THE fame of El Greco[116] has of late years spread and deepened, although the full fascination of his pictures will perhaps never be understood, except by a few. Of his life we have but one or two threadbare details, and this is the more tantalizing because we feel that his life and character were of a strange, alluring interest. Before his coming to Spain, the most interesting fact we learn concerning him is contained in a letter of the artist Julio Clovio, written in November, 1570: “There has arrived in Rome a young Cretan, a disciple of Titian, and, in my opinion, an excellent painter—parmi raro nella pittura.” The date of El Greco’s birth is uncertain, but if he was a giovine in 1570, he would hardly have been seventy-seven at the time of his death in 1614. This assertion as to his age was made when the date of his death was given as 1625. It has been conjectured that it arose from an easy confusion between sesenta and setenta, and that he was not seventy-seven but sixty-seven; the year of his birth would then be 1547. The exact date of his arrival at Toledo is unknown, but it was about the year 1575; certainly in or before 1577. Toledo had ceased to be the capital and court of Spain, yet still remained the home not only of princes of the Church, but of many men of letters, and the Arabic MS. of “Don Quixote” was discovered in its market-place. Its cathedral was “the richest church in Christendom.” An Italian work published at Venice in 1563 records that “the priests reign triumphant in Toledo—trionfano—and give themselves up to good living, and no one reproves them.” The power of the Inquisition was at its height. From the gloom of the Escorial, Philip II.’s narrow, unbending spirit found many echoes in the stern cities of Castille. El Greco lived to see the expulsion of the Moriscos, and the utter decay of the trade and industry of Toledo and other cities. Antonelli’s project to make the Tagus navigable as far as Toledo was rejected scornfully: would not God have made it navigable had it been His will? Yet it was the golden age of Spanish letters, and during El Greco’s sojourn at Toledo the most humorous and broadly human figure of all literature was being elaborated in Cervantes’ brain. El Greco died at Toledo two years before the death of Cervantes and Shakespeare.
Pacheco says of El Greco that he was “in all things as singular as in his paintings.” Other stray notices represent him as “a great philosopher,” “eloquent in discourse,” a witty, acute speaker—de agudos dichos—a writer on painting, sculpture and architecture. We are further told that he earned many ducats but spent them in pomp and display, even keeping musicians to play to him during his meals. He would seem to have retained the soft atmosphere of Italian luxury amid the narrow, gloomy Toledo streets, and to have introduced an alien note of pleasure into the cold, intense existence of Castille. But if his life preserved about it a certain tinge of Venice (Venice that spent what Venice earned), his art was essentially Spanish. The mannerism of his painting might be deemed extravagant, as his caprices might not be understood, by many Spaniards. He was, they might say, “too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate.” They are the epithets of Holofernes describing a Spaniard; and what could be more Spanish than El Greco’s mingling of keen vision and realistic power as a portrait painter with an intense, unfailing spiritualism; than his vehement, almost tortured desire to shun the common and the vulgar—not the mere seeking after originality but a wish to be sincere, to express his own soul? His manner has not the sensuous richness of Italy but a Castilian, nay, a Toledan austerity. It is as “a sword of Spain, the ice-brook’s temper.” Already in his famous “Expolio” (in the Sacristy of Toledo Cathedral), painted not long after he had arrived in Spain, he had, as Señor Cossío says, abandoned the reds and golds of Italy for blue and carmine and ashen grey. As to the price of this picture he had a quarrel with the Chapter of Toledo Cathedral.[117] Assessors were appointed to value it and they found that, though the picture was beyond all price—no tiene prescio ni estimación—a verdict with which all who have seen the “Expolio” will readily agree, yet, having regard to “these poverty-stricken times,” they assessed it at nine hundred ducats, an extraordinarily high price for that period. The Chapter, on the other hand, offered a much smaller sum, and that under the condition that he should remove certain “improprieties”—ynpropiedades—from the picture, among them the figures of “the Virgin and the saints—las marias y nuestra señora—whose presence in the picture is contrary to the gospel, seeing that they were not actually present.” El Greco held out for his own price, but the Mayor, siding with the Chapter, decreed that he must either give up the picture or go to prison, and the painter submitted. The exquisitely beautiful figures that he was to have removed are, however, still in the picture, as well as the other ynpropiedades, so that he seems at least to have defied the narrow spirit of the letter in the priests who “reigned triumphant” at Toledo. Perhaps—in the temper of Alonso Cano towards the Chapter of Granada Cathedral—he threatened to destroy the “Expolio,” and the Chapter, having given him a hundred and fifty ducats on account, would be unwilling to lose their picture. Certainly El Greco would not say to himself with Frà Lippo Lippi—
“they must know!
Don’t you think they’re the likeliest to know,
They, with their Latin? so I swallow my rage,
Clench my teeth, suck my lips in tight, and paint
To please them.”
