1541–1614)

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.

Overview

The man known as El Greco was a Greek artist whose emotional style vividly expressed the passion of Counter-Reformation Spain. Here at the National Gallery is the most important collection of his work outside that country, which was his adopted home.

The haunting intensity of El Greco's paintings—resulting from their unnaturally long figures and strong contrasts of color and light—has invited a kind of mythmaking about his life and art. Following his death, El Greco's work fell into obscurity and, after its rediscovery in the nineteenth century, was often misunderstood. El Greco has been called a prophet of modern art, a mystic, and even a man whose sight was distorted by astigmatism, all misconceptions that have clouded understanding of his distinctive but deliberate style.

El Greco's Style

Born on the island of Crete, Domenikos Theotokopoulos acquired the name El Greco—the Greek—in Italy and Spain. After working as an icon painter in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, he left Crete in 1568 to study western-style painting in Venice. There he was influenced by the Venetian artists Titian and Tintoretto, embracing their rich colors and free, sketchy manner of painting. After about two years he moved to Rome, where artists such as Michelangelo had developed a new mannerist style in which realistic portrayals of the physical world were shunned in favor of a more subjective view, one that existed not in nature but in the intellect. In mannerist works space was compressed, colors were bizarre, and figures became elongated and were intertwined in complex poses. Mannerism, from the Italian word for style, was highly self-conscious and artificial, emphasizing the artist's virtuosity and stylishness. Its intellectual basis appealed to El Greco, who enjoyed the company of scholars and, himself, wrote treatises on art and architecture.

Failing to win major commissions in Italy, El Greco moved to Spain. By 1577 he was in Toledo, where he remained for the rest of his life and produced his most important works. In the relative isolation of Spain, he continued to explore and intensify the possibilities of mannerism while his contemporaries in Italy returned to more naturalistic styles.

El Greco and the Counter-Reformation

El Greco's style, highly charged and hypnotic, was well suited to the aims of the Counter-Reformation. In the face of Protestant revolt, the Catholic church sought to reform its practices and reinforce belief in its doctrines. Spain put its vast resources—expanded by conquests in the New World—at the service of the church, and Toledo, because it was the seat of the archbishop, played an active role. The Council of Trent, which met in the mid-sixteenth century to clarify Counter-Reformation goals, explicitly recognized the importance of religious art. El Greco, whose patrons were primarily learned churchmen, responded with intelligent and expressive presentations of traditional and newly affirmed Catholic beliefs. His works underscored with powerful images the importance of the sacraments, the Virgin, and saints.

El Greco, Greek, 1541 - 1614, Laocoön, c. 1610/1614, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1946.18.1

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A long haired, bearded man holds a whip and stands in the middle of a crowd of about two dozen people who stand or twist, all in a building with columns and arches in this horizontal painting. Brushstrokes are visible in some areas, especially in the clothing and sky seen through one arch. All the men have light skin with a greenish cast while the women and children have smooth, pale skin. They wear dresses and robes in shades of rose pink, lapis blue, emerald green, or brown. The man at the center, Jesus, stands facing us with his right knee bent and his weight shifted onto his other leg. He holds a short, four-tailed whip in his right hand high and stretched across his body. He tilts his head to our left and looks down in that direction at the person next to him. Jesus has brown hair and wears a dark pink robe under a bright blue cloth that drapes over one shoulder and across the other hip. To our left, two men with bare torsos and raised arms lean away from Jesus. The man closest to him faces away from us as he bends over at the waist and looks over his shoulder at Jesus. That man wears a burnt orange cloth wrapped around his hips over a dark brown skirt, perhaps of a toga. Behind this pair are about a dozen other people and below them, two bare-breasted women recline on steps, their bodies angled to our right. One woman throws her head back against her raised arm, her mouth open and brow gathered. The other woman looks up at Jesus, holding one hand to her bare breast, her lips closed. She rests her right hand, to our left, on a cage holding five white birds on the ground next to her. Next to Jesus, on our right, a wrinkled, balding, gray-haired and bearded man sits on the steps so his knees come toward us. His torso twists to our left so he can rest his chin in his hand as he looks up at Jesus. That elbow and his other hand rest on the handle of a basket filled with gold coins. There are several animals around this man, including two black and white rabbits at his feet, nosing silver objects spilling from a pouch. Nearby, a gray bird sits on the step, and a white lamb with its feet tied to a stick lies belly up next to a wooden box. Behind the man is a crowd of at least eight people, looking at Jesus or each other. A bare-breasted woman guides a naked, toddler-aged child away from this group. A stick balanced across the woman’s far shoulder has a chicken hanging from the front end and a basket hanging behind. Another child lies back on the steps near the right edge of the painting. Next to that child, an open book and a loaf of bread lie beneath a table covered with an orange and brown patterned cloth. The scene takes place in a structure with columns and arched openings. Two people wearing blue robes hustle under one arched opening to our right, which leads back to a shadowed space lit with a chandelier. Blue sky and gray and white clouds are visible through the arch over Jesus, where there are also more sand-brown buildings in the distance. There are statues high up on ledges on either side of that opening. The artist signed the work in white paint in the lower left to the right of the bird cage in Greek letters.

