although the full fascination of his pictures will perhaps never be
understood, except by a few. Of his life we have but one or two
threadbare details, and this is the more tantalizing because we feel
that his life and character were of a strange, alluring interest.
Before his coming to Spain, the most interesting fact we learn
concerning him is contained in a letter of the artist Julio Clovio,
written in November, 1570: “There has arrived in Rome a young Cretan, a
disciple of Titian, and, in my opinion, an excellent painter--_parmi
raro nella pittura_.” The date of El Greco’s birth is uncertain, but if
he was a _giovine_ in 1570, he would hardly have been seventy-seven at
the time of his death in 1614. This assertion as to his age was made
when the date of his death was given as 1625. It has been conjectured
that it arose from an easy confusion between _sesenta_ and _setenta_,
and that he was not seventy-seven but sixty-seven; the year of his birth
would then be 1547. The exact date of his arrival at Toledo is unknown,
but it was about the year 1575; certainly in or before 1577. Toledo had
ceased to be the capital and court of Spain, yet still remained the home
not only of princes of the Church, but of many men of letters, and the
Arabic MS. of “Don Quixote” was discovered in its market-place. Its
cathedral was “the richest church in Christendom.” An Italian work
published at Venice in 1563 records that “the priests reign triumphant
in Toledo--_trionfano_--and give themselves up to good living, and no
one reproves them.” The power of the Inquisition was at its height. From
the gloom of the Escorial, Philip II.’s narrow, unbending spirit found
many echoes in the stern cities of Castille. El Greco lived to see the
expulsion of the Moriscos, and the utter decay of the trade and industry
of Toledo and other cities. Antonelli’s project to make the Tagus
navigable as far as Toledo was rejected scornfully: would not God have
made it navigable had it been His will? Yet it was the golden age of
Spanish letters, and during El Greco’s sojourn at Toledo the most
humorous and broadly human figure of all literature was being elaborated
in Cervantes’ brain. El Greco died at Toledo two years before the death
of Cervantes and Shakespeare.
Pacheco says of El Greco that he was “in all things as singular as in
his paintings.” Other stray notices represent him as “a great
philosopher,” “eloquent in discourse,” a witty, acute speaker--_de
agudos dichos_--a writer on painting, sculpture and architecture. We are
further told that he earned many ducats but spent them in pomp and
display, even keeping musicians to play to him during his meals. He
would seem to have retained the soft atmosphere of Italian luxury amid
the narrow, gloomy Toledo streets, and to have introduced an alien note
of pleasure into the cold, intense existence of Castille. But if his
life preserved about it a certain tinge of Venice (Venice that spent
what Venice earned), his art was essentially Spanish. The mannerism of
his painting might be deemed extravagant, as his caprices might not be
understood, by many Spaniards. He was, they might say, “too picked, too
spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate.” They are
the epithets of Holofernes describing a Spaniard; and what could be more
Spanish than El Greco’s mingling of keen vision and realistic power as a
portrait painter with an intense, unfailing spiritualism; than his
vehement, almost tortured desire to shun the common and the vulgar--not
the mere seeking after originality but a wish to be sincere, to express
his own soul? His manner has not the sensuous richness of Italy but a
Castilian, nay, a Toledan austerity. It is as “a sword of Spain, the
ice-brook’s temper.” Already in his famous “Expolio” (in the Sacristy of
Toledo Cathedral), painted not long after he had arrived in Spain, he
had, as Señor Cossío says, abandoned the reds and golds of Italy for
blue and carmine and ashen grey. As to the price of this picture he had
a quarrel with the Chapter of Toledo Cathedral.[117] Assessors were
appointed to value it and they found that, though the picture was beyond
all price--_no tiene prescio ni estimación_--a verdict with which all
who have seen the “Expolio” will readily agree, yet, having regard to
“these poverty-stricken times,” they assessed it at nine hundred ducats,
an extraordinarily high price for that period. The Chapter, on the
other hand, offered a much smaller sum, and that under the condition
that he should remove certain “improprieties”--_ynpropiedades_--from the
picture, among them the figures of “the Virgin and the saints--_las
marias y nuestra señora_--whose presence in the picture is contrary to
the gospel, seeing that they were not actually present.” El Greco held
out for his own price, but the Mayor, siding with the Chapter, decreed
that he must either give up the picture or go to prison, and the painter
submitted. The exquisitely beautiful figures that he was to have removed
are, however, still in the picture, as well as the other
_ynpropiedades_, so that he seems at least to have defied the narrow
spirit of the letter in the priests who “reigned triumphant” at Toledo.
