_Domenico Theotocopulos_ El Greco
There is but one great painter permanently and almost exclusively
associated with Toledo, _El Greco_. All the notable pictures of the town
are his, and so vast is his work here, that the Toledan churches possess
at least fifty pictures of his, a dozen of which are nothing less than
masterpieces, and the rest the work of a master in weaker and more
erratic moments.
Masters are so rare in the history of this world that one would gladly
know something of this tardily recognised great one; learn the secret of
his preposterous defects in the second stage of his development, and the
no less enigmatic secret of his occasional reach to supreme perfection.
How came the man who could paint the glorious under picture of the
Burial of Count Orgaz (see illustration), to draw and paint the
inconceivable picture of St John the Baptist in the _hospital de
Afuera_? How, in fact, rose the absurd legend of his madness, since no
details of the man's life has reached us on which to base such an idea?
Théophile Gautier, with lamentable flippancy, gives echo in France to
the ill-natured supposition of Palomino, the least trustworthy of
guides. Nearly every fact given by Palomino concerning _El Greco_ is
false. He states the painter's age, though no mortal being, contemporary
of _El Greco_, or researcher of our own times, has the faintest ground
for any such statement. The registrar of his death, which a Spanish
painter, an impassioned student of all that concerns _El Greco_, has
seen, proves that the artist's age was uncertain, since nobody about him
knew the date of his birth. Furthermore, Palomino tells us triumphantly
that _El Greco_ was buried in the parish of San Bartolomé, "and instead
of a slab they placed a railing over his grave to indicate that nobody
else should be buried there." The church fell down years afterwards, he
assures us, and the place of _El Greco's_ burial was no longer known.
This is all mere supposition, just as Palomino's statement of _El
Greco's_ age, seventy-seven, and more innocent in the way of loose
statements than his information that Theotocopulos went mad with rage
from hearing himself compared with Titian, and purposely distorted his
work to extinguish a similarity that did him honour. Such is the flimsy
tale so genial and witty a writer as Gautier lightly spreads.
To begin with, it is now denied that _El Greco_ ever was Titian's pupil.
It is admitted that he studied under Tintoretto, and however much he may
preserve (and wisely!) of the noble Italian school, there can be no
doubt to the least discerning that he has brought to its interpretation
his own forcible individuality and cold temperament. Great he often is,
supreme sometimes, but never voluptuous or charming. You admire him with
your head; your heart he leaves always untouched, unless we make an
exception in the solitary instance of the delightful figure of St Martin
in the Chapel of San José. Here you have a touch of romantic pathos and
charm in the slim young knight, which evokes reverie and remembrance of
warm soft legendary love such as _El Greco_ is elsewhere persistently
blind to. We accept his own word for it, that he came from Crete, but
when, why, how, we know not. We hear of him in Italy, but at no fixed
spot, and he blazes unexplained upon the horizon of Spanish art, first
known by one of the masterpieces of Spain. Pacheco, earlier than
Palomino, tells us that he was a curious student, a philosopher, an
architect, a sculptor, as well as a painter. Of his studies, his
philosophy, no proof has come down to us; but of his sculpture, his
wood-carving, his architecture, Toledo possesses many a sample as
evidence of the man's versatility. He is said to have left behind him,
as a monument of industry in a life so full and varied, a complete copy
in clay of everything he wrought or painted. The only faint hint of the
man himself that we get is a reference Pacheco makes to a conversation
he had with _El Greco_ in Toledo, when the great painter told him that
in his opinion colour alone was of value, and form and drawing quite
secondary considerations in the art of painting. It was this feeling
that made El Greco so persistently cold to the work of Michael Angelo,
says Palomino. Michael Angelo, he said to Pacheco, was a very good
fellow, but a very poor painter.
Beyond two legal squabbles, we learn nothing of the man's life at
Toledo. He is said to have painted his own visage in the Burial of Count
Orgaz: lean, hard, nervous, exceedingly dark and striking, the face of a
man in whom energy was an unsleeping disease, who worked with his mind
concentrated upon the accomplishment of an ideal achievement, not as an
idealist, as a materialist rather with an ideal object in view. There is
the same curious modern expression in this dark, impassioned face that I
noticed in the desperate portrait of the Italian novelist, M. Gabriel
d'Annunzio, whom the face strangely resembles; an eager, ravenous, cruel
sensuality which knows neither rest nor satiety, and which gives meaning
to the charge of habits of harsh gallantry and deliberate ostentation.
