El Greco Overview

As a young artist, Domenikos Theotokopoulos was fascinated by news of the Renaissance, which reached all the way to his home on the island of Crete. Crete was controlled by Venice, then an important center for commerce and the arts. Domenikos... [more]

As a young artist, Domenikos Theotokopoulos was fascinated by news of the Renaissance, which reached all the way to his home on the island of Crete. Crete was controlled by Venice, then an important center for commerce and the arts. Domenikos headed for this cultural hub around 1560, determined to learn from the masters of the Renaissance style. He soon apprenticed himself to Titian, the premier genius of the lush pageant that was Venetian painting. In Titian's studio El Greco ("the Greek," as he came to be known) would have found large canvases covered in velvet-rich colors with golden highlights. The human figures -- whether saints or nobles or nudes -- combined ideal proportions with the texture and weight of real flesh. From these models, El Greco mastered the High Renaissance techniques of placing figures in perspective and defining depth with contour and shading. His training complete, he moved to Rome to gain exposure to the work of Raphael and Michelangelo. El Greco shared these artists' interest in the density and structure of the human form -- but he soon slipped out of the Renaissance mold. An intensely spiritual approach came into his work: bodies become elongated or distorted in order to illustrate moments of heightened emotion or religious fervor; perspective plays a secondary role to the fluidity of vision, the shifting of surfaces. El Greco's new appreciation for motion, texture, and color was symptomatic of the Mannerist movement, a bridge towards the baroque. In Mannerist painting, figures undulate, colors draw attention to themselves, and the surface of the canvas throbs. Perhaps it was his interest in spirituality that led El Greco to Spain, then the stronghold of the Catholic church. Here he produced portraits of local notables and painted vast canvases on religious themes. Stark juxtapositions of darkness and light provide the setting for El Greco's saints and epiphanies; a mix of deep and translucent colors conveys the heavy burden of faith. These methods and themes come together in his most famous painting, the "The Burial of Count Orgaz" (1586), commissioned for the Church of Santo Tom'. In the lower register, the Count's corpse is surrounded by a collection of local nobility and clergy. In the upper register -- a sweeping and cataclysmic vision -- an angel transports his soul to heaven, where the Virgin, the Saints, and Christ await him. This is a supernatural, almost surreal, realm where emotion and inner vision replace rationality and outer vision. El Greco is considered the founder of the Spanish School of painting; his dark, Mannerist style paved the road Velasquez and Goya would later travel. The feverish, bold, and sometimes fanatical undertone that characterizes their canvases is inherited from him, as is their success in capturing stark landscapes and elaborate inner visions. [show less]