At the center of a crowded throng, Christ wields a whip to drive money-changers, merchants, and beggars from the temple. Before the Counter-Reformation, when the church undertook to rid itself of heresy and improper practices, the biblical story was seldom depicted. This is the earliest of several versions El Greco made of the subject and was painted while he was in Venice. The confusing architectural setting and awkward poses of several figures show El Greco still assimilating the pictorial space of western-style painting. But it also indicates that he had adopted the rich colors and sketchy, unblended brushwork of his Venetian teachers. El Greco signed this painting, as he did throughout his career, with his name in Greek characters.

El Greco, Greek, 1541 - 1614, Christ Cleansing the Temple, probably before 1570, oil on panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1957.14.4

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A woman and the baby she holds float in a cloud flanked by two winged angels, as two women stand below in this tall, vertical painting. All the people have pale skin shaded with smoke gray, and their necks, fingers, and limbs are elongated. At the top center of the painting Mary holds Jesus on her lap. Jesus is nude except for a white cloth wrapped around his middle. His body faces us as he looks off to our left. He has blond, curly hair and the pudgy features of a baby. He grasps the forefinger of Mary’s right hand, to our left, and his other hand rests by his side. Mary looks down at the baby with her head tilted to our right. One hand reaches around Jesus’s torso and the other arm is lifted, so he can hold her finger. She wears a white veil draped over chestnut-brown hair and a sapphire-blue cloak over a voluminous, rose-pink dress. A winged angel looks on to each side of this pair. Both angels have blond hair and delicate features. The angel to our left wears a parakeet-green robe and has ice-blue wings. That angel crosses arms over the chest, as the angel to our right holds hands together in prayer. The second angel wears shell white and has silvery-gray wings. Both are seen from the chest up from behind puffy, pale blue clouds. Above the angels, rows of ghostly winged baby heads are loosely painted with tones of ivory white and slate gray. They frame a golden glow that surrounds Mary’s head. At Mary’s feet are five more winged baby heads. In the bottom third of the painting, two women stand with their bodies facing inward, toward each other. They both have honey-brown hair, snub noses, and pointed chins. The woman to our left looks up at Mary with large, glistening eyes, her pale pink lips parted. She wears a canary-yellow robe over a topaz-blue, long-sleeved garment. One hand curves over the head of a lion standing in front of her, holding one end of a long palm frond that rests on her right shoulder, closer to us. Two curling lines on the lion’s forehead are the cursive Greek letters for Delta and Theta, which are the artist’s initials. The woman to our right looks down so we see her in profile. A gossamer-white veil covers her hair and drapes across her chest. She is enveloped in a shimmering, flame-red cloak. A white lamb lies across the woman’s left forearm, closer to us, and the woman holds her other hand up to her chest.

This painting and Saint Martin and the Beggar were part of one of El Greco's most important commissions. They originally hung opposite each other, flanking the central altar in the Chapel of Saint Joseph in Toledo. The Virgin and Child are framed by angels and a billow of clouds. Below are two female saints. Saint Agnes on the right holds the lamb with which she once appeared after her death to worshipers gathered at her tomb. The saint beside her, standing by a lion on which El Greco has painted his Greek initials, is probably Martina. Her name is the feminine form of that of the chapel's founder, Martín Ramírez. It is also possible, however, that she is Saint Thekla, who appeared to Saint Martin in visions. In the painting's original position high on the south wall of the chapel, the two saints would have seemed to stand directly behind the altar table, ready to intercede for worshipers in the heavenly realm.

