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.