We now come to one of the most interesting figures in the history of
Spanish painting—Dominico Theotocopuli, better known as “El Greco”
(1548-1614), from the country of his birth. Born in Crete about 1548,
El Greco entered at a very early age the studio of Titian in Venice.
This at least we know from a letter written by Clovio from Rome in
1570, without which, if we were to judge from the master’s early
style, we should be forced to the conclusion that he acquired his art
from Tintoretto, and more particularly from Jacopo da Ponte, to whom
several of his earliest works in private collections were formerly,
and in some cases are still, ascribed. He went to Rome in 1570, and
after five or six years took up his abode at Toledo, his first dated
picture in that city, the scene of his chief activity, bearing the
date 1577. Between that year and his death in 1614, his extant works
illustrate the gradual evolution of his art, the change of his Italian
into a typically Spanish manner, the rapid acquisition of a very
personal style, and the straining of that personal style to extreme
mannerism. The notes and flashes of rare, cold, almost acid, but always
harmonious, colour lend a peculiar distinction to El Greco’s work. His
predilection for long, narrow faces and slender, emaciated bodies led
him in his declining years to extravagant exaggeration; the ecstatic
passionate action and gesture of his figures reveal contortion and
frenzy. As a portrait painter El Greco is second only to Velazquez in
the school of his adopted country. His biographer, Señor Cossío, has
called him “a painter of souls,” because he had that intense power of
penetration which perceives and retains at a glance the sum total of a
person’s traits of character.
El Greco’s conception of portraiture enters largely into his pictures
at the Louvre, from which we must exclude as an imitation by an
inferior hand the _St. Francis and a Novice_ (No. 1729A). It is
certainly an important feature in the large _Christ on the Cross, with
Two Donors_, one of the comparatively recent acquisitions, which still
hangs on a screen in Gallery XV. This great altarpiece has little
of the master’s fierce passion and lightning flashes of colour. The
expression of the two Donors, Diego and Antonio Covarrubias, who are
seen to the waist at the foot of the Cross, does not go beyond normal
pious devotion; and the Saviour seems rather to stand with spread arms
than to hang on the Cross with all the weight of His characteristically
elongated body. A leaden grey dominates the whole colour scheme. The
composition is singularly empty and simple for a master who seemed to
have a perfect horror of empty spaces. The picture, which is fully
signed, must have been painted soon after El Greco’s arrival at Toledo
(and not, as Sñr. Cossío thinks, between 1590 and 1600), since one of
the Donors, the priest Diego Covarrubias, died in 1577.
Comparison of the two Donors’ faces with their portraits by the same
master in the Toledo Library can leave no doubt as to their identity.
The _Christ on the Cross_ was offered by the deputy Isaac Pereire
of Prades (Pyrenées-Orientales) to the local parish church, but was
refused and hung in the Palais de Justice at Prades, whence it was
removed to the Mairie in 1904, and finally sold to the Louvre in 1908
for £1000. The picture measures 8 ft. 8 in. by 5 ft. 8 in.
The _St. Louis of France and a Page_ (No. 1729B), which was formerly
wrongly catalogued as _King Ferdinand the Catholic_, is a more typical
example of El Greco’s management of colour. The boldly painted armour
is identical with that of the St. Martin on horseback, at Toledo. The
probable date of the picture, which was bought in 1904 at the high
price of £2800, is between 1594 and 1600.
By El Greco’s favourite pupil and assistant, Luis Tristan (1586-1640),
is the realistic half-figure of _St. Francis of Assisi_ (No. 1730).
A more scientific classification of the works by the Toledo painters
has reversed Sir W. Stirling-Maxwell’s judgment that Tristan had all
the virtues and none of the faults of his master. He was in reality a
mediocre imitator of El Greco, without a spark of his master’s genius
and without any of his distinction.