He is said to have kept a band of musicians to play during his
carefully-prepared and selected repasts. Yet nothing could be less
sensual than the work of El Greco. He is colder than Velasquez, and only
understands feminine emotion in a certain austere intensity, passion fed
upon the perfume of incense and saintly legend, as in the striking head
of St Agnes in his great Virgin and Child of San José.
But this statement also is untrustworthy. It is incredible that a man,
who left so much behind him, whose life was so active, and whose
achievement was so important for a town in which he lived for so many
years, should be merely a name, leaving no evidence of social or civic
existence, no word of friend or foe in the annals of that town, nothing
in its contemporary letters to guide us to any knowledge of the man
himself. Pacheco in three lines reports a conversation with him, that is
all. We do not know even where he lived in Toledo, how he lived, who his
wife was, if he loved her, who his friends were, what manner of father
and citizen he was. We know that he painted pictures, that he built
churches, carved statues, and, since he was well paid for his work, that
he must have possessed considerable means, and was probably an
influential personage as well as a great master. Sir William Stirling
Maxwell possesses a portrait said to be that of El Greco's daughter by
him, but this, too, is regarded as doubtful. Of a son's existence,
however, we are certain, and the charming figure of the delicate and
pensive St Martin on horseback, as well as that of the dreamy youth in
the plan of Toledo of the Museum, are the portraits of George Manuel
Theotocopulos, architect, like his father. It is now certified that he
was buried in the church, built by himself, of the Dominican convent,
_Santo Domingo el Antiguo_.
I have said that an impenetrable obscurity lies upon the personal life
of El Greco, though here his artistic existence is one of the most
insistent facts about us. He seems first to have come to Toledo about
1575 to build the church of _Santo Domingo el Antiguo_, and paint the
fine Assumption, the original of which was bought by Don Sebastian de
Bourbon, and is now the property of the Infanta Cristina, the picture of
the Retablo being only a copy, from which we may infer that his name in
the world of Italian art was already known. How else could he have come
to Toledo upon direct invitation, unless he came upon chance, hearing of
Toledo as a flourishing city, where art was more appreciated and better
remunerated than anywhere else in Spain. Then the chapter of the
Cathedral ordered the most beautiful Expolio of the sacristy. When the
ordered picture was painted, with the group of three women in the
foreground, the canons were shocked by the audacious innovation, sent it
back to the painter, and refused to pay for it. There was no
justification, they asserted, for the presence of the three Maries at
the Crucifixion, and they could only consent to receive it if the
figures were rubbed out. This El Greco haughtily and properly declined
to do. Having painted his picture, he announced himself ready to stand
by it, good or ill, as it was, without the slightest alteration. But he
demanded his money, whether the chapter took the picture or not. This,
too, the chapter refused, whereupon the irate and humiliated artist went
to law. It was a long case, lasting for years, during which time El
Greco whiled away his enforced leisure at Toledo by marching off to
Illescas, where he found time to build the church and paint some noble
pictures. His defence against the chapter was a naïve and lame one. He
asserted that the presence of the women did not matter, "as they were a
long way off," which is not true. But the main fact was true, "it did
not matter," any more than radically matters the mediaeval knight in
armour behind them. Such inaccuracies and discrepancies leave the
artist's genius undiminished. So apparently thought the judges and jury,
for El Greco won his case, gained his price, and maintained his artistic
dignity without offensive concession to his pride. The women remained,
the picture was hung in a frame of jasper and marble, the wood-work
wrought by El Greco, which cost the chapter considerably more than the
painting, and El Greco himself lived to die an old man in the town he
had started in so stormily.
His next proceedings were at Illescas where, having built the Church of
Our Lady of Charity, painted retablos and carved statues, it was
seriously proposed to tax his pictures as common merchandise. El Greco
went to law again, and this time, too, won his case. Only this was not
merely a personal triumph, it was a big justice wrung in these far-off
days from the stupid bourgeois to art. Palomino, commenting on it,
writes: "Immortal thanks are due to El Greco for having broken a lance
for art and thus forced the proclamation of its immunities." He
compelled the court to accept his theory that art was a thing apart from
merchandise, not like mere fabrications, subject to the control of taxes
or to the law of duty. While the process went on, El Greco refused to
sell any of his pictures, but simply hired them out for a certain sum,
as the good counsellors of Illescas only proposed to tax _sold_
pictures. As the case with the chapter of Toledo was concluded before
that of Illescas, he only accepted a loan on account of the future sum,
from the canons for the Expolio.
