Toledo, but he did something for the permanent embellishment of the
city, and the last architectural monuments reared on its craggy
peninsula belong to his era.
It is difficult to ascribe the Alcazar, to which reference has so often
been made, to any one epoch. It has undergone so many vicissitudes, so
many reconstructions, that the name, as we have employed it, must be
understood to represent a site rather than the actual palace. A
stronghold of some sort has always been here--possibly, in Roman times,
the Arx, where tradition avers the martyr Leocadia suffered death. The
Arabian geographer, Jerif al Edris, writing in 1154, describes Toledo as
“a town great in extent and population, extremely strong, with fine
ramparts, and an Alcazaba, fortified and impregnable.” This citadel was
doubtless the Alcazar, which was strengthened and rebuilt by successive
Castilian kings, and is said to have been the residence of the Cid, the
first Christian Alcaide. Added to, reconstructed, partially demolished
and repeatedly restored, it must have presented an aspect rude and
heterogeneous enough when, in 1538, Charles V. ordered Alonso de
Covarrubias and Luis de Vega to rebuild the palace entirely on the
lines of the new Alcazar of Granada. The Flemish Emperor may, then,
fairly be considered the founder of the present fortress-palace, though
it has since his time undergone radical transformations. It was burnt
down during the War of Succession in 1710, restored sixty years later,
destroyed again by the French in 1810, and devastated by a third
conflagration as late as 1887. Since 1882 it has been the seat of the
Royal Military Academy.
The northern façade was constructed after the designs of Covarrubias,
and looks on the square created by Ferdinand and Isabel in 1502. The
reconstruction was so complete that probably no stone of the older
façade was left in its place. The façade is severe and majestic,
revealing classical influence, though not without important traces of
the plateresque. It is flanked by towers, and adorned with a handsome
portal--the work of Enrique de Egas, brother-in-law of Covarrubias. Over
the door are the Imperial arms, supported by the figures of two heralds
or mace-bearers. The fortress-like eastern façade is believed to be a
part of the original Alcazar as restored by Alfonso X.; the western side
of the building dates from the reign of the Catholic sovereigns, and the
southern, with massive Doric pillars and square turrets, was built after
designs by Juan de Herrera.
The inner court, or _patio_, is described by a Spanish writer as
“solemn, grandiose, full of majesty ... constructed for the
dwelling-place of the August Cæsar.” It forms a spacious parallelogram
and is enclosed by an arcade in two storeys with columns of the
Corinthian order. Above the capitals are displayed the escutcheons of
the various kingdoms ruled over by Charles. The modern restorers of the
palace have adorned the court with a statue of the Emperor in the Roman
costume in which he was so fond of being represented.
The finest feature of the palace must have been the staircase, designed
by Villalpando and Herrera, which has been to some extent restored after
its destruction by Stahremberg in 1710. One of the widest staircases in
the world, “it ends,” says Miss Hannah Lynch “in the void!” In truth,
the Alcazar is not to-day a very interesting building. It is, in
reality, quite impossible to identify the scenes of the romantic and
historical episodes which we know occurred in one or other of the
successive Alcazars. But the room in which Alfonso VI. died and the
window at which the hapless Blanche de Bourbon wept, _pace_ the local
guides, must have disappeared to the last stone and fragment ages ago.
All that can be said of the palace to-day is that it forms an imposing
landmark, and affords from its northern terrace one of the finest views
of Toledo.