Perhaps--in the temper of Alonso Cano towards the Chapter of Granada
Cathedral--he threatened to destroy the “Expolio,” and the Chapter,
having given him a hundred and fifty ducats on account, would be
unwilling to lose their picture. Certainly El Greco would not say to
himself with Frà Lippo Lippi--
“they must know!
Don’t you think they’re the likeliest to know,
They, with their Latin? so I swallow my rage,
Clench my teeth, suck my lips in tight, and paint
To please them.”
El Greco painted to please no one but himself and his individual vision.
His next great picture, the “San Mauricio,” was painted by command of
Philip II., but it did not please the King and in his lifetime was not
placed in the Escorial, where it now is. _No le contentó á su Magestad_,
says Sigüenza, and he goes on to say, “and this is small wonder, since
it pleases but few, though it is said that it shows much art, _aunque
dizen es de mucho arte_.” It is conceivable that the picture as a whole
might seem ugly, and repel, especially on a first view, before the eye
had embraced its wealth of beautiful details. The real reason, however,
of its “not pleasing” was not the exaggerated drawing nor the harsh
colouring, the dominant note of yellow and blue, but the realistic
portrayal of the group of martyrs in the foreground. “Saints,” proceeded
Sigüenza, “should be painted in such a manner that they may not take
away the desire to pray, but may rather incite to devotion.”
“‘Ay, but you don’t so instigate to prayer,’
Strikes in the Prior! ‘when your meaning’s plain
It does not say to folks--remember matins--
Or, mind you fast next Friday.’”
The Spanish Church would willingly have reduced art to skull and bones.
But El Greco saw that his Saints must be human before they could be
divine. He had now inaugurated that realism which was to find its
highest expression in the art of Velázquez, but which is evident also in
the Saints and Madonnas of Murillo.
El Greco has not the immediate attraction and universal appeal of
Velázquez; some of his pictures may displease at first and only
gradually make their charm felt. What, then, we may ask, is El Greco’s
peculiar fascination, the dominating power to attract or to repel in
his pictures so great that it is apt to become almost an obsession? Is
it the truth to life, or the aloofness from life, the clear expression
of character or the spiritual submission to divine will? Does it lie in
his fondness for those cold, simple colours, the pale greens and lilacs,
grey and the blue of hydrangeas or of the surface of ice, that delight
the soul of “primitive” and “decadent” alike; in the pervading life and
movement, the slender, lengthened limbs and tapering figures; in the
subtle permanence of expressions and attitudes that were “so fugitive”?
Is it the passionate sincerity and striving that disdains rest and mere
complacency of work accomplished, the noble discontent with effects
achieved, the ceaseless longing to reach yet higher levels, till
ultimately, as in his “Asunción,” the whole picture is moulded to a
perfect realization of the soul’s desire, a harmonious unity of
aspiration, “toccando un poco la vita futura”? Or is it the exquisite
sadness, the air of acquiescence in suffering and fate unshunnable, or
the wonderful peace and serene joy of some of his faces? It is a rare
combination of all this that gives the essence of El Greco’s potent
charm; it is the richness of contrast so truly Spanish, the marvellous
rendering alike of heavenly things and things terrestrial, the wild
magic of his imagination, the sober individual alchemy of his style. In
these delicate lines, thin faces, long white limbs and restrained
colours there is a spiritual intensity that impassions and consumes with
a light and fire reaching beyond dim mortal vision. But in the
expression there is, moreover, a softness of lingering pity, of linked
sweetness and tears for earthly sorrows, that makes his art not cold and
distant, appealing merely to the intellect, but lovable and human; “a
thing ensky’d and sainted,” yet still bound by gold chains about the
feet of man.