His fame now was spreading through Spain, and that on no common
unattuned voice. His superb portrait of the monk, Felix de Artiaga, won
from that distinguished poet the first of the two celebrated sonnets to
El Greco.
"Divino Griego de tu obrar yo admira
Que en la imagen exceda a el ser el arte"
it begins, and having descanted on the superiority of the artist's
creature to God's, wittily ends:
"Y contra veinte y nueve años de trato
Entre tu mano y la de Dios, perplexa
Qual es el cuerpo, en que ha de vivir duda."
The second sonnet was brought forth by El Greco's tomb of Queen
Margarita, when Fray Felix de Artiaga addresses him:
_Huesped curioso, a qui la pompa admira_
_De este aparato real_, MILAGRO GRIEGO!
_No lugubres Exequias Juzgues ciego,_
_Ni marmol fiel en venerable pyra_
_El sol que Margarita estable mira_
_Le arraneo del fatal desassossiego_
_De esta vana Region, y en puro fuego_
_Vibrantes luces de su rostro aspira_
_A el Nacer que vistió candido, pone_
_Toledo agradecido_ POR VALIENTE
MANO _en aquesta caxa peregrina._
_Tosca piedra la maquina compone_
_Que ya su grande Margarita ausente_
_No le ha quedado si España piedra fria_.
We know that El Greco had disciples, since his two most famous, Fray
Bautista Maino and Luis Tristan, were considerable artistes, whose work
in Toledo is only second to his own. But had he a school such as had the
great Italian masters? Was he beloved, admired, followed through the
town? What was his influence upon the young men around him? Was his
personality intense and commanding? Strong, yes, else he would never
have dabbled in litigation. We may imagine too some intemperateness of
character to explain the intemperate blemishes of his work. The strange
obscurity of so successful a career as his must have been, if the most
important commissions of the time mean anything, leaves us in doubt of
the man's personal attractiveness. He can scarcely have formed strong
friendships, or some testimony, some facts would have reached us through
these. A wilful, obstinate, self-centred nature is revealed in all his
works, and a curious lack of temperament and charm in it would explain
to some extent the man's lack of personal magnetism and influence to
account for the century's indifference to the creator of work it seems
to have appreciated so thoroughly.
We find him again at loggerheads with Felipe Segundo. The Escorial was
built, and the morose Philip ordered El Greco to paint a picture of the
martyrdom of St Maurice for the chapel. He had by this entered into his
last period of accentuated eccentricity, of which the St John the
Baptist of the _Hospital de Afuera_, beyond the Puerta de Visagra, is a
sufficiently exasperating example. The St Maurice I have not seen, but
if the saint's legs in any way resembled those of St John the Baptist,
small blame to the astounded king when he refused to accept the picture.
The sacristan of the _Hospital de Afuera_ explains the outrageous
anatomical contortions in the blunt good-natured fashion of the people:
"Picture by El Greco when he went mad." But as El Greco never went mad,
we rest dissatisfied with the information. There can be no doubt that
every strongly-marked nature reveals excess of some sort in whatever
direction development may tend. Neither men nor things, nor colour nor
line, can appear the same to all. The same sex and nation produced
Rossetti's women and Romney's. Greuze and Puvis de Chavannes see
Frenchwomen with a different eye, though woman herself is the eternally
unchanged, the same variously-imaged enigma of the beginning, rather
reflected and modified through the glance that scans her than seriously
altered or influenced by environment and impression. Humanity was not an
elegant affair for Hogarth, and viewed through El Greco's imagination,
it ceased to possess proportion, and man became absurdly tall and
grotesquely contorted. He bestows the finished hand of twenty on a child
of ten, and shoots his saints up to such a height as would make them
ridiculous in Frederick's famous Potsdam regiment of giants. But this is
no indication of madness, any more than any other exaggeration of a
natural tendency. Even in the _Expolio_, his first known great picture,
painted when he was a young man, his predilection for excessive height
is visible in the tall figure of Christ, and as the years go on this
predilection accentuates itself, till his figures cease to be natural.
The same tendency to distort the human limbs reveals itself in his
magnificent picture in the little church of Santo Tomé, in the upper
portion of which one notes extraordinary figures of angels out of
drawing, with twisted limbs over clouds.
