Doménikos Theotokópoulos, known as El Greco (Castilian for "The Greek") (1541 – April 7, 1614), was a prominent painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance, whose dramatic and expressionistic style was met with puzzlement by his contemporaries but found appreciation in the 20th century.
Years of obscurity El Greco was disdained by the immediate generations after his death because his work was opposed in many respects to the principles of the early baroque style, which came to the fore near the beginning of the 17th century and soon supplanted the last surviving traits of 16th-century Mannerism. El Greco was deemed incomprehensible and had no important followers.M. Lambraki-Plaka, El Greco-The Greek, 49 Only his son and a few unknown painters produced weak copies of his works. Late 17th- and early 18th-century Spanish commentators praised his skill but criticized his antinaturalistic style and his complex iconography. Some of these commentators, such as Acislo Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco and Ceán Bermúdez described his mature work as "contemptible", "ridiculous" and "worthy of scorn".Brown-Mann, Spanish Paintings, 43* E. Foundoulaki, From El Greco to Cézanne, 100-101
The views of Palomino and Bermúdez were frequently repeated in Spanish historiography, adorned with terms such as "strange", "queer", "original", "eccentric" and "odd".E. Foundoulaki, From El Greco to Cézanne, 100-101 The phrase "sunk in eccentricity", often encountered in such texts, in time developed into "madness".
Re-invention of El Greco (19th century)
In 1838 the Spanish Museum of King Louis-Philippe was inaugurated at the Louvre. In 1835 Louis-Philippe had sent Baron Isidore Justin Séverin Taylor to Spain to purchase, on his account, a representative group of works from the Spanish School. Taylor enriched the king's collection with nine paintings by El Greco: four with religious motifs, four portraits, and an Evangelist.C. Marinas, La Galerie Espagnole, 168-175 Among 450 paintings by 85 Spanish painters, the French public was able to see works of El Greco for the first time. During this period the idea that El Greco represented the beginning of the Spanish School was first formulated. In 1838 the A of Spanish painting was already El Greco while the Z was Goya.E. Foundoulaki, From El Greco to Cézanne, 98, 102-103 Nevertheless, Murillo, Velázquez, Ribera, Cano and Zurbarán were the painters to whom critics, artists and public referred reacted favorably to the Spanish Museum. Only a small élite preferred El Greco and Goya.P. Guinard, Baudelaire, le Musée Espagnol et Goya, 321
With the arrival of romanticism, El Greco's works were examined anew. To Théophile Gautier, a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and literary critic, El Greco was the precursor of the European Romantic movement in all its craving for the strange and the extreme.J. Russel, Seeing The Art Of El Greco As Never Before Gautier would esteem and admire the later technique of El Greco, connecting him to art contemporary with himself: "The best works of his second period resemble the romantic paintings of a great deal".T. Gautier, Voyage en Espagne, 96-97, 217 The critic Zacharie Astruc and the scholar Paul Lefort helped to promote a widespread revival of interest in his painting.
It was precisely then that the myth of El Greco's madness came into being. The second Romantic generation, the adherents of the theory of art for art's sake, were in search of the fantastic and the rare, whatever eluded norms and limitations, what resisted interpretation and was unique. Consequently, madness was re-evaluated. The myth of El Greco's madness came in two versions. On the one hand, Théophile Gautier believed that El Greco went mad from excessive artistic sensitivity.T. Gautier, Voyage en Espagne, 217 On the other hand, the public and the critics would not possess the ideological criteria of Gautier and would retain the image of El Greco as a "mad painter" and, therefore, his "maddest" paintings were not admired but considered to be historical documents proving his "madness". During the operation of the Spanish Museum, El Greco became the ideal romantic hero, the gifted, the misunderstood, the marginal, the one who lost his reason because of the scorn of his contemporaries. The critics of Courrier Français and La Presse would retain the image of El Greco as a "mad painter".