To the age of Charles V. (or Carlos I. as in Spain he would properly be
called) belongs the Hospital de San Juan Bautista, styled the Hospital
de Afuera (outside) in the suburb of Covachuelas. The building was begun
in 1541 by order of Archbishop Juan de Tavera, who died on his return
from the baptism of Prince Carlos at Valladolid. The building was
carried on after Bustamente’s death by the two Vergaras, and completed
about 1600. The façade dates from the eighteenth century and is still
unfinished. The courtyard, spacious and imposing, is divided into two
and enclosed by colonnades. A fine Renaissance portal by Berruguete
leads into the large chapel, which is in the form of a cross and
surmounted by a dome. The pavement is of black and white marble. Before
the altar is the tomb of Archbishop Tavera by Berruguete. This is one of
the finest monuments in Spain. It was finished by Berruguete when he was
over eighty years old, in 1561, his death taking place the same year in
one of the rooms under the great clock. His sons received nearly a
million maravedis for the work. “The Cardinal,” says Théophile Gautier,
“is stretched out upon his tomb in his pontifical habit. Death has
pinched his nose with its strong fingers, and the last contraction of
the muscles, in their endeavour to retain the soul about to leave the
body for ever, puckers up the corners of the mouth and lengthens the
chin; never was there a cast taken after death more horribly true; and
yet the beauty of the work is such, that you forget any amount of
repulsiveness that the subject may possess. Little children in attitudes
of grief support the plinth and the Cardinal’s coat of arms. The most
supple and softest clay could not be more easy or more pliant; it is not
carved, it is kneaded!”
The hospital contains some of El Greco’s most notable work, which will
be noticed in the chapter on that master.
To Charles V. Toledo also owes the grand New Gate of Visagra, built in
1550, and restored in 1575. It consists of two separate structures, or
gateways, enclosing a _patio_. On the exterior of the north gate is
shown the double eagle with the Spanish arms and a Latin
inscription--all in sculptured granite. On the inside is a fine statue
of St. Eugenio, variously attributed to Berruguete and Monegro. The
statues of Gothic kings, a life-sized angel with unsheathed sword,
elegant capitals and balconies, combine to make this gateway one of the
finest approaches possessed by any city in the world.
The Ayuntamiento, or town hall, of Toledo was erected in the time of
Ferdinand and Isabel by the corregidor Gomez Manrique, and enlarged and
restored between 1576 and 1618 by the corregidor Juan Tello, under the
supervision of El Greco. The façade is composed of two storeys, the
first consisting of nine arches with Doric columns which spring from
massive pillars, the second of as many arches with Ionic columns. The
edifice is surmounted by two towers, crowned with steeples and
weather-vanes. On the fine staircase may be read in letters of gold on a
blue ground this admonition to the civic dignitaries of Toledo:
Nobles, discretes varones,
Que gobernais á Toledo,
En aquellas escalones,
Desechad las aficiones,
Codicio temor, y miedo,
For los comunes provechos,
Dejad los particulares;
Pues vos fizo Dios pilares
De tan riquisimos techos,
Estad firmes y derechos.
The Summer Council Chamber is handsomely decorated with _azulejos_, and
contains some battle pictures. The portraits of Carlos II. and his wife
are the work of Carreño.
The celebrated Bridge of Alcantara, of which mention has so often been
made in these pages, belongs indifferently to all the epochs of Toledo’s
history, so no apology is needed for mentioning it here. “It constitutes
to-day as in the past,” writes Amador de los Rios, “the principal
entrance to the city, and, constructed very wisely on one of the
narrowest parts of the river, it is formed of a great central arch of
more than twenty-eight metres in breadth, resting on the right on a
solid pile, often demolished, behind which is a smaller semicircular
arch, which is, in turn, sustained by the bridge head, founded on the
rock and pierced by a still smaller arch or passage, where several
Visigothic remains have been discovered.” At the outer or country end of
the historic bridge formerly stood a fortified tower, which was in 1787
replaced by the existing structure. This is in a pretentious style, and
is decorated with various inscriptions, among them one commemorating the
building by order of Philip V. The majestic hexagonal tower on the town
side, with its picturesque turrets, dates probably from 1259. Above it
is a statue of St. Ildefonso, by Berruguete. Over the archway are
sculptured the badges of Ferdinand and Isabel (the yoke and bundle of
arrows), commemorating the restoration of the tower, in 1489, by Gomez
Manrique. A noble bridge is this of Alcantara; old--old as the city--the
work of all Toledo’s rulers, and like Toledo, grim, stern, rude,
destined, it would seem, to endure for ever. Romans, Visigoths, Moors
and Castilians have lingered on it, triumphed on it, fled across it,
fought upon it, and across it to-day must walk every traveller entering
with reverence this great temple of the mediæval and bygone.
