El Greco
The Cretan in Toledo.
Domenikos Theotokopoulos was born on Crete, trained in Venice and Rome and settled in Toledo. His spiritual, flame-like style was unique and was rediscovered only by the modernists.
El Greco, “the Greek”, was really called Domenikos Theotokopoulos and was born in 1541 in Candia, now Heraklion, on Crete. The island then belonged to Venice. He trained as an icon painter in the Byzantine tradition and was a recognised master on Crete by the early 1560s. Around 1567 he travelled to Venice, where he studied Titian and Tintoretto.
In 1570 he moved to Rome and moved in the circle of the powerful Farnese family. He struggled to obtain major commissions there. According to a contemporary account, he offered to repaint Michelangelo's Last Judgement, which did not make him popular. In 1577 he moved to Toledo in Spain. There he received commissions from the cathedral and from churches in the city. He hoped to become court painter to Philip II, but the king was dissatisfied with a painting he had commissioned for the monastery of El Escorial, and El Greco remained in Toledo for the rest of his life.
His best-known work is The Burial of the Count of Orgaz of 1586–88, which still hangs in the church of Santo Tomé in Toledo. The lower part shows a solemn funeral with realistic portraits of the city's noblemen, and the upper part shows heaven, where the soul is received. He also painted View of Toledo, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, one of the first pure cityscapes in Spanish art, with a dark and stormy sky.
El Greco's style is unique. The figures are elongated and seem to flicker upwards like flames. The colours are cold and sharp, and the light seems to come from within. He combined the Byzantine tradition, Venetian colourism and the distorted proportions of Mannerism. He lived with Jerónima de las Cuevas, whom he never married, and they had a son, Jorge Manuel, who became a painter and architect. He died in Toledo in 1614.
After his death he was long regarded as eccentric and was almost forgotten. In the 19th and early 20th centuries he was rediscovered by artists such as Manet, Cézanne and Picasso, and the Expressionists saw him as a forerunner.