In his later pictures El Greco increased the mannerism of his style; the figures are longer, more angular, the intensity of expression becomes an obsession, a paroxysm: he paints as one for whom the whole world has ceased to exist. Sometimes, as in the “Baptism” at Toledo, these exaggerations seriously spoil the beauty of his work; but the “Asunción” of the church of San Vicente, at Toledo, also belongs to his later style, and is not the least beautiful of his pictures: in no other work of art has the sense of motion been so marvellously expressed—the Virgin, saints, and angels seem actually floating upwards before our eyes. El Greco’s mannerism, jene unglaubliche Manier, Herr Carl Justi calls it, is more evident in some of his pictures, in others less; but there is not a sufficiently wide gulf between them to justify the saying that “they are so different that they appear not to be painted by the same hand,”[119] nor to countenance Palomino’s statement that “What he did well no one did better, and what he did badly no one did worse.”
It was not carelessly nor ignorantly that El Greco drew his figures out of proportion, making them preternaturally long and thin. He did so deliberately, just as Bacon said deliberately that “In all beauty there is some strangeness of proportion,” and the effect in El Greco’s pictures often, indeed as a rule, justifies his boldness. We see him
“Pouring his soul ...
Reaching, that Heaven might so replenish him,
Above and through his art—for it gives way;
That arm is wrongly put—and there again—
A fault to pardon in the drawing’s lines,
Its body, so to speak! its soul is right.”
Naturally the peculiarity of his style has at once struck all observers. So the French have spoken of his “maladresses enfantines, audaces troublantes,” his “attitudes strapassées,” his “draperies cassées et chiffonnées á plaisir,” his “dessin fantastique.” So Sir Edmund Head wrote of some of El Greco’s pictures as “extravagant in length, of an ashen-grey tone, most singular in so fine a colourist.” If only glanced at once, this is perhaps the impression that the majority of his pictures would leave, and he thus remains a sphinx to many. “He will always remain caviare to the multitude,” wrote Sir J. C. Robinson in 1868; “the uninitiated observer passes over [his pictures] with wonder and bewilderment, the grim angular figures and draperies and the flickering unrest of all the details affecting him as would a harsh tumult of discordant sounds.”
Palomino said of El Greco that “he ended by making his painting despicable and ridiculous alike by extravagance of drawing and harshness of colour.” His contemporaries explained the singularity of his work either as due to madness or to craving for effect, por valentía, para salir del día, or to a wish to prevent them from being confused with those of Titian!
Not less than his drawing, El Greco’s colouring has been a stumbling-block and an offence. We read of his “teintes presque cadavériques,” “coloris grisâtre, pâle blafard,” “symphonies en bleu mineur;” and Ford characteristically wrote that his pictures were often “as leaden as cholera morbus.” After the rich reds and golds of Italian painting, the subtler tints of El Greco, evolved by him partly under Tintoretto’s influence, partly under the influence of Toledo, could not please his contemporaries, but we feel now that they are no slight ingredient of his charm. In colouring El Greco largely influenced Velázquez, and through Velázquez all subsequent painting. Velázquez learnt from him, in the words of Señor Cossío, “his harmony of silver greys and the use of certain carmines.” But it was not only El Greco’s colouring that affected him. Señor Cossío sees in the construction of “The Surrender of Breda” vague reminiscences of the “San Mauricio,” and one may also see in it reminiscences of the “Expolio.” Palomino, in his Life of Velázquez, says that “in his portraits he imitated Domenico Greco, for he considered that his heads could not be sufficiently praised.” Velázquez rejected El Greco’s mystic intellectuality, but possibly without El Greco’s influence the realism of Velázquez might have been excessively exact and less inspired.
Toledo, in the words of a modern Spanish poet, stands “dark, ruinous, forgotten and alone;” but Domenico[120] Theotocopuli, who lay there unremembered for three centuries, now rises to spread his fame through the world—
“Tout passe. L’art robuste
Seul a l’éternité,
Le buste
Survit à la cité.”
Foreigners from many lands climb up and down the cobbled lanes and passages, in search of hidden churches here and there with pictures by El Greco—Santo Tomé, San José, San Vicente, Santa Leocadia, San Nicolás, and many more:
“The sanctuary’s gloom no longer wards
Vain tongues from where his pictures stand apart.”