The little church of Santo Tomé, with its beautiful old tower, stands
but a few hundred yards from El Greco’s house at Toledo, and for this
church he painted perhaps the most beautiful and certainly the most
important of all his works--“El Entierro del Conde Orgaz.” For an artist
the “Entierro” has almost as much interest and instruction as “Las
Meninas” of Velázquez. The subject is a local legend. Saint Augustine
and Saint Stephen come down to carry to burial the corpse of the
charitable Conde de Orgaz--of whom we read that he “employed his life in
holy works and so came to a holy death”--and the chief citizens of
Toledo mourn him. In this long line of faces El Greco shows his full
mastery as a portrait-painter. And we may see in them all the race of
Castille--Castilian dignity, frankness, nobility, sadness, resignation,
pride, haughtiness, intensity, ascetic mysticism. We seem, as we look,
to hear the solemn rhythm of Jorge Manrique’s verses--[118]
“Este mundo es el camino
Para el otro, que es morada
Sin pesar;
Mas cumple tener buen tino
Para andar esta jornada
Sin errar.
Partimos cuando nacemos,
Andamos mientras vivimos,
Y llegamos
Al tiempo que fenecemos;
Así que cuando morimos
Descansamos.”
The light of the torches burning in long thin flame and the upward look
of the priest in plain surplice draw the eye up to the second part of
the picture, the _Gloria_, where the Conde de Orgaz appears before
Christ and the Virgin in a heaven thronged with apostles and saints and
supported by angels. The beauty of the lower part is as easily
recognizable as that of a picture of Velázquez, but the _Gloria_ takes
longer to appreciate, having a fuller measure of El Greco’s mannerism.
Partly for this reason the picture may displease at first, permanently
displease if seen once only in a cursory glance, but on a more leisured
study it assumes its right place as one of the wonderful and most
beautiful pictures of the world. It requires time, too, to realize the
infinite beauty of detail, the figures on St. Augustine’s robe, the
scene of St. Stephen’s stoning on that of St. Stephen, and the skill
with which all monotony is avoided in the mourners, in spite of their
being nearly all of the same height, and nearly all wearing white ruffs
and pointed beards.
In his later pictures El Greco increased the mannerism of his style; the
figures are longer, more angular, the intensity of expression becomes
an obsession, a paroxysm: he paints as one for whom the whole world has
ceased to exist. Sometimes, as in the “Baptism” at Toledo, these
exaggerations seriously spoil the beauty of his work; but the “Asunción”
of the church of San Vicente, at Toledo, also belongs to his later
style, and is not the least beautiful of his pictures: in no other work
of art has the sense of motion been so marvellously expressed--the
Virgin, saints, and angels seem actually floating upwards before our
eyes. El Greco’s mannerism, _jene unglaubliche Manier_, Herr Carl Justi
calls it, is more evident in some of his pictures, in others less; but
there is not a sufficiently wide gulf between them to justify the saying
that “they are so different that they appear not to be painted by the
same hand,”[119] nor to countenance Palomino’s statement that “What he
did well no one did better, and what he did badly no one did worse.”
It was not carelessly nor ignorantly that El Greco drew his figures out
of proportion, making them preternaturally long and thin. He did so
deliberately, just as Bacon said deliberately that “In all beauty there
is some strangeness of proportion,” and the effect in El Greco’s
pictures often, indeed as a rule, justifies his boldness. We see him
“Pouring his soul ...
Reaching, that Heaven might so replenish him,
Above and through his art--for it gives way;
That arm is wrongly put--and there again--
A fault to pardon in the drawing’s lines,
Its body, so to speak! its soul is right.”
Naturally the peculiarity of his style has at once struck all observers.
So the French have spoken of his “maladresses enfantines, audaces
troublantes,” his “attitudes strapassées,” his “draperies cassées et
chiffonnées á plaisir,” his “dessin fantastique.” So Sir Edmund Head
wrote of some of El Greco’s pictures as “extravagant in length, of an
ashen-grey tone, most singular in so fine a colourist.” If only glanced
at once, this is perhaps the impression that the majority of his
pictures would leave, and he thus remains a sphinx to many. “He will
always remain caviare to the multitude,” wrote Sir J. C. Robinson in
1868; “the uninitiated observer passes over [his pictures] with wonder
and bewilderment, the grim angular figures and draperies and the
flickering unrest of all the details affecting him as would a harsh
tumult of discordant sounds.”
