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El Greco Edit Profile

also known as Doménikos Theotokópoulos

architect painter sculptor

El Greco, pen mane of Doménikos Theotokópoulos, was a Geerk painter, sculptor and architect active in the Spanish Renaissance. His expressionistic style which combined traits of Byzantine school and Western traditions of painting, characterized by tortuously elongated figures and phantasmagorical blend of colors, set him aside as an artist totally different from his contemporaries.

Background

El Greco, by his own account, was born in 1541 in Heraklion, Crete, an island of a Venetian possession at the time. He was a son of Geórgios Theotokópoulos, a merchant and taxman, and had an older brother Manoússos Theotokópoulos, a salesman too.

Education

There is little information on El Greco's childhood but it is known that he was inclined towards the craft of an artist at a very early age. First trained in icon art, it is supposed that he then went to Venice for studies in between 1560-1566.

While in Italy, he joined the studio of Titian, learned Byzantine art and the Italian Renaissance, in particular, perspective and figural construction. The surviving records state that by the early 1570s El Greco relocated to Rome.

Career

The start of El Greco's career can be counted from the early 1570s. According to the surviving accounts, he came to Rome and first, with the help of Giulio Clovio, an illuminator in the service of Cardinal, was settled at the Palazzo Farnese. The documents state that about 1572 El Greco was accepted to the Guild of St. Luke in Rome. He also opened his own studio and hired two apprentices while in Italy.

The works El Greco produced during his tenure in the country, including Christ Cleansing the Temple, were completely close in style to the Venetian Renaissance of the 16th century. The artist tried himself in portraiture as well, what is seen through the canvases depicting Giulio Clovio and Vincentio Anastagi.

Having no commissions the whole six years he lived in Italy, El Greco journeyed to Spain in 1577, attracted by the growing fame of Philip II's building project of the monastery of San Lorenzo at the Escorial. The artist first traveled to Madrid and then moved to Toledo where he finally received important commissions for local churches, for the high altar and the two lateral altars in the conventual church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo.

The surviving paintings of the time, Assumption of the Virgin and small sculptured group of the Miracle of St. Ildefonso, executed for the altar, as well as another masterpiece, the Espolio (Disrobing of Christ), revealed El Grec's genius to the full extent. Elongated human figures, the integral element of all his subsequent works, appeared more and more frequently on the paintings of the period. St. Sebastian and Crucifixion with Donors are the keen examples of that.

El Greco remained in Toledo for the rest of his life, busily engaged on commissions for the churches and monasteries there and in the province. He became a close friend of the leading humanists, scholars, and churchmen, including a classical scholar Antonio de Covarrubias, a favorite preacher of Philip II of Spain Fray Hortensio Paravicino, and writers Luis de Góngora y Argote and Don Pedro de Salazar de Mendoza. El Greco applied his talent in sculpture and architecture as well, although only few examples of the creations survived.

El Greco's connection with the court of Philip II was brief and unsuccessful, consisting first of the Allegory of the Holy League (Dream of Philip II) and second of the Martyrdom of St. Maurice. Another masterpiece, the Burial of the Count de Orgaz, dates to the same time.

Instead, the period from the 1590s to 1607 was replete with commissions for El Greco. Working on several chapels and monasteries in parallel, the artist produced a number of his most well known works, including three altars for the Chapel of San José, Toledo, three paintings for the Colegio de Doña María de Aragon, an Augustinian monastery in Madrid, and the high altar, four lateral altars, and the painting St. Ildefonso for the Hospital de la Caridad at Illescas.

A painter of primarily religious subjects, El Greco left behind several portraits as well, which are equally high in quality. The portraits of Fray Felix Hortensio Paravicino and Cardinal Don Fernando Niño de Guevara are among the finest late works in the genre.

Achievements

  • Achievement The El Greco Museum was founded in Toledo in 1911. of El Greco

    An outstanding religious painter and talented portraitist, El Greco is rightly considered as one of the most eminent artists of all time. The fact that he elaborated such an individual manner of painting, hardly attributable to any conventional school, by combining the elements of Greek, Italian and Spanish cultures in his art, showed him as a lonely genius of unprecedented emotional power and imagination.