EL GRECO
BY
ALBERT F. CALVERT AND C. GASQUOINE HARTLEY
Domeniko Theotokopuli,[A] known to us to-day as El Greco, was the first
great painter of Spain, and in his strange and fascinating art, the
Spanish School compels for the first time the attention of the world.
And El Greco was not Spanish. He was born in Crete, it would seem about
the year 1548, and died at Toledo in 1614. Learning his art in Venice,
in his early manner he is a pure Venetian, owing much to the work of the
Bassani, and more to the inspiration of Tintoretto, but in Toledo he
became Spanish and himself, developing there a manner in which the
special temper of the race finds an expression passionate enough, not
equalled again, indeed, until the advent of Goya.
There will always be some men imaginative, entirely personal, who,
like El Greco, seek to express themselves, and in so doing, quite
unwittingly probably, express the life of their age. Having the
interpretative--creative would perhaps be the truer word--genius, their
work becomes, as it were, a mirror, which reflects not the man alone,
but the circumstances that have formed his life. For, after all, what
the artist does is to use up what he has seen.
This is why El Greco seems to chronicle for us our impressions of
Toledo, and of Spain.
Surely no other painter has lived in a city in such strong agreement
with his spirit. Think of the place--wind-swept, heat-dried,
extraordinarily austere, yet flushed with colour, ochre-red shading to
unusual greens; heaped upon its rocky throne above the yellow flowing
Tagus, its rugged silhouette straight cut against a sky hard and clear
as enamel; and, beyond, the sierra like a great brown sea in which it
all stands as an island starting from the waves. A suggestion of
strenuousness seems to linger everywhere, a spirit, personal and keen,
cruel almost as the sword-blades the city fashions. The very buildings,
placed upon the crags beneath the great hulk of the Alcazar, repeat this
impression, they rise in sharp upward and downward lines like an
arrangement of swords, and make their appeal by the strange strength of
their aspect. The streets are a tortuous net of steep-rising
passage-ways. A city strongly itself that has suffered no change,
fantastic as a city seen in a dream.
Yes, to those who know Toledo, the impression of the character of the
city upon El Greco will bring no surprise. His art corresponds perfectly
with its setting. Everywhere his work is around you, for El Greco is one
of those painters who has but a single home. He built churches and other
buildings--the classic façade of the Ayuntamiento, for instance, was
modelled on his design; he carved statues, he painted pictures, there
are canvases of his in the museum, in the cathedral, and in many of the
churches. And in all this mass of work, it is the living force behind it
that is the first impression that you gain; a kind of driving power that
fascinates you, just as Toledo fascinates you, by reason of its power.
El Greco was a painter able to create--that is the secret of it all.
And, be it remembered, the artist does not find his matter straight from
the springs of his brain, what he is able to see he sets down, and that
is all. His art is great in exact measure as it is able to transfer this
vision from him to us. In this way El Greco, to whom vision seems to
have been the whole of life, does in his pictures transfer to us the
entire impression of Toledo, so that it is difficult to speak of his art
without making Toledo the refrain.
And as we wait with his pictures and note, after the first surprise has
left us, the qualities of the work, throughout they confirm this. The
very form of his composition is moulded upon Toledo. Just as its
buildings cluster around the Alcazar, almost as bees swarming about
their queen, so he groups everything around a central figure. Never,
after he came to Toledo, did El Greco use Italian backgrounds. And in
his long, lithe figures, so fantastic in their hard outlines, sometimes
we catch that suggestion of the sword that haunts Toledo. Then when we
come to more tangible things, we find to-day El Greco’s models in the
dark peasants of Toledo. Nowhere else can we quite believe in the
reality of those coldly fervent, self-absorbed, ecstatic men, who greet
us with such fascination from his canvases, their lean, long profiles
suggesting again that aspect of a sword.
