El Greco: A Guide to El Greco’s Life and Artworks

Doménikos Theotokópoulos, nicknamed “El Greco”, was a Greek painter and sculptor during the Spanish Renaissance. As an homage to his heritage, he famously signed his paintings with his name in Greek letters. During his life, El Greco’s expressionistic style was met frequently with confusion by his peers, and his outspoken criticism of other artists caused tension. El Greco is now considered an early influence of Expressionism and Cubism. El Greco’s art has hung in some of the world’s most influential museums, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Madrid’s Museo del Prado.

Over the course of El Greco’s life, he moved throughout Europe and the Mediterranean as his training and career evolved. Here is a brief overview of El Greco’s life:

• Early Life: Doménikos Theotokópoulos was born in the Kingdom of Candia (modern-day Crete) in 1541, which was under Venetian rule. He was trained in the post-Byzantine Art tradition popular there at the time, and achieved master status by his twenties.
• Venetian Period: In pursuit of greater learning and commercial opportunities, El Greco moved to Venice in about 1567. It’s believed that he briefly studied under Titian while in Venice and techniques made popular during the Venetian Renaissance can be seen in his work from this time forward. Notable among those techniques are the bold, energetic brushwork and Mannerist tendencies (like distorted figures and awkward movement) of speed-painter Tintoretto, who reportedly inspired El Greco.
• Roman Period: During his time in Rome, El Greco opened his first workshop. He garnered a reputation for being outspoken in his disdain for the revered painters. In a city where the styles of Michelangelo and Raphael were still considered untouchable genius, El Greco went so far as to offer to repaint the Sistine Chapel. While El Greco did not garner much financial success in his lifetime with his art, his work was purchased by Alessandro Farnese for his family’s palace, Palazzo Farnese.
• Spanish Period: By 1577, El Greco had lost favor with much of Italy’s artist population for his opinionated criticisms. He relocated to Spain, landing first in Madrid before settling in Toledo, where he’d live until his death in 1614. Toledo is also the location of the Museo del Greco, which recreates the artist’s residents and houses many of his works.

El Greco’s work is known for a few key stylistic signatures:

• Bright Coloring: El Greco’s work is known for vivid coloring and pigmentation (perhaps owing to his post-Byzantine influence) giving his works an air of fantasy.
• Distorted Figures: The figures and features of El Greco’s paintings have a lanky, stretched-out appearance, drawn with an eye towards imagination and distortion, as seen in other works of Mannerism.
• Combination of Art Styles: El Greco’s work is known for a fusion of Byzantine tradition (two-dimensional, predominantly religious subject matter) with Mannerist techniques, favoring exaggerated and abstract forms over proportional ones.

El Greco’s attitude and techniques lead directly to other groundbreaking movements and artworks, including:

• Expressionism and Cubism: El Greco’s influence is most notably seen in famous cubist Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of a Painter, after El Greco in 1950, and Edvard Munch’s The Scream, whose subjects’ elongated face directly calls back to an El Greco visage.
• The Romantics: Some eighteenth-century Romantics, particularly French Romantics, revered El Greco as a brilliant loner with a hunger for the strange, whose creative visions spoke truth but were misunderstood and dismissed by the mainstream.
• Modern Writers and Poets: El Greco has even inspired writers and poets like Rainer Maria Rilke, who was inspired by the artist’s ability to blend originality and peer influence after visiting an exhibition of his work, and Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, whose memoir Report to Greco was written as a narration of his life told to the artist.

El Greco’s most celebrated works span the length of his career. Some of those include:

1. 1. The Holy Trinity (1577–1579) is an example of El Greco’s early period, marked by fantastical takes on altarpieces and religious imagery, as his style was beginning to assert itself amongst the religious icon painters of the Renaissance.
2. 2. Assumption of the Virgin (1577–1579) is one of El Greco’s first major commissions—one in a series of nine—completed for the church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo, Spain. It was the central painting of the church’s main altar, depicting the Virgin Mary floating upwards to the heavens as the apostles look on in awe.
3. 3. The Nobleman With his Hand on his Chest (El caballero de la mano en el pecho) (1580) is notable as an example of El Greco’s prowess as a portraitist, blurring the lines between truthful representation and whimsy. In the painting, an unknown nobleman appears from the bust up with his hand on his chest with the handle of his sword visible.
4. 4. The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (El entierro del conde de Orgaz) (1586–1588) is one of El Greco’s most popular later works, rendered in a massive two-zone composition. The image tells the story of a local Toledo myth, in which Saint Augustine and Saint Stephen descend from the heavens to bury one of the city’s beloved mayors.
5. 5. View of Toledo (1596–1600) shows a slightly distorted panorama of the Spanish city’s landscape. Landscape art was very unusual in Spanish art at the time, which is why El Greco may be considered one of the first Spanish landscape artists.

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