    Barely decoded by his contemporaries, the highly individual artistic vocabulary of El Greco, characterized by emotional expressionism, was rediscovered and reevaluated in the 19th and the 20th centuries. The most vital visual representative of Spanish mysticism, El Greco made a great contribution to the subsequent development of Cubism. His unusual approach both to composition and way of expression pushed the representatives of the movement, including Pablo Picasso, to experiment with geometric shapes and interlocking planes. Picasso's Portrait of a Painter, made after El Greco, is a vivid proof. The traces of El Greco's nontraditional manner can also be found in Expressionism and the Blaue Reiter Group.

    El Greco Museum, founded in Toledo in 1911, has a large collection of works by the artist, especially from his highly prolific late period, including the unfinished set from the major series, Apostolados, which features Christ and the Twelve Apostles.

Works

  • drawing

    • Saint John the Evangelist

  • painting

    • Opening of the Fifth Seal

      (also known as The Vision of Saint John)

    • Portrait of a Cardinal

      (Probably Don Fernando Niño de Guevara)

    • An Allegory with a Boy Lighting a Candle in the Company of an Ape and a Fool

      ((Fábula))

All works

Religion

According to the compehensive researches led since the early 1960s, El Grec''s family and forebears were Greek Orthodox. However, the question of the artist's own denomination is still under debate. Referring to El Greco's self-description as a "devout Catholic" in his testament, Some scholars suppose that the artist could convert to Catholicism after his relocation to the European areas where this religion was widespread.

Whether El Greco was Greek Orthodox or Catholic, his devotion to religion and its great influence on his art is certain. The artist underlined himself that he painted "because the spirits whisper madly inside my head" and not just to create visually attractive work. El Greco repeated several times such topics as the Agony in the Garden, in which a supernatural world is evoked through strange shapes and brilliant, cold, clashing colours, as well as the devotional theme of Christ Carrying the Cross, existing in the 11 originals and in many copies. The major saints predominant in his art, including St. Dominic, Mary Magdalen, St. Jerome as cardinal, St. Jerome in penitence, and St. Peter in tears, were often featured by El Greco in the same, repeated, compositions as well.

Views

From its beginnings under the inspiration of Titian, Michelangelo, and the roots of Mannerism, El Greco's art developed rapidly to a point where it anticipated much of the Baroque. Above all, however, it reflected the painter's personal, impassionedly subjective and intellectual manner. Each of his portraits tells much about the artist and little about the sitter.

As one would expect from a painter of Byzantine origin, his paintings became more and more vehicles for his ideas, rather than mere pictures. His realism is of the spirit, not of the flesh, and color, abstraction, and dynamic motion are put in the service of the artist's yearning for a union with God. This ardent craving was shared by the Spanish mystics, by St. Theresa and St. Ignatius Loyola, and it explains why Spain suited El Greco and why his art was readily adapted into the mainstream of Spanish art.

Scientific preoccupations and mathematics play an increasingly important role in his paintings and help to date his later pictures. Parabolas, hyperbolas, and ellipses, coming from and going into the infinite universe, form, for him, an artistic and compositional device to bind this world to the next. In his last paintings, figures are no longer form, but burning, blazing movement, vibrating and freed of earthly weight. El Greco expressed here, with an artistic power equal to his purpose, the spiritual dissolving of man in God.

The subjects of his devotional works varied little but his interpretations changed with his style. Although El Greco's style is so personal, it is, nevertheless, related to Spanish art and also to the Mannerist art of his time. All the great Spanish masters conceived their religious paintings out of their innermost spiritual experience. Mannerist art shares with El Greco elongated, nervous forms and twisting, serpentine movement.

Quotations: "I paint because the spirits whisper madly inside my head."

"I suffer for my art and despise the witless moneyed scoundrels who praise it."

"The language of art is celestial in origin and can only be understood by the chosen."