El Greco painted to please no one but himself and his individual vision. His next great picture, the “San Mauricio,” was painted by command of Philip II., but it did not please the King and in his lifetime was not placed in the Escorial, where it now is. No le contentó á su Magestad, says Sigüenza, and he goes on to say, “and this is small wonder, since it pleases but few, though it is said that it shows much art, aunque dizen es de mucho arte.” It is conceivable that the picture as a whole might seem ugly, and repel, especially on a first view, before the eye had embraced its wealth of beautiful details. The real reason, however, of its “not pleasing” was not the exaggerated drawing nor the harsh colouring, the dominant note of yellow and blue, but the realistic portrayal of the group of martyrs in the foreground. “Saints,” proceeded Sigüenza, “should be painted in such a manner that they may not take away the desire to pray, but may rather incite to devotion.”
“‘Ay, but you don’t so instigate to prayer,’
Strikes in the Prior! ‘when your meaning’s plain
It does not say to folks—remember matins—
Or, mind you fast next Friday.’”
The Spanish Church would willingly have reduced art to skull and bones. But El Greco saw that his Saints must be human before they could be divine. He had now inaugurated that realism which was to find its highest expression in the art of Velázquez, but which is evident also in the Saints and Madonnas of Murillo.
El Greco has not the immediate attraction and universal appeal of Velázquez; some of his pictures may displease at first and only gradually make their charm felt. What, then, we may ask, is El Greco’s peculiar fascination, the dominating power to attract or to repel in his pictures so great that it is apt to become almost an obsession? Is it the truth to life, or the aloofness from life, the clear expression of character or the spiritual submission to divine will? Does it lie in his fondness for those cold, simple colours, the pale greens and lilacs, grey and the blue of hydrangeas or of the surface of ice, that delight the soul of “primitive” and “decadent” alike; in the pervading life and movement, the slender, lengthened limbs and tapering figures; in the subtle permanence of expressions and attitudes that were “so fugitive”? Is it the passionate sincerity and striving that disdains rest and mere complacency of work accomplished, the noble discontent with effects achieved, the ceaseless longing to reach yet higher levels, till ultimately, as in his “Asunción,” the whole picture is moulded to a perfect realization of the soul’s desire, a harmonious unity of aspiration, “toccando un poco la vita futura”? Or is it the exquisite sadness, the air of acquiescence in suffering and fate unshunnable, or the wonderful peace and serene joy of some of his faces? It is a rare combination of all this that gives the essence of El Greco’s potent charm; it is the richness of contrast so truly Spanish, the marvellous rendering alike of heavenly things and things terrestrial, the wild magic of his imagination, the sober individual alchemy of his style. In these delicate lines, thin faces, long white limbs and restrained colours there is a spiritual intensity that impassions and consumes with a light and fire reaching beyond dim mortal vision. But in the expression there is, moreover, a softness of lingering pity, of linked sweetness and tears for earthly sorrows, that makes his art not cold and distant, appealing merely to the intellect, but lovable and human; “a thing ensky’d and sainted,” yet still bound by gold chains about the feet of man.
The little church of Santo Tomé, with its beautiful old tower, stands but a few hundred yards from El Greco’s house at Toledo, and for this church he painted perhaps the most beautiful and certainly the most important of all his works—“El Entierro del Conde Orgaz.” For an artist the “Entierro” has almost as much interest and instruction as “Las Meninas” of Velázquez. The subject is a local legend. Saint Augustine and Saint Stephen come down to carry to burial the corpse of the charitable Conde de Orgaz—of whom we read that he “employed his life in holy works and so came to a holy death”—and the chief citizens of Toledo mourn him. In this long line of faces El Greco shows his full mastery as a portrait-painter. And we may see in them all the race of Castille—Castilian dignity, frankness, nobility, sadness, resignation, pride, haughtiness, intensity, ascetic mysticism. We seem, as we look, to hear the solemn rhythm of Jorge Manrique’s verses—[118]
“Este mundo es el camino
Para el otro, que es morada
Sin pesar;
Mas cumple tener buen tino
Para andar esta jornada
Sin errar.
Partimos cuando nacemos,
Andamos mientras vivimos,
Y llegamos
Al tiempo que fenecemos;
Así que cuando morimos
Descansamos.”
The light of the torches burning in long thin flame and the upward look of the priest in plain surplice draw the eye up to the second part of the picture, the Gloria, where the Conde de Orgaz appears before Christ and the Virgin in a heaven thronged with apostles and saints and supported by angels. The beauty of the lower part is as easily recognizable as that of a picture of Velázquez, but the Gloria takes longer to appreciate, having a fuller measure of El Greco’s mannerism. Partly for this reason the picture may displease at first, permanently displease if seen once only in a cursory glance, but on a more leisured study it assumes its right place as one of the wonderful and most beautiful pictures of the world. It requires time, too, to realize the infinite beauty of detail, the figures on St. Augustine’s robe, the scene of St. Stephen’s stoning on that of St. Stephen, and the skill with which all monotony is avoided in the mourners, in spite of their being nearly all of the same height, and nearly all wearing white ruffs and pointed beards.