Birth Year : 1541
Death Year : 1614
Country : Greece
Domenico Theotocopuli, the last and most inspired of the Mannerists,
was born in Crete, where he received his early training in the Byzantine
style. Theotocopuli is presumed to have left Crete in about 1560 for Venice
where he probably studied with Titian as well as some considerable contact
with Tintoretto. He then went
to Rome where he saw the work of Michelangelo
and Raphael, and to Parma where he saw
Correggio's paintings. In 1577, he went to Toledo and settled there for
the rest of his life, receiving from the Spaniards the name "El Greco,"
the Greek, by which he is known even today.
But El Greco had already found his own style by 1577. It combined a
Byzantine richness with a mystical spirit, Mannerist distortion, and warm
Venetian coloring. An intensely spiritual inner vision burns through his
portraits, his religious works, and his landscapes. His figures are elongated,
the heads narrow, the hands long and slim, the limbs lean: and each figure
seems almost bloodless. The effect is dramatic but it is a drama of the
spirit rather than of the flesh. Sometimes melancholy, sometimes exalted,
the effect reflects both the drama of the Counter-Reformation and the austerity
of the reign of Philip II. Arguably the most familiar of El Greco's masterpieces,
his "The View of Toledo", is an expressionistic view of the city seen from
the plains below, with its craggy ramparts bathed in an eerie light coming
from a thunderous sky. His most ambitious and perhaps greatest painting,
"The Burial of Count Orgaz", executed for the church of Santo Tome, is
painted on two levels divided by the assembled heads of the burial party
and rising like a fire toward a central figure of Christ. In this as in
his other works, he represents the natural phenomena of a tempestuous world
that is reaching for, or is acted upon, by an even more tempestuous heaven.
Out of these elements El Greco created a truly national Spanish art, which
was not followed by his successors but has been extremely influential upon
modern Western art.
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(Domenikos
Theotocopoulos) El Greco
View
of Toledo
(Domenikos
Theotocopoulos) El Greco
View
of Toledo
(Domenikos
Theotocopoulos) El Greco
View
of Toledo
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