El Greco was born Domenikos
Theotokopoulos in Crete, 1541. ‘El
Greco’ actually means ‘The Greek’, and
is a direct reference to his heritage.
There is little known about his early
life and training, but it is evident
from his later work that he was
influenced by the late Byzantine style
of the time.
Around 1566, he went to
Venice and studied under the High
Renaissance masters, Titian and
Tintoretto. Some of the earliest of his
works show their strong influence. El
Greco combined Titian’s use of colour
and Tintoretto’s compositions of people
and use of space, and this is evident in
his paintings.
One such example, Christ
Healing the Blind Man, is on display at
the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, Germany.
In 1570, El Greco moved to Rome and was
further influenced by some of the great
Italian artists and sculptors of the
time, including Michelangelo. Two
examples of how Michelangelo directly
influenced his work are displayed in the
United States; Pietà at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art and Purification of the
Temple at the Minneapolis Institute of
Arts. El Greco also studied Roman
architecture which gave his drawings a
more solid quality.
El Greco moved to Spain in 1577. His
first Spanish commission was for the
church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo. The
Assumption of the Virgin is now on
display at the Art Institute of Chicago.
El Greco had based this on his old
master, Titian's, Assumption but now
showed that he was developing his own
style. He used unusual colours,
groupings and proportions for the
figures. Throughout the rest of El
Greco’s career, these differences would
become more pronounced.
What El Greco really wanted was to
secure the commission to fresco the
walls of the newly built royal
monastery-palace of El Escorial near
Madrid, which had been completed in
1582. In an attempt to do this, he
submitted several paintings to Philip II
for approval but was denied the
commission.
The Triumph of the Holy
League was one of these, and there are
versions on display in El Escorial
today, and in the National Gallery,
London. Around this time, El Greco also
worked for Toledo Cathedral, in the town
where he was living. One of these, The
Disrobing of Christ, was actually the
cause of the first of several lawsuits
brought by the artist against his
patrons. They felt he was charging too
much for the work, and were refusing to
pay.
Perhaps one of El Greco’s great
masterpieces, The Burial of Count Orgaz,
is still on display in the Church of
Santo Tomé in Toledo. He painted this in
1586, and it shows two of El Greco’s
trademark features; the elongation of
his figures, and also his ‘horror vacui’.
This dread of unfilled spaces became
even more evident in his later works.
These two characteristics are often
associated with Mannerism, and it seems
as though El Greco was influenced by
this style, even after its popularity
had faded. However, one thing is clear
from all of El Greco’s main works, and
that was his intense spirituality. There
is almost a mystic quality to many of
them, and this increased until his death
in 1614.