Then, El Greco’s colour was drawn from the landscape around him. And
colour, if we may credit the truth of the conversation recounted by
Pacheco, was to him the one quality in painting, form, drawing, all
else, being of secondary significance. This, too, was learnt in Toledo,
where colour has an allurement--illusive and insistent. Toledo it was
showed him the existence of cold tones, and the fascination of its greys
and livid greens led him to anticipate modern colour, at a time when
every one else was painting warm tonalities. In the Convent of San Juan
de los Reyes, now the Museo Provincial, is that ‘Bird’s-Eye View of
Toledo,’ the picture in which we have a portrait of George Manuel
Theotokopuli, El Greco’s son. At first you will be astonished, it is the
strangest landscape in the world. But wait with the picture--always the
danger with El Greco is that you will not linger enough. The painter who
sees for himself must be studied, not dismissed as he who but sets down
the common vision of things. And El Greco does give us the real Toledo
in this fantastic landscape. Do you doubt this? Then go when night falls
upon the city to some such vantage-point as the Puerta del Cambón, where
beneath the dome of the evening sky you will see Toledo, heaped roof
against roof, tower against tower. You will forget the strangeness of
the picture’s statement, as you come to see that it is just this effect
that El Greco has caught. Now you will recognise the reality of those
bluish whites, those tones of green that surprised you, and, in
gladness, you will yield to the truth, the beauty--are not the two the
same?--of the painter’s vision, and avow how much he has taught you to
see.
Always El Greco’s pictures leave an impression of their own upon the
spectator; and this is the test of vital work. It is personality that
counts in art. Whether he paints the visible truth of outward things, as
in his portraits--that wonderful series in the Prado, for instance, in
which he startles us with his revelation of his model--or pure fancies
of the mind, as ‘The Vision of Philip II.,’ in the Escorial, a picture
that would seem to have no conscious reference to things seen, one feels
that he had something definite to express. And although his style at
first may have been formed largely on that of the great Venetian
painters, of Tintoretto especially--a “sort of shorthand of the
Venetian,” Mr. Ricketts calls it--in all his pictures there is but one
personality--that of himself. At the back of his art was a force of
passionate character--unbalanced? Yes! capricious and arbitrary; a
tyrannical need that compelled expression. But in spite of his singular
conventions and, from a theorist’s point of view, the strangeness and
exaggeration of his qualities, he does convey his meaning, splendidly
effective, if not the best. And because of this intensity of vision we
have those pictures of exaggerated statement that give credit to the
fable of the painter’s madness, such as the ‘St. John the Baptist,’ in
the Hospital San Juan Bautista, a picture which many have found ugly,
while the few see in its new conception a striving for personal
utterance, and find many things in its suggestion.
El Greco stumbled in his methods maybe, never in his purpose, which was,
it would seem to us, the significance of movement. All his strange
skill, the power of his imagination, his new knowledge of colour and
light, are used in this service, to bring home to us the vision of
movement that everywhere he saw. Even in his portraits it is this that
holds us. There is something more in them than the outward likeness;
there is a power of reaching to and showing us the unquiet spirit
within. He makes his portraits live and speak. This quality is present
in all his work. Every picture is built up by its effect; and this
effect is movement--life. By concentrating on a particular passage, by a
contempt for detail and peddling accuracy, he directs our minds to this
principal thing. His interest, as it were, compels ours; he realises his
vision and makes us share in his imagination.
But it may be said that in many of these pictures the effect is forced;
in the ‘St. Maurice,’ the rejected altar-piece of the Escorial, for
instance, in the ‘Baptism of Christ’ and the ‘Descent of the Holy
Spirit,’ in the Prado, and in many pictures in Toledo, easily
recognised, in which realities are replaced by a series of conventions.
It is not necessary to wait to particularise examples. Certainly one
does not see in the pictures of other painters those greens, those ashen
whites and crimsons, those livid blacks; El Greco’s use of colour is
unusual and his own. Light is not used as he uses it, as a quantity for
emotional appeal; those faces, so elongated or contracted, and with such
extravagant expressions, those figures with hard anatomical outlines, do
not correspond with life as we see it. Yes, this is true. But look
longer at these pictures.... Well, would it be possible to gain their
_effects_ without the _defects_? If things are forced out of harmony it
is for the sake of “telling strongly.” All this search for expression is
done quite consciously. El Greco throughout was strong enough to be true
to himself and to his imagination. He knew that no system of art is
final, that the achievements of artists are, in truth, the stones
wherewith the Temple of Art is built. Imagination does not see
commonplaces. And we recall the statement of Blake--he, too, a painter
of visions of the mind: “He who does not imagine in stronger and better
lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than his perishing mortal
eye can see, does not imagine at all.”