El Greco, Greek, 1541 - 1614, Madonna and Child with Saint Martina and Saint Agnes, 1597/1599, oil on canvas, wooden strip added at bottom, Widener Collection, 1942.9.26

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An armored man on horseback hands a piece of emerald-green cloth down to the nearly nude man standing next to him in this slightly stylized, vertical painting. Both men have light skin, and they, along with the horse, nearly fill the composition. To our right, the bright white horse stands angled to our right with the front left hoof raised. It has a smoke-gray mane, and wears a black bridle. The man riding the horse has short, copper-blond hair and a long face with a pointed chin. He looks down at the ground with dark eyes under black, arched brows. He has a long, thin nose, and his small lips are closed and framed by the faint suggestion of a mustache. He wears a white ruff pleated into figure-eights over his high-necked armor, which is liberally outlined and decorated with gold against the pewter-colored plates. He grips the voluminous, green cape in one hand and holds a sword in the other, down by the leg we can see. The cleanshaven man next to him, to our left, looks off to our right in profile. He has close-cropped, dark hair and smooth skin. His lips are parted, and he tips his head slightly away from us. He holds the green cloth with the hand closer to the horse and gestures down with his other pointer finger, in front of his hip. A white cloth bandage is wrapped around one shin, and he rests his weight on the other leg. The horse and man stand on a curving spit of brown earth. A spring-green landscape dips down behind them, running low near the bottom edge of the painting. The horizon comes about a quarter of the way up the composition, and fog-gray and white clouds create thin screens across the topaz-blue sky. The loose brushstrokes are visible in some areas, especially in the landscape and clothing. The artist signed his name in Greek near the lower right corner.

The Chapel of Saint Joseph in Toledo, where this painting hung above the north altar, was established by Martín Ramírez, whose patron saint, Martin of Tours, is the subject here. As a soldier in Roman France, Martin cut his cloak in half to share it with a beggar he encountered. Christ later appeared to Martin in a dream wearing the makeshift cape and saying, "What thou hast done for the poor man, thou hast done for me." Martin was then baptized, and dedicated his life to Christianity. Venerated for his charity, he was zealous in making converts to the church.

The figures positioned in the extreme foreground loom as if perched on a high ledge, while the background recedes quickly to a distant vista—not of Amiens where the story took place, but Toledo. Time is likewise transformed as the fourth-century saint wears contemporary armor. These deliberate shifts of time and place hint at Toledo's role in the Counter-Reformation, suggesting that all Toledans should emulate the saint's charitable behavior.

A small replica of this subject, one of five known, may have been painted by El Greco's son, Jorge Manuel Theotokopoulos. It provides an instructive comparison with El Greco's own works. Here the brushstrokes are shorter and more hesitant; the elongated figures of the original are further distorted; and the saint's serene expression is transformed by the twisting curl of his lip.

El Greco, Greek, 1541 - 1614, Saint Martin and the Beggar, 1597/1599, oil on canvas with wooden strip added at bottom, Widener Collection, 1942.9.25

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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.

The powerful and enigmatic Laocoön is El Greco's only surviving treatment of a mythological subject. The story relates how the hero, a priest in Troy, attempted to warn his countrymen of the Trojan Horse, whose hollow body concealed Greek soldiers. Laocoön was punished by the gods, who sent serpents out of the sea to kill him and his two sons.

A famous ancient sculpture of Laocoön, which El Greco must have seen, was unearthed in Rome in 1506. Like it, El Greco's painting depicts the climactic moment when the bearded priest struggles for life. One son lies dead, and the other will soon succumb. But El Greco placed these mythological characters and the Trojan Horse against the backdrop of Toledo. At the right stand two figures, perhaps gods viewing the scene. They are complicated by a third head and the leg of an unfinished figure. These mysterious figures and the view of Toledo have prompted many speculations about El Greco's intention. Is this a reference to a contemporary religious controversy, a moralizing allegory, or an allusion to the tradition that Toledo was founded by descendants of the Trojan heroes? Probably it is impossible to know. It may simply be that El Greco was motivated to match the virtuosity of a famous ancient statue with his own masterful invention.

El Greco, Greek, 1541 - 1614, Laocoön, c. 1610/1614, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1946.18.1

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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.