Palomino said of El Greco that “he ended by making his painting
despicable and ridiculous alike by extravagance of drawing and harshness
of colour.” His contemporaries explained the singularity of his work
either as due to madness or to craving for effect, _por valentía, para
salir del día_, or to a wish to prevent them from being confused with
those of Titian!
Not less than his drawing, El Greco’s colouring has been a
stumbling-block and an offence. We read of his “teintes presque
cadavériques,” “coloris grisâtre, pâle blafard,” “symphonies en bleu
mineur;” and Ford characteristically wrote that his pictures were often
“as leaden as cholera morbus.” After the rich reds and golds of Italian
painting, the subtler tints of El Greco, evolved by him partly under
Tintoretto’s influence, partly under the influence of Toledo, could not
please his contemporaries, but we feel now that they are no slight
ingredient of his charm. In colouring El Greco largely influenced
Velázquez, and through Velázquez all subsequent painting. Velázquez
learnt from him, in the words of Señor Cossío, “his harmony of silver
greys and the use of certain carmines.” But it was not only El Greco’s
colouring that affected him. Señor Cossío sees in the construction of
“The Surrender of Breda” vague reminiscences of the “San Mauricio,” and
one may also see in it reminiscences of the “Expolio.” Palomino, in his
Life of Velázquez, says that “in his portraits he imitated Domenico
Greco, for he considered that his heads could not be sufficiently
praised.” Velázquez rejected El Greco’s mystic intellectuality, but
possibly without El Greco’s influence the realism of Velázquez might
have been excessively exact and less inspired.
Toledo, in the words of a modern Spanish poet, stands “dark, ruinous,
forgotten and alone;” but Domenico[120] Theotocopuli, who lay there
unremembered for three centuries, now rises to spread his fame through
the world--
“Tout passe. L’art robuste
Seul a l’éternité,
Le buste
Survit à la cité.”
Foreigners from many lands climb up and down the cobbled lanes and
passages, in search of hidden churches here and there with pictures by
El Greco--Santo Tomé, San José, San Vicente, Santa Leocadia, San
Nicolás, and many more:
“The sanctuary’s gloom no longer wards
Vain tongues from where his pictures stand apart.”
He loved to paint the city, and, besides his famous view of it, we find
it in the background of his pictures. The Cathedral and the Bridge of
Alcántara and the Castle of San Servando are perfectly distinct in the
“Asunción” of the Church of San Vicente. The city figures again, though
less clearly, in the magnificent picture of St. Martin (of Tours)
dividing his cloak, an act of charity that certainly receives a new
significance in this bleak, unsheltered Toledo country. And Toledo, not
Troy, appears in the “Laocoon,” the only picture by El Greco that has a
classical subject. El Greco, the Cretan, lived at Toledo for some forty
years, and the charm of Toledo seems to have entered into his soul. His
house was not in one of the smothered streets, but in an open space high
above the Tagus, opposite the Synagogue of the Jews.[121] It has a cool
_patio_ with a floor of red bricks and glazed tiles, and four white
pillars, with a tiny well near the entrance, and a grey wooden gallery
above, resting on the pillars, and open on one side, so that in spring
swallows occasionally enter and whirl round the court. To the right a
door leads to a quaint, old-fashioned kitchen, with its immense open
fireplace and seats on either side beneath the chimney. That El Greco, a
foreigner, should have become the most Spanish of Spanish painters, was