El Greco might have said these words.
And the man? There is a portrait Domeniko Theotokopuli has left of
himself now in the Museum of Seville. In it we see the long, striking
profile, with its large, strong nose, restless eyes and straight mouth,
cruel slightly, framed by the great white ruff that forms such fitting
setting to the fine head. The forehead is high, the dark hair scant upon
the temples. We may read in the face, and still more in the perfectly
shaped hands--the left holds a square palette upon which are the five
primary colours, white, black, yellow-ochre, vermilion, and lake, the
colours he used most frequently--the fastidiousness of the artist, the
instinct for beauty; we may read a peculiar suggestion of mysticism and
ardour; self-assertion, too, and impatience--both wait in those long,
nervous fingers. It is a face of genius, but of a kind restless,
unbalanced, decadent perhaps. And we understand the driving energy that
burned to fever, so that at times the balance was lost between the
painter’s aim and the result, and we realise that the work of such a man
must be introspective, experimental, neurotic.
We know nothing almost of El Greco’s life, and if external happenings
were all, the most original painter of Spain would remain an unexplained
personality. His very name is uncertain, and contemporary writers,
disregarding the Theotokopuli, speak of him as Domeniko Greco. We do not
know the year in which he was born, for the information given by
Palomino in “El Museo” must certainly be questioned, no register of his
birth as yet having been found among the Cretan archives, or in the
parochial books of the Greek colony in Venice, the city in which it
seems certain that he lived--a pupil, we may well think, of Tintoretto,
rather than of Titian; and this in spite of the letter of his friend
and compatriot the miniature-painter, Clovio,[B] in which Clovio speaks
of the young Greek painter’s skill, tells of his coming to Rome, and,
after commending him to the patronage of the Cardinal Nepote Farnese,
refers to his having learnt his art from the greatest Venetian. But the
testimony of his work gives more truth than this statement; his early
pictures, their authorship so long unknown, again and again have been
attributed to Tintoretto, to Bassano, to Veronese even, never to Titian.
That El Greco was a Cretan we know by his signature, always in Greek, on
many pictures, Λομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος Κρήσεποίει--the ‘San Maurice,’
in the Escorial, is one. And again, when called, in 1582, by the
Tribunal of the Inquisition to act as interpreter in the case of a
Cretan accused of being a Morisco, he describes himself as “Domeniko
Theotokopuli, native of Candia, painter, resident in Toledo,” as we
learn from a document discovered by Señor Cossio, to whose research, and
to that of Señor Foradada and of Señor de Beruete, we owe the few
discovered facts of El Greco’s life.
We know that Domeniko Greco came to Toledo some time before 1577, and in
that year he was at work in the convent of Santo Domingo el Antigua,
where the Church was built and its statues carved by him, and where he
painted the screens of the fine retablo; that further, he would seem
never to have left Toledo; that he married there, and had a son, George
Manuel, who was architect and sculptor to the cathedral from 1628 to his
death in 1631, and also a daughter, whose portrait figures in several
pictures--in ‘Christ Despoiled of his Vestments,’ in the cathedral, for
one; that he died in Toledo, and was buried in Santo Domingo el Antigua
on April 7, 1614[C]--and that is about all. We have record of much
work--Toledo still has more than fifty Grecos--and there were pictures
painted for the small town of Illescas, and also for Madrid. We read of
two lawsuits, one undertaken to compel the Cathedral Chapter to pay in
full for the ‘Expolio,’[D] the second to vindicate the painter’s right
to sell his pictures without paying the tax levied upon merchandise.
These lawsuits, his pictures, with their dates and signatures, certain
contracts and receipts, are the few facts to be reported.
It would seem that this strange, self-contained life wished to be
silent; for it is perhaps not too fanciful to read this meaning into
that answer given by El Greco when asked, in connection with the writ
served on him for the ‘Expolio,’ whether he had been brought to Toledo
to paint the retablo of Santo Domingo: “I am neither bound to say why I
came to this city nor to answer the other questions put to me.” Here we
gain hints of certain very real traits of character.