A visitor to El Greco's studio wrote of seeing small versions of the painter's most famous works. They provided models for clients who wished to have copies made—such as the smaller Saint Martin painting also in the National Gallery of Art collection—and they also allowed the artist to work out compositional changes. Though unfinished, The Holy Family is essentially a record of the larger original and a basis for a second version. In this painting El Greco experimented with the figure of Saint Joseph, making him older than in other versions. This reflects debate in the Spanish church about Joseph's age at the time of his marriage to the Virgin.

This scene, in which the Virgin's mother, Saint Anne, and the infant John the Baptist join Mary and Joseph in admiring the sleeping Jesus, is not described in the Bible. It is one of El Greco's many inventions intended to further the aims of the Counter-Reformation. The complex symbolism of the Holy Family suggests Christ's eventual death and resurrection, hinted at by the infant's deep sleep and by the way he lies in his mother's lap. This pose, known in Italian as the pietà (pity), is most often used to show the Virgin holding her son's body after his crucifixion.

El Greco, Greek, 1541 - 1614, 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

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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.

Saint Ildefonso, a seventh-century archbishop and the patron saint of Toledo, interrupts his writing to gaze devoutly at a statue of the Virgin. In the sixteenth century the saint was accused of heresy by critics outside Spain, and this composition, which includes Ildefonso in the company of Saint Jerome and other divinely inspired scribes, reinforces the saint's authority.

Scintillating colors and flickering white accents amplify Ildefonso's emotional intensity. The nineteenth-century French painter Jean-François Millet, who owned the painting and hung it over his bed, remarked, "you'd need a lot of heart to make a work like that." Millet and later Edgar Degas (who bought Saint Ildefonso from Millet's estate) were largely responsible for the revival of interest in El Greco's art, but their emphasis on his emotion and "modern" technique also clouded understanding of the painter's relation to his period.

El Greco, Greek, 1541 - 1614, Saint Ildefonso, c. 1603/1614, oil on canvas, Andrew W. Mellon Collection, 1937.1.83

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The Counter-Reformation renewed emphasis on penance and other sacraments attacked by Protestants. Here Saint Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin in the late fourth century, has retreated to the desert. He holds the rock he will use to beat his chest in punishment for loving secular learning too much.

This unfinished painting provides evidence of El Greco's working method. He began with a ground coat of dark reddish brown, still visible in many places. He outlined the figure with heavy dark contours, as in Jerome's lower left leg, then used thin, fluid strokes of lighter paint to define the body, as the right leg reveals. With a stiff brush and thick white paint he enlivened some parts of the anatomy, most noticeably the torso. And in completed areas such as the saint's face, he smoothed these jagged contours.

El Greco, Greek, 1541 - 1614, Saint Jerome, c. 1610/1614, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1943.7.6

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A man stands at a coastline with his back to us, gesturing toward a group of seven men sailing on the rolling sea in this horizontal painting. All the people have pale, peach skin. The man standing near us to our left wears a light blue tunic under a shell-pink garment that drapes around his hips and falls to his ankles. A thin gold halo encircles his head over curly brown, shoulder-length hair. Green land extends along the foreground close to us, and trees rise to either side. It is unclear whether the man stands on the land or on the water with bare feet. His body is angled away from us and to our right as he looks and gestures with one arm raised toward the boat on the water beyond. Choppy waves and swirling, dense clouds ranging from topaz to navy blue dominate the landscape. Each of the seven men in the sailboat does something different. For instance, one leans over the edge to grasp a fishing net while another pulls a rope for the sail. Two of the men have white halos. One stands at the back of the boat looking into the far distance and the other begins to step onto the surface of the water.

This is one of the most dramatic paintings produced by Tintoretto, whom El Greco considered the greatest artist after Titian. Its striking illumination, sketchy brushwork, and haunting effect are found in El Greco's own work. Christ stands at the Sea of Galilee after his resurrection, telling his disciples from the shore to cast again their empty nets. As they draw up a multitude of fishes, Simon Peter leaps from the boat in a swirl of activity similar to the crowded mêlée in El Greco's Christ Cleansing the Temple.

Jacopo Tintoretto, Italian, 1518 - 1594, Christ at the Sea of Galilee, c. 1575/1580, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1952.5.27

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