due no doubt to the influence exercised over him by this stern yet
luring city of Castille. It is impossible to dissociate his colouring
from the many greens and greys and browns of the city and surrounding
country, the rust-coloured soil of the Cigarrales thinly covered with
many greens that are not green, grey hill-plants, dull tints of thyme
and olive, the shriller green of pomegranate and other fruit-trees, the
grass sun-parched to patches of yellow. And perhaps it is not altogether
fanciful to connect the metallic gleams visible in certain lights on the
surface of the Tagus with the glazed effects so frequent in El Greco’s
pictures, or even the ragged, wind-tormented elms by the river with some
of his more extravagant figures. The city points upward like a grey
sword; and whether seen in shafts and foils of orange light against a
stormy sunset, or fainting and crumbling greyly beneath a relentless sun
and sky of cloudless blue, it has the austere intensity that we find in
El Greco’s work. Yet, as in the greyest pictures of El Greco occurs some
relieving touch of colour, so Toledo is not merely a monotonous symmetry
of brown or grey. A procession, white and gold and red and purple,
passes through the narrow streets under a shower of roses from the
balconies of houses gaily hung in white and red, red and yellow; or the
bright colours of peasants’ dresses are to be seen against the ancient
Alcántara bridge as they come in to market; or in some street of
stifling, windowless walls that lead up to a line of blue sky by day,
and at night to a ribbon of stars, comes a glimpse, through doors of
massive ancient stone, of a _patio_ of bright flowers--carnations,
nasturtiums, geraniums--as one may find a picture of El Greco in some
old forgotten Church; and beneath the yellow-brown walls and grey rocks
of the city are gardens of fruit-trees, where in spring nightingales
sing from pomegranates in scarlet flower. It is a city of continual
surprises, not to be understood or appreciated in a single day or a
single visit; it gives, like El Greco’s pictures, a strong original
impression at a first glance, but its inner being, its softer moments,
its true significance and charm it reveals only to a patient study. Its
attitude is indeed that of reserve; it seems to be holding judgment on
modern civilization. It represents all that is noblest, most individual,
and unbendingly austere in the spirit of Spain.
INDEX
A
Abenabet, _King of Seville_, 101
_Afforestation_, 99
_Agriculture_, 97, 203
Ajofrín, 90
Alarcón (Pedro Antonio de), 195
Alas (Leopoldo) _Clarín_, 150, 193, 196, 197
Alfonso, _el Sabio_, quoted, 98
_Alhambra, The_, 89
Alicante, 113, 114, 115
Almería, 57, 113
Altabiscar, Poem of, 62
Altamira (Rafael), quoted, 22, 25
Amadeo I., _King of Spain_, 43, 198-199
Andalucía, 103, 128, 134-141, 186, 195
_Andalusians_, 25, 26, 90, 140, 188, 190
André (E. L.), 39
Antequera, 137
_Anti-Clericals_, 39, 40, 81, 199, 200
Aragon, 26, 100
Arenys de Mar, 104
Arriba, 75
Asturians, 26, 196
Asturias, 196
Atchuria, 64, 65
Avila, 87
Augustinians, 166, 181
Aulnoy, Mme. d’, quoted, 20, 29, 52, 59, 60, 62, 239, 240
Azorín. _See_ Martínez Ruiz.
_Azulejos_, 132, 194
B
Bacon (Francis), quoted, xi, 33, 34, 41, 252
Barcelona, 88, 91, 104
Baroja (Pío), 27, 93, 208, 209
Basque Provinces, 50, 63, 66-79, 210-211
_Basques_, 25, 28, 61, 62, 66-79, 209, 225
Bayonne, 63
_Beggars_, 29, 87, 126
Béhobie, bridge of, 61
Benavente (Jacinto), 27, 41
Berceo (Gonzalo de), 39, 93
Berenger (Remont), _Count of Barcelona_, 159-160
_Betting_, 73, 74
Biarritz, 63
Bidasoa, 57-61, 65
Bilbao, 60, 88
Blasco Ibáñez (Vicente), 38, 123, 149, 152, 193, 205-208
Böhl von Faber (Cecilia). _See_ Fernán Caballero.