Philip, in his dissatisfaction with his bargain was, however, as befits
a prince, more honourable than the chapter of Toledo. He paid El Greco
the price of his work, and only with difficulty did the unhappy artist
obtain, for his reputation's sake, a grudging admission of the picture
into the _Sala de Capitular_, while Philip ordered for the chapel, in
its stead, another picture of Romulo Cincinnato.
But these rebuffs were few in a truly brilliant career. The wonder is
how he found time, as well as physical strength, for all the commissions
he received. He built the extremely elegant façade of the Ayuntamiento,
which makes an odd and formal note in its Gothic and semi-Moorish
environment, in Greco-Roman style, but has a fine and dignified effect
against an appropriate depth of azure to carry out the classical
intention of a son of Greece. The side towers give lightness to the
solidity of the immense base, and if the columns and arches do not
succeed in producing a general impression of grace--a quality absent in
nearly all El Greco's work--there is no sin anywhere against harmony.
The interior is worth a visit if it were only for the pleasure of
reading on stone Manrique's sententious and noble lines, with their
indubitable ring of the plumed, dramatic ages and the hidalgo's studious
search for the fitting word, the fitting gesture, that shall send him
down to posterity in the worthiest form:
"Nobles, discretos varones,
Que gobernais à Toledo,
En aquestas escalones
Desechad las aficiones,
Codicio, temor, y miedo.
Por los comunes provechos
Dejad los particulares;
Pues vos fizo Dios pilares
De tan riquisimos techos,
Estad firmes y derechos."
When the Toledans wore their famed steel, and damascene armour was the
fashion and not a curiosity, the "discreet and noble males" Manrique so
magnificently addresses, may have lived up to the high civic ideal of
these verses, but it is much to be doubted if the modern Toledans, who
no longer seek distraction in the excitement of excellent steel, and
fashion paper-knives for books they never read, of damascene instead of
exquisite armour, maintain this level of austere civic virtue.
To our lasting gratitude, Cardinal Quiroga, at the instance of the
Augustines, ordered El Greco's immortal and glorious picture of the
"Burial of Gonzalo Ruiz, Count of Orgaz." It is no exaggeration to
describe this picture as one of the greatest of Spain. One puts it only
immediately below the
[Illustration: THE BURIAL OF THE COUNT OF ORGAZ]
masterpieces of Velasquez. The Toledans went wild with admiration, and
writing of it a century ago, Antonio Ponz describes their admiration as
still unabated. At the time part of the excitement was due to the superb
portraits of well-known personages, which the townspeople contemplated
with ever fresh delight. We, who have not this interest in the picture,
may wisely, nay, must enforcedly, follow their example to-day. "Since
its appearance," writes Ponz, "the city has never tired of admiring it,
visiting it continually, always finding new beauties in it, and
contemplating the life-like portraits of the great men of Toledo."
How modern, how seizing, what a subtle, magnificent impressionist the
man was! is the first surprised exclamation when confronted with all
these living, speaking faces of old Spain. Faces so Spanish, so
delicately and forcibly varied and individual in their maintenance of a
rigid, racial type. Every shade of national character stands out
separate and in union with the general expression: harsh pride, insane
wilfulness, stupendous fanaticism, exalted and untender mysticism, a
sensuality so dominant as to tread on cruelty, a delicate humour, an
inflated self-consciousness, exquisite kindliness, morose indifference,
the very genius of selfishness and a sterile sensibility. Did ever a
canvas before so perfectly gather all the fugitive moods, all the
underlying currents, all the grace and charm, the vices and defects of a
single race, and give them complete stability in their wavering
expression? This is to carry portraiture to the rarest perfection. Among
these twenty or so living faces, there is not one that is insignificant
or mediocre, not one that apart would not make a superb picture, not one
that does not carry the enveloping stamp of moment, race and
environment. In some the type is so unchanged that to-day in Spain such
faces may be seen looking precisely as they did then; unaltered even by
costume, so marked is the individuality, so seemingly imperishable the
large strong utterance of the Castillian physiognomy. This picture has
something of the eternal freshness of "Don Quixote." There is the
simple, unconscious stroke of Cervantes in the fashioning of these
hidalgoes' heads, something of his mild incomparable humour, something
of his nobility and the underlying depth of sadness in his easy wit. No
painter who was not both witty and humorous could observe so deeply, so
wisely, with such an obvious kindliness of regard; could accentuate so
suggestively, so delicately, national traits, and yet not break the
consistent harmony of a solemn scene; could tell posterity so much with
the most charming air of telling it nothing. "The Burial of the Count of
Orgaz" proves El Greco something more than a complete artist; it proves
his intellectual force, for here he brings all the distinguished
qualities of the brain to the very different qualities of the painter's
eye and hand.