"It is only after years of struggle and deprivation that the young artist should touch color - and then only in the company of his betters."

"Artists create out of a sense of desolation. The spirit of creation is a excruciating, intricate exploration from within the soul."

"I was created by the all powerful God to fill the universe with my masterpieces."

"Art is everywhere you look for it, hail the twinkling stars for they are God's careless splatters."

"You must study the Masters but guard the original style that beats within your soul and put to sword those who would try to steal it."

Personality

Doménikos Theotokópoulos by birth, El Greco acquired his name which means "the Greek" while he lived in Italy, where the person was usually identified by designating country or city of his origin. The curious form of the article (El), however, may be the Venetian dialect or more likely from the Spanish.

The rich library that El Greco left behind characterized him as a man of breadth interests and extensive knowledge. The collection consisting of about 130 volumes included works of the major Greek authors in Greek, numerous books in Latin, and others in Italian and in Spanish: Plutarch's Lives, Petrarch's poetry, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, the Bible in Greek, the proceedings of the Council of Trent, and architectural treatises by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, Giacomo da Vignola, Leon Battista Alberti, Andrea Palladio, and Sebastiano Serlio. El Greco even prepared illustartions for an edition of Vitruvius but the manuscript is lost.

Quotes from others about the person

  • Jason Farago, art critic: "El Greco was not a lone wolf or a hermit. He was a shrewd businessman and he had supporters, though nothing on the level of such hustling artist-politicians as Titian or Rubens."

    Keith Christiansen, art historian: "was both the quintessential Spaniard and a proto-modern – a painter of the spirit."

    Julius Meier-Graefe, art critic and novelist: "He [El Greco] has discovered a realm of new possibilities. Not even he, himself, was able to exhaust them. All the generations that follow after him live in his realm. There is a greater difference between him and Titian, his master, than between him and Renoir or Cézanne. Nevertheless, Renoir and Cézanne are masters of impeccable originality because it is not possible to avail yourself of El Greco's language, if in using it, it is not invented again and again, by the user."

    Roger Fry, artist and critic: " [El Greco is] an old master who is not merely modern, but actually appears a good many steps ahead of us, turning back to show us the way."

    Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States: "[El Greco was] the most extraordinary painter that ever came along back then [...] maybe three or four centuries ahead of his time."

Connections

El Greco had a Spanish female companion, Jerónima de Las Cuevas, who gave birth to his only son, Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli. It is unknown whether the painter lived with his sweetheart but they definitely never married although he acknowledged both her and his child as seen through the documents which he left behind, including his will.

Jorge Manuel became painter as his father. He assisted him and then inherited El Greco's studio after his death. El Greco's grandson, Gabriel, born in 1604, was baptized by the painter's friend, Gregorio Angulo, ruler of Toledo.

Father:
Geórgios Theotokópoulos

(born between 1471 and 1531 – died 1556)

Brother:
Manoússos Theotokópoulos

(born 1531 – died 1602)

Son:
Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli
Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli - Son of El Greco

(born 1578 – died 29 March 1631)

Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli (or Theotokópoulos) followed his father steps and became a painter and architect.

common-law wife:
Jerónima de Las Cuevas

(born between 1512 and 1572)

mentor:
Titian (Tiziano Vecelli)
Titian (Tiziano Vecelli) - mentor of El Greco

(born 1488 – died 27 August 1576)

Titian was an influential Italian painter. A prominent representative of the Italian Renaissance, he is regarded as one of the leading figures of the 16th-century Venetian school. He painted landscape backgrounds, mythological and religious subjects, and portraiture, having Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, Pope Paul III, Philip II of Spain and Henry III of France as his sitters.

Friend:
Fulvio Orsini
Fulvio Orsini - Friend of El Greco

(born 11 December 1529 – died 18 May 1600)

Orsini studied the ancient languages, produced works on the history of Rome, and reedited Arnobius and the Septuagint. Orsini's collection included many antiquities, a risch library of manuscripts and books, and seven paintings by El Greco.

References