We come to the second stage, in which the painter, forgetting tradition, seeks to set down his vision in his own way; it is the period of experiment, as we see it first in the ‘St. Maurice,’[G] painted in 1581, that strange picture, rejected, as we may so well believe, by Philip II., who, misunderstanding, as many have done since, the intensity of feeling that animates the work, attributed its exaggerated expression to madness. Here, and in other pictures of this time, in the seizing ‘Vision of Philip II.’ and in the ‘St. John the Baptist’ in particular, we have splendid examples of imaginative work. Maybe the details are impossible, perhaps absurd—many have found them so—but for others the inspiration of the painter triumphs, and the longer they gaze at these visions the more they are impelled. For, be it remembered, the idea should be the starting-point in all imaginative pictures, and should control both the design and its treatment, and these Greco’s are splendid in this respect. Whether the imagination is exaggerated and perverted in wilful experiment, whether from an uncertain technical equipment, or whether it is, as we would think, the natural and true expression of intense dramatic vision, it is not easy to say. Who shall decide whether to call these mad pictures or visions that breathe the sublime? That is a question hard to answer in much of El Greco’s characteristic work. Perhaps the truth is that we dislike too readily what we do not easily understand. El Greco goes back to first principles and speaks in symbols with which we are not familiar. Those spectres of human kind that surprise us in so many of his pictures in Toledo, in those in the Prado, as well as in these two in the Escorial, do not suggest life as we see it; but they are inspired—they do convey his meaning. This painter’s method is a real enigma; he essayed surprising effects by separating colour into its original values; he used light as a means of emotional appeal, giving us sometimes most delicate harmonies, sometimes discordant contrasts. Domeniko Greco had to teach his world to see what he saw, and in this way he came, it may seem to some, to over-emphasise what to him was truth.
And his third stage was a fevered expression of his imaginative vision. We have entered a new world of extraordinary restlessness, the restlessness that must exist when spirit struggles from the bonds of the flesh. Toledo, the ardent arid city, burnt fiercely in El Greco’s blood, and, more and more, he seems to have felt that it was not enough to record facts; to have cared less to give æsthetic pleasure; but that the object of his art should be to clothe abstract ideas with life. It is something of all this that we find in his later pictures. In each there is emphasis—or, if you like, exaggeration—of statement; in the ‘Coronation of the Virgin’ in San José, for instance, a picture that in a strange, left-handed way carries us forward to the picture by Velazquez[H] on the same subject. The exaggeration is equally visible in the ‘Assumption’ in San Vicente, more beautiful, and the most interesting of these rare visions, a picture in which we have movement—the very sensation of a figure passing through the air as we have, perhaps, in no other picture. It is even stronger in the group of pictures in Madrid, the ‘Baptism,’ the ‘Descent of the Holy Spirit,’ the ‘Resurrection,’ and the ‘Christ Dead in the Arms of God’; it meets us again in the ‘St. Joseph with the Child Jesus,’ and in the ‘Virgin and Child with Saints Justa and Gertrude,’[I] both in San José, the church that is the museum of so much of the master’s work—pictures all similar in their intense sentiment; while emphasis burns to a white flame of ardent expression in the famed ‘St. John the Baptist,’ the wonderful picture of which we have spoken already. It is there, too, in the ‘Christ Crucified,’ one in the Prado, one in San Nicolas, surely the most terrible realisation possible of that scene of sacrifice, in which the agony of spirit so outweighs the agony of the flesh, and sky and earth seem to take their share in the struggle.
It is impossible to translate the effect of these animated religious pictures into words. El Greco was not content to embody the old myths in fresh forms, but he gave fresh forms to the ideas that are, as it were, the soul of each myth—that which lives when the form of the stories change. Even in his pictures with few figures, such for instance, as the ‘Mary and Jesus,’ in San Vicente, the ‘St. Francis,’ of which there are four replicas in Toledo, or that earlier picture, a beautiful rendering of a difficult theme, ‘La Veronica,’ one of the series painted for the Santo Domingo el Antigua in 1575-76, we have this exaggeration. Then, sometimes, exaggeration, which in each picture, after all, only emphasises the idea, disappears altogether, and we are given figures of singular beauty, as the ‘San Martin,’ in San José, or the really fine Madonnas—dark, oval-faced angels that surprise us at times with a beauty of type we hardly expect from El Greco. But, as a rule, in the pictures of this period, roughly marked by the painting of that experimental picture the ‘St. Maurice,’ there is this intensity of expression; and especially we find a new, and often strange, use of colour; colour, as well as form, being used as a means of dramatic statement, with a result that to many is exaggeration. For El Greco learnt first, perhaps, from the Venetians, and afterwards certainly in Toledo, many new possibilities of colour—that it has a quality that speaks, and further that the appeal of a picture depends first of all on the tone of its colour. It is for this reason he used colour as a means of emotional appeal; it was another quality by which to convey his idea to the world. For El Greco held truly that the province of art is to interpret, not to imitate. Every development of his art seems to have come from his own mind, hardly at all from the work of other painters; from the first he was true to his ideals. And always his pictures seem to be more the work of his soul than of his hand; which, in other words, is to say that he was greater as an artist than as a painter.
Domeniko Greco, like so many of the painters of Spain, was great in portraiture; and some of his portraits, such as those of Antonio Covarrubias and of Juan de Alava, in the Museo de San Juan de Los Reyes, that of Cardinal Tavera, in the Hospital de Afuera, the whole series in the Prado, and many others not possible to name, are as fine portraits as have ever been done in the world. In his earliest portraits even, in that of Julio Clovio, in the Museum of Naples, or that of ‘A Student,’ a portrait, it well may be, of the young painter himself, we have the qualities of his later work; always it is the spirit of his model that he seeks.
And this inward interpretation of life is seen, too, in that picture which is accounted rightly the most interesting, though not perhaps the most typical, of his work, ‘The Burial of Gonzalo Ruiz, Count of Orgaz,’ still in the Church of Santo Tomé, where it was painted in 1584. Look at this gallery of living portraits, all the life of Toledo—the life of Spain—is reflected back from those ardent faces. In St. Augustine, splendid in ecclesiastical robes, is the magnificent opulence of the Catholic Church; in the livid face of the dead count, in the cowled monk and two priests is the fervid piety of a people who have felt themselves in mystical communion with God; in the young, warm beauty of St. Stephen and the lovely acolyte is the full joy and rich colour of Spain; and lastly, in the long line of mourners who stand behind the group of the principal figures, and where the painter’s own nervous face is the sixth portrait counting from the right side, you have types unchanged in Castile to-day. And how individual is the rendering of the upper section of the picture in which Christ awaits in the heavens the spirit of the dead saint. Yes, this picture is one of the greatest pictures in Spain; it is always interesting.
Plate 1
TOLEDO