Of these latter it would be difficult to say too much. Look at the
wonderful shadow of death in the livid grey of the corpse, and then at
the brilliance of St Augustine's episcopal robes! Examine above all the
lovely head of the boy, St Stephen, not in the least Spanish, a dream of
sweet and stainless youth, with warm-hued beauty to thrill the glance,
and just enough of heaven about the young brown head to suggest the
absent aureole. And from these fresh-tinted cheeks, so purely rounded,
look at the two emaciated and pallid monks behind, and then down at
little Acolyte, who has much more of the air of a proud and charming
little princess, with a practised grace of gesture and an inherited
dignity of glance than a church lad. Is it possible to paint more
supremely four such different hours and moods of life--dawn, radiant
morning, dull twilight, and cold night,--to unite in a higher degree
the skill and power of a master? No wonder the enthusiastic sonneteer
addressed him as "Miraculous Greek" and "Divine Greek." This picture has
indeed genius's rare and inimitable touch of divinity. All else, with
patience and talent, may be acquired but this, and had El Greco never
painted anything else, by the "Burial" of Santo Tomé alone he would
stand apart in the history of Spanish art, with the world's select few.
It is a singular fact, as I have pointed out, that such a painter's
influence on the town he lived in should not be more marked in every way
than references to the period would lead us to assume. He had pupils
certainly, but we only hear of two, Luis Tristan, his favourite, and
Fray Bautista Maino. Tristan has left a good deal of work in Toledo
which is often taken to be El Greco's in decline. Apart from the
master's, it is notable in its way, still and rather colourless; but a
story told of master and pupil bears retelling as an excellent trait in
El Greco. The one characteristic we are permitted to gather from the
obscurity that envelopes the man, is a haughty conviction of the value
of his art. There was no lack of confidence here, no feeble
self-depreciation, no meek concern for the judgment of others. In all
altercations between him and the purchasers, the purchasers were
naturally the blockheads, and in no circumstance whatever could he
possibly err, not even when he was convicted of wilfully contorting and
dislocating the human body. He only went on seeing more and more crooked
by a natural perversity. Now, not content to worship art and its rights
in his own emphatic work, he taught his disciples to do likewise in
theirs. This is his uncompromising method of teaching such a lesson.
The monks of La Sisla, a vanished powerful monastery of the middle
ages, ordered of young Tristan a picture for their chapel. Tristan
painted the picture and brought it to the abbot, claiming in payment two
hundred dollars. The abbot, noting the painter's youth, objected to the
price, and said it was far too high. Tristan modestly protested, and
referred the abbot to his master, who shortly called on El Greco at an
hour when Tristan was working in his studio. He opened the interview by
remarking that he believed there was a mistake in the terms demanded by
Tristan. "What were they?" dryly asked El Greco. The abbot blandly named
two hundred dollars. "A mistake," cried El Greco, "I should think so
indeed." He jumped up and flung himself violently on the astounded
youth, and began to thump him. "How comes it, you rascal, you could make
such a mistake? How dare you ask such a sum as two hundred dollars for a
picture worth five hundred? This will teach you to go about the world
asking such prices and proving yourself an ass." Thump, thump, and the
unfortunate abbot looked on while the blows hailed on the shoulders of
the too humble artist. "I buy that picture for five hundred dollars,"
said El Greco to the abbot, when he had finished Tristan's castigation,
whereupon the abbot, who knew his man and was glad enough to get off
quietly by the immediate payment to Tristan of five hundred instead of
two, politely requested permission to keep the picture. Here was a
master worth having. If he did use physical violence to his pupils, he
paid a lordly price for the privilege, and in the reckoning it may be
said the pupils were more than compensated for affront or wound.
In space so limited, it is not to be hoped to find room for mention of
all El Greco's pictures in Toledo. All I can endeavour to do is to
indicate the best, and thus, perhaps, provoke in the reader by whom his
work is ignored, a desire for fuller knowledge than I am able to impart.
