Why El Greco Matters - Artsy

2/26/2019 Why El Greco Matters - Artsy
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How El Greco’s Expressive Paintings Inspired Artists

from Velázquez to Van Gogh
Julia Wolko Sep 26, 2018 12:46 pm
El Greco Burial of Count Orgaz, 1586

Church of Santo Tomé, Toledo,
Spain
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-el-grecos-expressive-paintings-inspired-artists-velazquez-van-gogh?fbclid=IwAR3F-Gw4rD0PAvljr4EZiAXFxhf0Ye43-… 1/12
El Greco A View of Toledo, 1598-1599

"El Greco in New York" at The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York …
We can learn a lot about the mastery of the 16th-century painter

El Greco by exploring a single work, Burial of Count Orgaz (1586–88).
In the composition’s inky night, a huddled perimeter of black-clad men
—their faces pale and bearded, framed with lacy ruffs—watch as the
pallid Count Orgaz is lowered into his nal resting place by the radiant
Saints Augustine and Stephen.
Yet not everyone in El Greco’s commanding painting is focused on the

man’s lifeless body. e priest gazes to the sky with awe. ere! e
Count’s mortal soul, borne by an angel, ascends into a realm brightly
illuminated by godly transcendence. Saint John, Saint Peter, the Virgin

Mary, and Jesus, anked by angels, receive him into heaven in a
billowing whirl of gray smoke and yellow silk.
Notice, though, one small gure who seems unconcerned with the
miraculous funeral service unfolding before him: A young boy towards
the painting’s bottom left corner regards the viewer directly as he
gestures back to the scene. e child serves as a sober intermediary
between reality and marvel, life and artwork. He is, in fact, a depiction
of El Greco’s son, and he confronts onlookers with the central concern
of his father’s life and work: achieving in art a heightened sense of
reality—a deeply personal, emotional form of spiritual expression.
Born Doménikos eotokópoulos in 1541, El Greco’s rapacious

curiosity and ambition led him from the at, symbolic world of the
Byzantine icon workshops in his native Crete to Venice in 1567. ere,
he immersed himself in the art theory espoused by the
Italian Renaissance painters, purportedly apprenticing with Titian (or,
more likely, idolizing him from afar).
El Greco, Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple, c. 1570. Courtesy of the Minneapolis
Institute of Art.
From 1570 to 1577, El Greco set up shop in Rome, where he

encountered exceedingly elegant, unnaturally contorted Mannerist
works by artists such as Michelangelo and Parmigianino. During his
sojourn in Italy, El Greco absorbed everything he could about the
perspectival and compositional techniques pioneered during the
Renaissance, which he seemed to master in great haste. He remains

known by his Italian nickname, El Greco (“e Greek”), a re ection of
the great impression the country made on him.
He shows his admiration for this new tradition in Christ Driving the
Money Changers from the Temple (ca. 1570), a theme he returned to
multiple times throughout his career. is New Testament tale took on
new symbolic signi cance during the intensifying religious fervor of the
Counter Reformation; the story was used to underscore the attempted
puri cation of the Catholic Church from heresy.
e painting’s bright colors, dramatic light, and emphasis on movement

shows a strong in uence from leading Venetian artists like Titian and
Tintoretto. El Greco also decided to pay homage to the four
contemporary artists he most revered then, depicting Titian,
Michelangelo, Raphael, and Giulio Clovio (a prominent miniaturist
and manuscript illuminator) in a tight huddle at the bottom right.
Despite his technical pro ciency, El Greco faced professional failure in

Rome, unable to obtain a single major commission. Keith Christiansen,
chairman of the department of European paintings at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, suggests that the disparaging remarks El Greco made
about Michelangelo’s painting ability led to his own lack of work,
causing potential patrons to doubt his taste and abilities. An outsider in
Rome, El Greco’s criticism would have been tremendously tone-deaf;
Michelangelo, called Il Divino—e Divine One—had only died in
1564, and remained unimpeachable.
El Greco The Vision of Saint John, 1608-1614

"El Greco in New York" at The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York (2014-2015)
El Greco, The Adoration of the

Shepherds, ca. 1605-10.
In 1576, El Greco signed a contract in Rome to create altarpieces for

the church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo, Spain. By the next
year, he was living there, seeking commissions from King Philip II, yet
his hopes were quickly dashed. While the king seemed to like his rst
bid for royal patronage, his second offering, Martyrdom of Saint
Maurice, completed for the church of El Escorial in 1582, displeased his
patron. While he had aspired to live amongst the royal court in Madrid,
this disappointment may have prompted El Greco’s permanent move to
Toledo, which would remain his home for the rest of his life.
ough somewhat removed from the European centers of the art world,
the Spanish city was an intellectual and religious center of the country.
El Greco found a community of like-minded scholars and church

reformers who appreciated his expressive work. It is in Toledo that El
Greco honed his signature style, and it is the increasingly conceptual
works he made during this period that speak most profoundly to
modern tastes.
In 1600, El Greco returned to the narrative of Christ and the money-

changers. Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple shows a similar
scene to the Rome version, yet appears radically altered. Here, the
apparent in uence of Titian and Tintoretto has been greatly expounded
upon: e colors are dissonant and acidic; the bodies more elongated in
the Mannerist style, emotions twisted and intense. In this edition,
fanciful architectural elements have been omitted to focus on the
central gure of Jesus, who charges right at us. Notably, the four
Renaissance masters have been left out: El Greco had found his own
voice.
e artist established a large and productive workshop in Toledo, which