In 1867, Paul Lefort, an expert on Spanish painting, dedicated an eight-page article to El Greco with engravings of four works. In this article, Lefort extols El Greco, refuting the all-powerful commonplace of his "madness" and proclaiming him the founder of the Spanish School.E. Foundoulaki, From El Greco to Cézanne, 102 Between 1860–1880 the archival research reveals some new important documents, such as a letter written by the Croatian miniaturist, Giulio Clovio, who characterized El Greco as "a rare talent in painting".M. Lambraki-Plaka, El Greco-The Greek, 42* M. Tazartes, El Greco, 67 In the 1890s, Spanish painters living in Paris adopted him as their guide and mentor. During this period, however, El Greco continued to still be a matter for the "happy few". Lefort was opposed to distinguished critics such as Charles Blanc and Louis Viardot, whose hostile comments on El Greco were a powerful commonplace. Therefore, Lefort wrote an article recommending the repossession of El Greco by the historians.E. Foundoulaki, From El Greco to Cézanne, 103
Re-evaluation of El Greco (20th century)
In 1908, art historian Manuel Bartolomé Cossío published the first comprehensive catalogue of El Greco's works.Brown-Mann, Spanish Paintings, 43 According to Foundoulaki, "in this book El Greco is not established as the founder of the Spanish School, but as the conveyor of Spanish soul par excellence". The same year Julius Meier-Graefe, a scholar of French Impressionism, travelled in Spain and recorded his experiences in The Spanische Reise, the first book which established El Greco as a great painter of the past. In El Greco's work, Meier-Graefe, who regarded El Greco as an utterly contemporary painter, found foreshadowings of modernity.J.J. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World, 150 These are the words Meier-Graefe used to describe El Greco's impact on the artistic movements of his time: "As I was climbing the narrow, rain-slicked lane -nearly three hundred years have gone by- I felt myself seized by the hand of a Powerful Friend and indeed I came to see myself lifted on the two enormous wings of Doménicos up to his skies
which this time were full of orange trees and water speaking of the homeland." –Odysseas Elytis, Diary of an Unseen April "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."J. Meier-Graefe, The Spanish Journey, 458
To the Blaue Reiter group in Munich in 1912, El Greco typified that mystical inner construction that it was the task of their generation to rediscover. Two years after the publication of Cossío's catalog, in 1910, another art historian, Borja de San Román, published his own research about El Greco, which included 88 new documents, among which the proxy where El Greco directed that his son, Jorge Manuel, should have the power to make his last will and testament, and the inventory of El Greco's house which mentioned 143 paintings and many books.M. Tazartes, El Greco, 68
In 1902 the first exhibition of his works took place in Prado, Madrid. In 1908 another exhibition with El Greco's works was organized in Paris, and in 1910 the El Greco Museum was founded in Toledo. In 1911, the exhibition of the Hungarian collector, Marczell von Nemes at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich presented eight paintings by El Greco for the first time in Germany, Hugo von Tschudi, a close friend of Meier Craefe, wrote the introduction to the catalogue, and made the comparisons between El Greco and the French Impressionists. Franz Marc wrote a tribute to Meier-Graefe and Tschudi, because they had offered to Germany "the world of transcendent ideas of a great painter, it were completely ignorant of: El Greco".E. Foundoulaki, From El Greco to Cézanne, 113
To the English artist and critic Roger Fry in 1920, El Greco was the archetypal genius who did as he thought best "with complete indifference to what effect the right expression might have on the public". Fry described El Greco as "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".M. Kimmelmann, El Greco, Bearer Of Many Gifts During the same period, other researchers developed alternate, more radical theories. Doctors August Goldschmidt and Germán Beritens argued that El Greco painted such elongated human figures because he had vision problems (possibly progressive astigmatism or strabismus) that made him see bodies longer than they were, and at an angle to the perpendicular. This theory enjoyed surprising popularity during the early years of the twentieth century. The El Greco fallacy, which postulated that perceptual abnormalities influence interactions with the world at large, comes from this hypothesis. However, these theories were opposed by the German psychologist David Kuntz.R.M. Helm, The Neoplatonic Tradition in the Art of El Greco, 93-94* M. Tazartes, El Greco, 68-69 Whether or not El Greco had progressive astigmatism is still open to debate.I. Grierson, The Eye Book, 115 Stuart Anstis, Professor at the University of California (Department of Psychology) concludes that "even if El Greco were astigmatic, he would have adapted to it, and his figures, whether drawn from memory or life, would have had normal proportions. His elongations were an artistic expression, not a visual symptom."S. Anstis, Was El Greco Astigmatic, 208 According to Professor of Spanish John Armstrong Crow, "astigmatism could never give quality to a canvas, nor talent to a dunce".J.A. Crow, Spain: The Root and the Flower, 216 English writer W. Somerset Maugham attributed El Greco's personal style to the artist's "latent homosexuality", and doctor Arturo Perera to the use of marijuana.M. Tazartes, El Greco, 68-69
After 1930, the scholarly interested is primarily concentrated on the Italian period of the painter. At the same time prominent scholars debated whether El Greco's style had Byzantine origins. Certain art historians had asserted that El Greco's roots were firmly in the Byzantine tradition, and that his most individual characteristics derive directly from the art of his ancestors,R. Byron, Greco: The Epilogue to Byzantine Culture, 160-174* A. Procopiou, El Greco and Cretan Painting, 74 while, others had argued that Byzantine art could not be related to El Greco's later work.M.B Cossío, El Greco, 501-512 The discovery of the Dormition of the Virgin on Syros, an authentic and signed work from the painter's Cretan period, and the extensive archival research in the early 1960s, contributed to the rekindling and reassessment of these theories. Significant scholarly works of the second half of the 20th century devoted to El Greco reappraise many of the interpretations of his work, including his supposed Byzantinism. Since the early 1960s, prominent scholars, primarily Greek ones, such as Nikolaos Panayotakis, Pandelis Prevelakis, Maria Constantoudaki and K.D. Mertzios, conducted an extensive archival research, which illuminates certain aspects of El Greco's life in Crete and Italy.