_Booksellers_, 172
Borrow (George), 53
_Brigands_, 47, 194
Browning (Robert), quoted, 248, 249, 253, 256
_Bullfights_, 38
Burgos, 87, 158, 240
Burton’s _Anatomy_, quoted, 88
Butler, _Bishop_, quoted, 35
C
_Caciquismo_, 23, 204
Cadiz, 88
Calderón de la Barca (Pedro), 32, 55, 227
Cambridge, 165
Camões (Luiz), quoted, 25, 26, 251
Cantabria, 63, 223-238
Cardeña, 139
_Carlists_, 76, 78, 81, 84, 210, 211, 223, 230
Carranza, _Archbishop_, 165, 169, 170
Cartagena, 116
Castejon, 158
Castelar (Emilio), 149, 198
_Castilian language_, viii, 24, 163, 181, 193, 202,
212, 221, 222, 237, 239-243, 245
_Castilians_, 26, 93, 94, 95, 96, 212 251
Castille, 48, 54, 66, 92-96, 232, 246
Castro (León de), 166, 167, 168, 173
_Catalan language_, 241
_Catalans_, 26, 34, 79
Catalonia, 104-107
_Celestina, La_, 144
Cervantes, 48, 146, 147, 182, 227, 237, 241, 242, 246
“Don Quixote,” 28, 88, 139, 146, 185, 240, 242, 245
Don Quixote, 30, 151, 207
Sancho, 27, 33, 40, 54, 242
Charlemagne, 62
_Church in Spain, the_, 39, 40, 200, 201, 245-246, 249
_Cid, Poema del_, 144, 150, 153-162
Cid, the, 87, 102, 144, 153-162
Clarín. _See_ Alas (L.)
Clarke (Edward), quoted, 21, 239
Clarke (Henry Butler), 79
Claudian, quoted, 48
_Climate_, viii, 37, 54, 93, 100
Clovio (Julio), 245
Coloma (Luis), 201
Córdoba, 90, 101, 103, 140
Cortese (Paolo), quoted, 18
Creighton (Mandell), _Bishop of London_, quoted, 44
Creixell, 106-107
D
_Dances, Basque_, 73
Dante, quoted, 26, 130, 241, 250
_Deshoja, A_, 230-231
Díaz de Bivar (Rodrigo). _See_ Cid.
_Diligencias_, 50, 51, 52
Dominicans, 166, 168
_Dress_, 53, 54, 77, 106, 135
E
Ebro, the, 100
_Education_, 140
Edward II., _King of England_, 63
Eibar, 73
Elgoibar, 73
Emigration, 100, 203, 225
England and Spain, 25, 63, 166
_Escorial, the_, 98
_Eskuara_, 59, 60, 62, 64, 68, 70-71, 76, 85-86
Espronceda (José de), 149
Estella, 81, 217
Estremadura, 98
F
Fernán Caballero, 185-191, 193
Fitzmaurice-Kelly (James), quoted, 142, 143, 146-147, 185, 195, 215, 227
Flaubert (Gustave), 192, 197
Ford (Richard), 25, 36, 47, 51, 53, 253
France (Anatole), quoted, 30
Francis of Assisi, Saint, 241
Francis I., King of France, 57
Fuenterrabía, 58, 62, 63, 85-86
_Fueros_, 76, 78, 79
_Funeral offerings_, 75
G
Galicia, 214-221
_Gallegos_, 25, 26, 214, 216, 220
Ganivet (Ángel), 22
Gallipienzo, 83
Gasset (Rafael), 99
Gautier (Théophile), quoted, 254, 256
_Generalife, the_, 89
Gibraltar, 207
_Giralda, the_, 126, 133, 188
Gómez de Baquero (E.), 201
Góngoray Argote (Luis), 148
Goya [Francisco Goya y Lucientes], 192
Granada, 88-89
_Grao, El_, 115, 205
Grazalema, 136, 137
Greco, El, 208, 243, 244-258
Guadalete, the, 137
Guadalquivir, the, 133, 140
Guernica, 76
_Guernicaco Arbola_, 76, 77
Guipúzcoa, 64, 67, 68, 78
H
Hendaye, 59
_Heresy_, 38, 172, 173
Horace, quoted, 71
_Houses_, 21
_Huerta, the Valencian_, 115-116, 121, 122, 124, 161, 205
Hugo (Victor), quoted, 47, 49, 57, 114, 115
Hurtado de Mendoza (Diego), 145
I
Ibiza, 205, 206
_Idearium Español_, 22
Île des Faisans, 60
_Inns_, 52, 140-141
_Inquisition, the_, 34, 38, 39, 147, 148, 168-184, 246