The Story of Spanish Painting

by Charles H. Caffin

money and colors had been a pretence for avoiding, if possible, the execution of the Royal commission. The outcome of the affair is described by a Father Siguenza, writing in 1605. “There is here in the Salas Capitulares of the Escoriál, a picture of San Maurico and His Soldiers by a Domenico Greco, who has come to Toledo and there made excellent things. The picture was designed for the proper altar of the Saint, but it did not satisfy His Majesty. It is not much, because it satisfies few; though they say that it has great art, and that its author has much knowledge and that excellent things can be seen from his hand.”

El Greco had one son, George Manuel, who was appointed architect of the Cathedral. He also practised sculpture and painting, in the latter medium imitating his father’s style so closely that some of the son’s pictures have been attributed to him. The portrait of a beautiful girl, late the property of Sir John Stirling-Maxwell and now in the National Gallery, London, has been called the artist’s daughter; but later criticism assigns this painting either to Tintoretto or to El Greco’s early Italian period when he was still a young man. The portrait of his son George, is identified in the San Martin of San José, and again as the youth who holds the map in the Vista of Toledo. It is also supposed to exist in the younger figure of the boy on the left of the composition of The Funeral of Count Orgaz. In the latter it has also been suggested that the face with the pointed beard, sixth from the right, represents El Greco himself; while tradition also attributes the title of Self Portrait of the Artist to the picture in the Seville Museum of a man of middle age, holding a brush and palette. These, however, are only surmises.

The mystery that surrounds the life of El Greco is perhaps a little lifted by the account of him which Guiseppe Martinez gives in his “Practical Letters on the Art of Painting.” It is not the evidence of a contemporary, but of one who probably got his impressions from those who had known the artist or at least the opinion commonly held of him during his life.

“At that time there came from Italy a painter called Dominico Greco; it is said that he was a pupil of Titian. He settled in the famous and ancient city of Toledo, introducing such an extravagant style that to this day nothing has been seen to equal it; attempting to discuss it would cause confusion in the soundest minds; his works being so dissimilar that they do not seem to be by the same hand. He came to this city with a high reputation, so much so that he gave it to be understood that there was nothing superior to his works. In truth he achieved some works which are worthy of estimation and which can be put among those of famous painters. His nature was extravagant like his painting. It is not known with certainty what he did with his works, as he used to say no price was high enough for them, and so he gave them in pledge to their owners who willingly advanced him what he asked for. He earned many ducats, but spent them in too great pomp and display in his house, to the extent of keeping paid musicians to entertain him at meal times. His works were many, but the only wealth he left were two hundred unfinished paintings; he reached an advanced age, always enjoying great fame. He was a famous architect and very eloquent in his speeches. He had few disciples, as none cared to follow his capricious and extravagant style, which was only suitable for himself.”

We get a glimpse here of a strangely individual personality, reserved and proud, conscious of his destiny, working it out in a haughty exclusiveness; wrapt up in high thoughts and cultivating in the retirement of private life a rare refinement. In Toledo, then the citadel of the Catholic Faith, so dominated by the dignitaries of the Church that Philip II, who brooked no rivalry of power, was forced to transfer his Court thence to Madrid, El Greco preserved the integrity of his artistic faith and, by separating himself from outside influences, maintained the independent sovereignty of his own ideals.

..........

El Greco left a View of Toledo; a portrait, one would rather call it, of a city’s appearance and her soul; a highly interpretative vision of the impression of Toledo’s soul upon the spiritual imagination of the artist. The view is from the hill beneath which the present railroad station lies, and looks across the broken ground to the ravine of the Tagus. In the middle distance toward the left it is spanned by the wide arch and its narrower sister of the Alcántara bridge. Thence the line of the city walls, interrupted by their Moorish towers, mount the citadel hill to the group of buildings that crown the summit. The Alcázar and the north tower of the cathedral stand conspicuously against a sky, tumultuous with emotion and lit with large aspiring clouds. These, like the architecture, catch the sharpest light, which elsewhere is distributed in masses of lower tone; a union of quiet illumination and of flashing sword-like brands of light, characteristic of so many of the artist’s compositions, so suggestive of passionate inspiration.

How different from Venice of his youth, this rock-rooted fortress city of the artist’s adoption! No less proudly aloof, but sternly and strenuously exalted; straitened within tortuous limits; an apex once of Moorish power and luxury, now of Catholic dominion and sumptuous ecclesiastical ceremony; its dignitaries men of high and commanding personality, its Cathedral famous throughout Spain as Toledo the Rich! The chivalric fervor bred upon countless battlefields, glowed here in an intense heat of religious mysticism. Her hidalgos, “sons of somebody,” were among the proudest of their class, self-contained, austere, yet fired with religious ecstasy. Toledo was at that time the soul of Catholicism and of the high-bred Chivalry of Castile.

El Greco, with the penetration of the alien observer, caught its spirit. It inflamed his own romantic ardor and religious devoutness; at the same time giving fibre and force to his imagination. Yet his whole art, as it developed under these conditions, was built up on observed facts. The type of his figures, both in portraiture and altar-pieces, was drawn from the humanity about him, the lean, long-limbed bodies, with high narrow heads; a type that still survives. You see it even in Madrid, still more readily in Toledo. Here too in the passing throng you may detect one of those wistful,