The first picture he painted here, the "Assumption" of _Santo Domingo el
Antiguo_, was purchased by Don Sebastian of Bourbon, and though the copy
in its place is not good, a fair idea of the picture might be obtained
if the nuns had not the bad taste to place a large and unutterable
atrocity in the shape of a hideous tabernacle in front of it. Whatever
virtues the ladies of St Dominick may possess, an understanding of art
is not among them. Before all their painted retablos, they place
offensive dressed statues and tawdry ornaments, out of keeping with the
cold severity of this beautiful church of El Greco's. The pictures on
either side of the "Assumption," all Greco's, are fine; St John the
Baptist and St Paul below, St Benedict and St Bernard above. The
Annunciation at the end of the church is by Carducci, and the St
Ildefonso opposite by Luis Tristan, neither equal to the master's
strong, harmonious work, which they show out in greater relief.
Interest is attached to this church by the curious fact that not only
did El Greco build it, and build it so well with such cold and classical
correctness and simplicity, but here he lies at rest forever in his own
large temple. The precise spot of his grave is not known, and it is
quite an accident that such indication has been found. All the writers
have been content with the loose statement that he was buried either in
Santo Tomé or San Bartolomé, without a word of regret that he who
wrought such lasting monuments with his hand has found no reverent hand
to carve a slab above his dust. It was only quite lately that the
Spanish landscape painter, Señor de Berruete, to whose kindness I owe
the information and a copy of the registrar of the death, by sheer dint
of perseverance and conviction, brought to light the definite and
correct knowledge at last of El Greco's resting-place. He lies in some
obscure corner of this church, forgotten by the nuns on whose business
he first came to Toledo, and the record of his death and burial dryly
runs:--_Libro de entierros de Santo Tomé de 1601-1614, en siete del
Abril del 1614 falescio Dominico Greco. No hizo testamento, recibio los
sacramentos, enterose en Santo Domingo el Antiguo. Dio velas._
And that is all we know of his illness and death. He made no will, he
received the sacraments, he died on the 7th of April 1614, and left
tapers for his funeral. Under some stone of Santo Domingo he lies
forever ignored and unhonoured!
Many of the convents that possessed pictures of El Greco have
disappeared, amongst them the old convent of the Visitation called the
Queen's, which contained a superb Crucifixion. Of the figures at the
foot of the cross, Palomino wrote: "They are very Titian-like, and how
superior to anything else here!" We are told of a certain Magdalen, a
lovely bit of colouring, painted while the influence of the Venetian
school was still marked in his work, but this has become private
property. Some of his best pictures were painted for the little town of
Bayona near Cienpozuelos. The scenes from the dramatic life of Magdalen
were so beautiful that Cardinal Portocarrero offered 5000 pesos (about a
crown piece) and the same quantity of Giordanos to replace them to the
church, which were indignantly refused. In the College of Atocha and the
monastery of La Sisla there were considerable collections of some of the
best Grecos. Into whose hands have they since passed? and in how many
obscure parts of Spain may not these treasures lie hidden and
unrecognised? Palomino tells us of "an unapproachable Judgment." Alas!
nobody to-day knows anything about it.
Three other great pictures, however, remain. In the little chapel of San
José, opposite the Exchange of Carlos III., a painted insignificant
edifice that has fallen into deserved decay, there are five or six
Grecos, two of which arrest immediate attention. On the left is the
singularly beautiful figure of St Martin, a portrait of the painter's
son, a delicate high-bred and dreamy young knight in armour,
inappropriately cutting his mantle in two with Toledan steel to bestow
half on the beggar standing beside his white horse. No Roman soldier
this conception of Martin of Tours, making a gift of half of his single
cloak, but a charming youth who is playing at charity as he rides out
beyond the town, while above the river, in some Gothic-Arabian palace,
he has his choice of variously-hued satin cloaks as well as damascene
armour, and as he cuts his mantle, he has the dainty and sentimental air
of one who muses tristefully on the absent or perfidious beloved, and
hugs despair as the more graceful part of passion, the while anxiously
asking himself if he shall meet her glance as he rides past her lattice.
Except the lovely girl's head of the _Expolio_, also said to be a family
portrait, and if so proving, along with the St Martin, that El Greco was
the father of beautiful children, El Greco has done no more witching and
romantic work than this boyish figure of St Martin. The colouring is
extraordinarily cold, and grey of an exquisite tone, with shadows of a
dull silvered blue. It suggests the pale borderland where dream and
reality meet and merge. When El Greco first came to Spain, he was fresh
from the warm voluptuous school of Venice. Nothing proves more than the
rapid alteration of his style, the invading influence of atmosphere. The
austere and hieratic capital of Spain developed a racial coldness, till
his art became like the city that remained its temple, something aloof
from and above the gusts of temperament, an art unmoved by passion or
the senses, too violent to be called serene, too reflective and
intellectual to touch the heart. One would look in vain for the
exquisite sweetness of Andrea del Sarto, for a particle of the delight
and radiance the Italians had the secret of gathering into their
canvases, for any of the superlative charm of da Vinci or the surpassing
tenderness of Raphael. El Greco has much of the modern hardness, much of
its quick impressionability, much of its accentuated indifference to
mere loveliness, much of its cold force and deliberate self-cultivation.
