CHAPTER VII
Domenico Theotocopulos El Greco
THERE is but one great painter permanently and almost exclusively associated with Toledo, El Greco. All the notable pictures of the town are his, and so vast is his work here, that the Toledan churches possess at least fifty pictures of his, a dozen of which are nothing less than masterpieces, and the rest the work of a master in weaker and more erratic moments.
Masters are so rare in the history of this world that one would gladly know something of this tardily recognised great one; learn the secret of his preposterous defects in the second stage of his development, and the no less enigmatic secret of his occasional reach to supreme perfection. How came the man who could paint the glorious under picture of the Burial of Count Orgaz (see illustration), to draw and paint the inconceivable picture of St John the Baptist in the hospital de Afuera? How, in fact, rose the absurd legend of his madness, since no details of the man’s life has reached us on which to base such an idea? Théophile Gautier, with lamentable flippancy, gives echo in France to the ill-natured supposition of Palomino, the least trustworthy of guides. Nearly every fact given by Palomino concerning El Greco is false. He states the painter’s age, though no mortal being, contemporary of El Greco, or researcher of our own times, has the faintest ground for any such statement. The registrar of his death, which a Spanish painter, an impassioned student of all that concerns El Greco, has seen, proves that the artist’s age was uncertain, since nobody about him knew the date of his birth. Furthermore, Palomino tells us triumphantly that El Greco was buried in the parish of San Bartolomé, “and instead of a slab they placed a railing over his grave to indicate that nobody else should be buried there.” The church fell down years afterwards, he assures us, and the place of El Greco’s burial was no longer known. This is all mere supposition, just as Palomino’s statement of El Greco’s age, seventy-seven, and more innocent in the way of loose statements than his information that Theotocopulos went mad with rage from hearing himself compared with Titian, and purposely distorted his work to extinguish a similarity that did him honour. Such is the flimsy tale so genial and witty a writer as Gautier lightly spreads.
To begin with, it is now denied that El Greco ever was Titian’s pupil. It is admitted that he studied under Tintoretto, and however much he may preserve (and wisely!) of the noble Italian school, there can be no doubt to the least discerning that he has brought to its interpretation his own forcible individuality and cold temperament. Great he often is, supreme sometimes, but never voluptuous or charming. You admire him with your head; your heart he leaves always untouched, unless we make an exception in the solitary instance of the delightful figure of St Martin in the Chapel of San José. Here you have a touch of romantic pathos and charm in the slim young knight, which evokes reverie and remembrance of warm soft legendary love such as El Greco is elsewhere persistently blind to. We accept his own word for it, that he came from Crete, but when, why, how, we know not. We hear of him in Italy, but at no fixed spot, and he blazes unexplained upon the horizon of Spanish art, first known by one of the masterpieces of Spain. Pacheco, earlier than Palomino, tells us that he was a curious student, a philosopher, an architect, a sculptor, as well as a painter. Of his studies, his philosophy, no proof has come down to us; but of his sculpture, his wood-carving, his architecture, Toledo possesses many a sample as evidence of the man’s versatility. He is said to have left behind him, as a monument of industry in a life so full and varied, a complete copy in clay of everything he wrought or painted. The only faint hint of the man himself that we get is a reference Pacheco makes to a conversation he had with El Greco in Toledo, when the great painter told him that in his opinion colour alone was of value, and form and drawing quite secondary considerations in the art of painting. It was this feeling that made El Greco so persistently cold to the work of Michael Angelo, says Palomino. Michael Angelo, he said to Pacheco, was a very good fellow, but a very poor painter.
Beyond two legal squabbles, we learn nothing of the man’s life at Toledo. He is said to have painted his own visage in the Burial of Count Orgaz: lean, hard, nervous, exceedingly dark and striking, the face of a man in whom energy was an unsleeping disease, who worked with his mind concentrated upon the accomplishment of an ideal achievement, not as an idealist, as a materialist rather with an ideal object in view. There is the same curious modern expression in this dark, impassioned face that I noticed in the desperate portrait of the Italian novelist, M. Gabriel d’Annunzio, whom the face strangely resembles; an eager, ravenous, cruel sensuality which knows neither rest nor satiety, and which gives meaning to the charge of habits of harsh gallantry and deliberate ostentation. He is said to have kept a band of musicians to play during his carefully-prepared and selected repasts. Yet nothing could be less sensual than the work of El Greco. He is colder than Velasquez, and only understands feminine emotion in a certain austere intensity, passion fed upon the perfume of incense and saintly legend, as in the striking head of St Agnes in his great Virgin and Child of San José.