almost exclusively created religious subjects and portraits. A View of
Toledo (1599–1600) presents a rare example of his landscape painting,
and is considered by some to be the rst expressionist landscape in
Western art. e dramatic composition takes a subjective, slightly
melodramatic approach to landscape that pre gures paintings by
Impressionists like Vincent van Gogh.
El Greco, Christ driving the Traders from the Temple, about 1600. Courtesy of The National Gallery,
London.
El Greco’s psychologically compelling portraits also greatly inspired his

successor, Diego Velázquez. e former’s St. Jerome as a Scholar (ca.
1610), for instance, elegantly combines the holy man’s asceticism and
ambitious scholarly accomplishments. e sitter’s unusually elastic
frame, a hallmark of El Greco’s aesthetic, manages to highlight both his
seriousness and godliness.
It is El Greco’s visionary religious works, however, that most strongly

seem to pre gure modern art. In an effort to embody a higher realm of
the spirit, El Greco pushed his paintings’ mystical content, distorted
and dematerialized gures, expressive effects of light and color, and

monumental scale to greater extremes. Undulating nude bodies extend
to the sky in the background of the metaphysical Vision of Saint John
(ca. 1608–14). e gangly, titular saint, in a owing electric blue robe,
stretches out his arms, contorting his body into a shape resembling the
cross. Unusually, there are no explicit religious symbols in this work:
e absence of Catholic garb, gold halos, or books and eagles to signify
John makes the vision itself—a moment of religious ecstasy—the true
subject of the work.
Although he in uenced generations of Spanish painters, from Velázquez

to Picasso (who called him “a Venetian painter…but Cubist in
construction”), El Greco does not truly belong to the lineage of the
Spanish Renaissance. His workshop, though popular, yielded no school
of art, and for almost 200 years after his death, many of his works were
derided by critics for their perceived emotional and compositional
indulgence (or, perhaps, the conservative establishment simply resented
his freewheeling, intuitive approach). In the 19th century, Romantic
artists resurrected an appreciation for his work, lauding its emphasis on
individual expression and emotional extremity; modernists like van
Gogh and Paul Gauguin fashioned themselves his artistic heirs.
Today, the artist is still closely associated with the Venetian artistic
tradition, yet his approach to religious art retained a lifelong in uence
from the Byzantine icons of his youth. Such icons rejected realism in
favor of straightforward, symbolic representation, and possessed a sacred
function, attempting to embody the divine presence. Tellingly,
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-el-grecos-expressive-paintings-inspired-artists-velazquez-van-gogh?fbclid=IwAR3F-Gw4rD0PAvljr4EZiAXFxhf0Ye43… 10/12
throughout his life, the artist signed his works with his given Greek
name, rather than an Italian or Spanish translation.
His paintings thus appear outside of time: El Greco embraced this

ancient artistic tradition as he championed contemporary advancements
and foreshadowed evolutions to come. It seems almost tting that the
artist spent years as an outsider in every city, from Italy to Spain, in
which he lived. It is precisely his personal vision of art and looking that
have made him an artist wholly beyond time and place—the passionate
spirituality of his work endures.
Julia Wolko is Artsy’s Editor, Art History.
Further Reading in
Art
Centuries Later, People Still Don’t Spanish Art History In a Nutshell Four Centuries After His Death, El
Know What to Make of “Las Greco Takes On New York
Artsy Editors Feb 11, 2014
Meninas”
Artsy Editors Nov 19, 2014
Casey Lesser Mar 23, 2018
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2/26/2019 Why El Greco Matters - Artsy

Search by artist, gallery, etc.

How El Greco’s Expressive Paintings Inspired Artists

Julia Wolko Sep 26, 2018 12:46 pm

El Greco Burial of Count Orgaz, 1586

Search by artist, gallery, etc.

El Greco A View of Toledo, 1598-1599

We can learn a lot about the mastery of the 16th-century painter

Yet not everyone in El Greco’s commanding painting is focused on the

illuminated by godly transcendence. Saint John, Saint Peter, the Virgin

Born Doménikos eotokópoulos in 1541, El Greco’s rapacious

Search by artist, gallery, etc.

From 1570 to 1577, El Greco set up shop in Rome, where he

Renaissance, which he seemed to master in great haste. He remains

e painting’s bright colors, dramatic light, and emphasis on movement

Despite his technical pro ciency, El Greco faced professional failure in

Search by artist, gallery, etc.

El Greco The Vision of Saint John, 1608-1614

Search by artist, gallery, etc.

El Greco, The Adoration of the

In 1576, El Greco signed a contract in Rome to create altarpieces for

El Greco found a community of like-minded scholars and church

In 1600, El Greco returned to the narrative of Christ and the money-

e artist established a large and productive workshop in Toledo, which

Search by artist, gallery, etc.

El Greco’s psychologically compelling portraits also greatly inspired his

It is El Greco’s visionary religious works, however, that most strongly

and dematerialized gures, expressive eﬀects of light and color, and

Although he in uenced generations of Spanish painters, from Velázquez

His paintings thus appear outside of time: El Greco embraced this

Julia Wolko is Artsy’s Editor, Art History.

Home Search by artist, gallery, etc. Museums

About Artsy Terms of Use Privacy Policy

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