Instead of learning from error, he cultivated error as part of his
individuality, a thing that was right in him since it defined his
peculiar perception of things. Even in this fine picture, the horse is
out of drawing, since it is a settled thing that no large work of his
can utterly satisfy, can come to us without some distinguished blemish
and oddness by which we recognise our Greco all in greeting him.
Opposite the St Martin is a Virgin and child, with two angels on either
side, and below two saints. The angel, on the left hand, almost
confronts me with inaccuracy in denying El Greco warmth. Nothing could
be warmer, even on a Murillo canvas, than the soft brown head and
shadowed cheek and eyes bent over the infant with an ineffable inward
curve that suggests, but does not reveal, the hidden smile. There is a
melting sweetness about this drooped visage that El Greco has not
accustomed us to expect from him. Underneath, St Agnes strains upwards a
very different cast of countenance: dark, severely outlined, intense,
and full of pain and yearning, the brows are tragically marked, and the
expression of the mouth is that of scornful resignation. By no means the
legendary Saint Agnes, meek and mild, but vigorously individual and
passionate, with a soul and intellect inconveniently above the little
joys of maidenhood. The Virgin, too, as are all El Greco's Madonnas, is
off the beaten track. This maiden-mother has none of the bland and
unintelligent sweetness of the Italian Madonna. The face is long and
pointed, and about the brow and eyes there is something Greek, a scarce
perceptible imperiousness, an intellectual quality in the expression of
reverie, more marked still in the Virgin of San Vicente. As a whole, the
picture is one of commanding interest.
The sacristan will assure you, despite the conviction of your eyes and
senses, that the altar picture is a Murillo. Nowhere have I found
sacristans so stupid and so ignorant as in Toledo. For that matter,
stupidity reigns over the town. For a home of relics, never were relics
more densely guarded, and there is not a single intelligent or
recommendable guide to be had. One remembers a delicate little
masterpiece of sensibility and pathos by Mr Henry James, "The Madonna of
the Future," with yearning, and wishes some learned monomaniac would
start across one's path, like the neo-Florentine hero of that story, to
guide one wisely through Toledo's forlorn treasures. But Toledo does not
seem to have inspired disinterested love in any human breast. Those who
know her decline to share their knowledge, and those in care of her
inheritance, from the canons of the Cathedral to the sacristans and
keepers of the Museum, are, without exception, wrapped in an
impenetrable fog of ignorance, accentuated by indifference. The Murillo
of the sacristan of San José is a very striking Greco--one would
recognise it a long way off by the stupendous height of St Joseph, the
hand of twenty of the infant Jesus, and the flowing wealth of drapery in
dull green, dim yellow, and faded pink, with the big deep folds so
peculiarly the master's. The sacristan also denied El Greco to be the
painter of a grey mystical St Francis, an emaciated, spiritualised
head, in a dim twilight, livid grey, half shadow, and ghostly white,
blurred with faint yellow. The hands show out whitely in the intensity
of gloom, and the expression in this grey atmosphere is mystic and
serene. Not one of the best examples, but good enough to suggest that
there may be some truth in the supposition that El Greco was the
sculptor of the famous little statue of St Francis of Assisi in the
Cathedral Treasury, and not Alonzo Cano or Pedro de Mena. But doubtful
of my sacristan's knowledge, I struck a match, mounted a chair, and
convinced him by reading out the half obliterated Greek letters of
Theotocopulos's signature. Nothing but the patronymic could be
deciphered, but the signature of the picture of the Escorial M.
Demetrius Bikelas deciphered more fully: [**Greek: Domênichos
Theotochoulos Kpês, 'epoíe], which is our sole assurance of his
birthplace.