But this statement also is untrustworthy. It is incredible that a man, who left so much behind him, whose life was so active, and whose achievement was so important for a town in which he lived for so many years, should be merely a name, leaving no evidence of social or civic existence, no word of friend or foe in the annals of that town, nothing in its contemporary letters to guide us to any knowledge of the man himself. Pacheco in three lines reports a conversation with him, that is all. We do not know even where he lived in Toledo, how he lived, who his wife was, if he loved her, who his friends were, what manner of father and citizen he was. We know that he painted pictures, that he built churches, carved statues, and, since he was well paid for his work, that he must have possessed considerable means, and was probably an influential personage as well as a great master. Sir William Stirling Maxwell possesses a portrait said to be that of El Greco’s daughter by him, but this, too, is regarded as doubtful. Of a son’s existence, however, we are certain, and the charming figure of the delicate and pensive St Martin on horseback, as well as that of the dreamy youth in the plan of Toledo of the Museum, are the portraits of George Manuel Theotocopulos, architect, like his father. It is now certified that he was buried in the church, built by himself, of the Dominican convent, Santo Domingo el Antiguo.
I have said that an impenetrable obscurity lies upon the personal life of El Greco, though here his artistic existence is one of the most insistent facts about us. He seems first to have come to Toledo about 1575 to build the church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, and paint the fine Assumption, the original of which was bought by Don Sebastian de Bourbon, and is now the property of the Infanta Cristina, the picture of the Retablo being only a copy, from which we may infer that his name in the world of Italian art was already known. How else could he have come to Toledo upon direct invitation, unless he came upon chance, hearing of Toledo as a flourishing city, where art was more appreciated and better remunerated than anywhere else in Spain. Then the chapter of the Cathedral ordered the most beautiful Expolio of the sacristy. When the ordered picture was painted, with the group of three women in the foreground, the canons were shocked by the audacious innovation, sent it back to the painter, and refused to pay for it. There was no justification, they asserted, for the presence of the three Maries at the Crucifixion, and they could only consent to receive it if the figures were rubbed out. This El Greco haughtily and properly declined to do. Having painted his picture, he announced himself ready to stand by it, good or ill, as it was, without the slightest alteration. But he demanded his money, whether the chapter took the picture or not. This, too, the chapter refused, whereupon the irate and humiliated artist went to law. It was a long case, lasting for years, during which time El Greco whiled away his enforced leisure at Toledo by marching off to Illescas, where he found time to build the church and paint some noble pictures. His defence against the chapter was a naïve and lame one. He asserted that the presence of the women did not matter, “as they were a long way off,” which is not true. But the main fact was true, “it did not matter,” any more than radically matters the mediaeval knight in armour behind them. Such inaccuracies and discrepancies leave the artist’s genius undiminished. So apparently thought the judges and jury, for El Greco won his case, gained his price, and maintained his artistic dignity without offensive concession to his pride. The women remained, the picture was hung in a frame of jasper and marble, the wood-work wrought by El Greco, which cost the chapter considerably more than the painting, and El Greco himself lived to die an old man in the town he had started in so stormily.
His next proceedings were at Illescas where, having built the Church of Our Lady of Charity, painted retablos and carved statues, it was seriously proposed to tax his pictures as common merchandise. El Greco went to law again, and this time, too, won his case. Only this was not merely a personal triumph, it was a big justice wrung in these far-off days from the stupid bourgeois to art. Palomino, commenting on it, writes: “Immortal thanks are due to El Greco for having broken a lance for art and thus forced the proclamation of its immunities.” He compelled the court to accept his theory that art was a thing apart from merchandise, not like mere fabrications, subject to the control of taxes or to the law of duty. While the process went on, El Greco refused to sell any of his pictures, but simply hired them out for a certain sum, as the good counsellors of Illescas only proposed to tax sold pictures. As the case with the chapter of Toledo was concluded before that of Illescas, he only accepted a loan on account of the future sum, from the canons for the Expolio.