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.
And, if the facts of his life are meagre enough, we can find suggestions of this same temper, silent, yet passionate, in that visit of Pacheco to the Toledan painter when he was old, in 1611, of which we have spoken before. Pacheco tells us that El Greco was a student of many things, a writer on art, a great philosopher given to witty sayings, a sculptor and architect as well as a painter. He writes of much work that he saw, and speaks in particular of a cupboard in which were models in clay of each picture El Greco had finished. The two painters talked on many subjects, of colour and its supreme quality in painting, of Michael Angelo and his failure as a colourist. But in all the account of Pacheco, always so minutely laborious, it is significant to note in one sentence the impression he formed of Domeniko Greco: “He was in all things as singular as in his painting.”
Nor will it do to overlook the testimony of Giuseppe Martinez, whose “Practical Letters on the Art of Painting,” though not printed until 1866, were written a century before. He too speaks of Domeniko Greco as of extravagant disposition, and in proof recounts that he engaged musicians to play to him that he might “enjoy an additional luxury during meals.” The prudent Aragonese condemns this “too much ostentation,” but we capture again some fresh clues and hints of this strangely effective personality—a fanatic of life, a fanatic of painting.
But we have not settled the account of genius when we have called it unusual, fanatic, or decadent. It is the solution of the dull that genius is extravagant consciously. El Greco can have had no desire, no power, to repeat the easy, the commonplace. If strange, exaggerated even, his art is without a trace of affectation. When he painted a vision he felt it natural to symbolise his idea in the way that he did. In colour, in form, he painted only what his imagination saw, gaining in colour fresh harmonies for himself, and a new suggestion of movement in his imaginative compositions, to which our imagination must find answer.
El Greco understood all nature as a Living Presence; his art was a series of experiments to express this. And every one must be struck with the peculiar development of this special personality in his art from stage to stage—stages that with sufficient accuracy may be divided into three periods.
The first is the pupil’s search for truth; the Venetian stage, in which we find a consciousness of tradition, showing itself in the still-fettered design, in the attitudes of the figures, in the use of warm colour, in a flowing quality in the paint, and, especially perhaps, in the landscape backgrounds, so Venetian with palaces and marble-paved piazzas; yet mingled with all this tradition is an emphatic personality, an ardour of expression, very difficult to define, seen in such early pictures as ‘The Blind Man,’ in the Parma Gallery, or ‘The Cardinal,’ in the National Gallery, both painted before 1577. Over the whole Venetian period the influence of Tintoretto is obvious; while the portraits of these years recall in their method the work of the Bassani; and of the pre-Spanish pictures, as, for instance, the ‘Cleansing of the Temple,’[E] now in the possession of the Countess of Yarborough, and the replica of the same subject on a small scale, in the Cook collection at Richmond, Surrey, a picture of real beauty that testifies to El Greco’s skill in miniature—these, and many other works, were thought until quite recently to be the work of the Venetians, the first being attributed to Paul Veronese, the latter to Tintoretto, and this in spite of their marked character.
And the Venetian influence remained in the first years in Toledo. It is seen in the beautiful Virgin in the early ‘Assumption,’ painted for the central altar-screen of Santo Domingo el Antigua, but now in the Prado.[F] But the chief work of this period is the ‘Christ Despoiled of His Vestments,’ still in the sacristy of the cathedral in Toledo, for which it was painted in 1577. Here, perhaps, in the fine simplicity of the grouping, in the dignity of the inspired head of the Saviour, in the rich and strong colour and in the vivid light and shade, we have the best results of all El Greco learnt in Venice. But even in this beautiful picture we see the development, or rather the co-existence, of his two styles: on the one hand carefully and thoroughly worked-out qualities, a balanced art remembered from Venice, but with it all a power that was his own, that seized the elements in the picture and gave them life—his life. And again, we have in the excessive height of the Christ, in the hands of many of the figures in this picture and in the ‘Assumption,’ first hints of the special conventions with which the name of El Greco is certainly most associated.