There remains another great picture of El Greco to draw attention to,
overlooking, as I am compelled to, the very names of so many others. The
Assumption of San Vicente is no less magnificent than singular. Most
rare is its realistic impression of a scene mid air. You feel about it
the very hurricane of the upper air, the dizzy velocity of flight. This
is no image of calm soaring through space, the idea of dreamy swim most
painters of the Assumption are content to convey. The very modernity and
the violent realism of El Greco's genius forced him to forsake in all
things the notion of simple reverie. He seeks to convey distinct
impressions; veracity as far as possible must stamp these. He does not
delight in pampering the spectator with sentimental musings or the
inanely beautiful. Ugliness, too, has its beauty when accompanied by
strength. You must understand to enjoy, must bring the brain as well as
the senses to the contemplation of his work. Like all preoccupied
artists, he inevitably sins by excess, and overtaxes the bewildered
spectator. Something of his spirit went into our own Browning. His
drawing is often like Browning's verse, inexplicably rough and out of
gear. But nothing could change either genius. One leaves you to make
what you can of his volumes; the other leaves you for ever exasperated
by eccentricities of pencil and brush it is now no use seeking to
understand. For instance, in this picture, shocking and glorious at the
same time, who is to account for the profile of the angel in yellow with
the grand beating wings of shaded purple and grey that support the
lifted Virgin through the rushing air? The limbs are grotesque, the
pointed nose almost stands away from the face, the ears protrude in
graceless deformity, and the chin is nearly rugged in its absurd upward
curve. A more painful presentment of an angel sane man never painted.
Yet look away, and you will see two exquisite slender limbs and feet,
pointed downward in the air, to show that El Greco knew a lovely thing
as well as any other painter. And yet higher still, examine the Virgin
with her dark, oval, intellectual, modern visage, beautiful with the
beauty of our own troubled and eager times, half spiritual, half
poetical, but partaking not in the least of the old-fashioned ideal of
maiden-mother, the mild benignant Madonna of Italy, the soulless Virgin
of Spain, Eastern peasant women painted from the mistresses of Italian
artists or from the pretty dancing girls of the Spanish people. Here is
an innovation, here is originality: a mournful Mary, leaving earth with
doubt and pain in her expression rather than rapture; with small refined
face and intense brows; a Mary who bears the mark of our fugitive common
suffering, the deep, enigmatic impress of life accompanied by thought,
and not the stereotyped dolorous brand of the seven times stabbed
mother Catholic art accepts. He boldly rejects the old ideal both in
maiden and in mother, and paints a Mary who is neither sweet nor quiet.
How tall she is too, and slenderly outlined beneath the superb
green-blue drapery that bears her on its floating folds, as it waves
down from the rich pink garment that covers the slim bust. Surely, in
spite of defects so monstrous as to provoke laughter, angel's limbs like
gnarled trees, such biceps as no athlete ever possessed, hands to fell
the heaviest beast, this picture for composition, for the vivid
impression of intense velocity of upward flight, for the grand treatment
of drapery and colour, for the vigorous reality of those outspread
wings, and above all for that beautiful, delicately-strong grieved face
of Mary, with the soft dark cloud of hair marking its most charming
oval, this original conception of the Assumption may be reckoned as one
of El Greco's triumphs of art. It does not enchant, or captivate, but it
seizes. Elsewhere you must look for delight. Here your satisfaction is
disturbed by deliberate and deplorable defections, but you have
boundless compensations.
El Greco's portraits have none of the defects of his large compositions.
The best perhaps is the admirable portrait of Cardinal Tavera in the
_Hospital de Afuera_. This is in the full sense of the word a
masterpiece. No blemish to irritate, no deliberate eccentricity to
recall his wrong-headed theory that in painting colour alone is of
importance and drawing of no value whatever. Here is a square of canvas
of sober and solid worth, which might be the work of any of the best
Italian masters for suavity and restraint, and has no fraternity
whatever with the extraordinary St John the Baptist so near it, and so
preposterously offensive. The other superb portraits by El Greco that
Toledo holds are those of Antonio Covarrubias and Juan de Alava in the
Provincial Museum at San Juan de los Reyes. The rest are chiefly at
Madrid, and hold no inferior place in that glorious assembly. They stand
out, individual, insistent, and seem to assure you with all the
eloquence of so violent and marked a personality as El Greco's, that in
spite of the general Venetian tone that so vividly recalls Titian and
Tintoretto, with whom proximity invites contrast, it is no imitator who
has painted these magnificent portraits of lean Castillian gentlemen,
with their austere pride of regard, their air of imperturbable breeding
and beautiful hands. They are the work of one of the world's masters,
who himself created a school to which we owe Velasquez.