Renaissance
El Greco (1541–1614)
Greek (Cretan), active in Spain Mannerism painter.
Doménikos Theotokópoulos (1541–1614), called El Greco, 'the Greek,' was born on Venetian-ruled Crete and trained first as a painter of Byzantine icons. Ambitious for the new art of Italy, he went to Venice around 1567 — where he absorbed the colour and loaded brush of Titian and the Venetian school — and then to Rome, where Michelangelo's example and Mannerist elongation entered his vocabulary. Finding no lasting success in Italy, he settled about 1577 in Toledo, the spiritual capital of Counter-Reformation Spain, and never left.
In Toledo his style caught fire. Figures stretch and flicker like flames; space tilts and compresses; cold silver, acid green, and lightning-white break across deep shadow. The Burial of the Count of Orgaz unites earthly funeral and heavenly reception in a single surging design; the View of Toledo turns a real city into a storm-lit vision; the late Opening of the Fifth Seal and Laocoön dissolve the body into pure spiritual electricity. His art fused the icon painter's otherworldliness, Venetian colour, and Mannerist license into something without precedent.
Proud, learned, and litigious, he lived grandly, kept musicians at dinner, and annotated his books with sharp opinions on other artists. Nearly forgotten for centuries as merely eccentric, he was rediscovered around 1900 and hailed as a forerunner of Expressionism and modern art. Much of what we know of his views comes from the Sevillian painter and theorist Francisco Pacheco, who visited him in 1611.
The words the record keeps using: visionary, incandescent, spiritual, restless, otherworldly, elongated, fervent.
At a glance
- Lived 1541–1614
- Origin Greek (Cretan), active in Spain
- Worked in Rome, Toledo
- Era Renaissance
- Movements Mannerism
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Oil glazing, Alla prima (wet-in-wet)
Works in the archive
- The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586 (Church of Santo Tomé, Toledo)
El Greco's most celebrated painting, made for the parish church of Santo Tomé, depicts a local legend: at the burial of the pious fourteenth-century Count of Orgaz, Saints Stephen and Augustine descended in person to… - View of Toledo, 1596 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
One of the very few pure landscapes in Spanish painting and among the most electrifying ever made: the city of Toledo under a storm-blackened sky, its towers and the Alcázar rearranged for dramatic effect on their green… - The Opening of the Fifth Seal (The Vision of Saint John), 1608 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
A late, unfinished visionary work illustrating Revelation: Saint John the Evangelist, at the lower left, throws up his arms as the fifth seal is opened and the naked souls of the martyrs rise, reaching for the white and… - Laocoön, 1610 (National Gallery of Art, Washington)
El Greco's only surviving painting of a classical mythological subject and one of his last works: the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons writhing in the coils of the serpents sent to destroy them, set incongruously…
What was said
Pacheco, who visited El Greco in Toledo in 1611, reports that the painter astonished him by declaring that Michelangelo was a good man but did not know how to paint — a provocation asserting the supremacy of colour over the Florentine ideal of drawing.
In the annotations El Greco wrote in the margins of his copies of Vasari's Lives and Vitruvius, he argued that colour is the greatest and most difficult achievement of painting and criticised the Florentine over-reliance on drawing, defending the Venetian primacy of colour he had learned in Italy.
The Toledo preacher and poet Paravicino, whom El Greco portrayed, praised the artist in a sonnet as a genius whose brush lent nature a second life, an unusually eloquent contemporary tribute in a period that otherwise little understood him.
What would El Greco make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after El Greco", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with El Greco · Keep a life moment the way El Greco would · Pictures made after El Greco