His fame now was spreading through Spain, and that on no common unattuned voice. His superb portrait of the monk, Felix de Artiaga, won from that distinguished poet the first of the two celebrated sonnets to El Greco.
“Divino Griego de tu obrar yo admira
Que en la imagen exceda a el ser el arte”
it begins, and having descanted on the superiority of the artist’s creature to God’s, wittily ends:
“Y contra veinte y nueve años de trato
Entre tu mano y la de Dios, perplexa
Qual es el cuerpo, en que ha de vivir duda.”
The second sonnet was brought forth by El Greco’s tomb of Queen Margarita, when Fray Felix de Artiaga addresses him:
Huesped curioso, a qui la pompa admira
De este aparato real, Milagro Griego!
No lugubres Exequias Juzgues ciego,
Ni marmol fiel en venerable pyra
El sol que Margarita estable mira
Le arraneo del fatal desassossiego
De esta vana Region, y en puro fuego
Vibrantes luces de su rostro aspira
A el Nacer que vistió candido, pone
Toledo agradecido Por Valiente
Mano en aquesta caxa peregrina.
Tosca piedra la maquina compone
Que ya su grande Margarita ausente
No le ha quedado si España piedra fria.
We know that El Greco had disciples, since his two most famous, Fray Bautista Maino and Luis Tristan, were considerable artistes, whose work in Toledo is only second to his own. But had he a school such as had the great Italian masters? Was he beloved, admired, followed through the town? What was his influence upon the young men around him? Was his personality intense and commanding? Strong, yes, else he would never have dabbled in litigation. We may imagine too some intemperateness of character to explain the intemperate blemishes of his work. The strange obscurity of so successful a career as his must have been, if the most important commissions of the time mean anything, leaves us in doubt of the man’s personal attractiveness. He can scarcely have formed strong friendships, or some testimony, some facts would have reached us through these. A wilful, obstinate, self-centred nature is revealed in all his works, and a curious lack of temperament and charm in it would explain to some extent the man’s lack of personal magnetism and influence to account for the century’s indifference to the creator of work it seems to have appreciated so thoroughly.
We find him again at loggerheads with Felipe Segundo. The Escorial was built, and the morose Philip ordered El Greco to paint a picture of the martyrdom of St Maurice for the chapel. He had by this entered into his last period of accentuated eccentricity, of which the St John the Baptist of the Hospital de Afuera, beyond the Puerta de Visagra, is a sufficiently exasperating example. The St Maurice I have not seen, but if the saint’s legs in any way resembled those of St John the Baptist, small blame to the astounded king when he refused to accept the picture. The sacristan of the Hospital de Afuera explains the outrageous anatomical contortions in the blunt good-natured fashion of the people: “Picture by El Greco when he went mad.” But as El Greco never went mad, we rest dissatisfied with the information. There can be no doubt that every strongly-marked nature reveals excess of some sort in whatever direction development may tend. Neither men nor things, nor colour nor line, can appear the same to all. The same sex and nation produced Rossetti’s women and Romney’s. Greuze and Puvis de Chavannes see Frenchwomen with a different eye, though woman herself is the eternally unchanged, the same variously-imaged enigma of the beginning, rather reflected and modified through the glance that scans her than seriously altered or influenced by environment and impression. Humanity was not an elegant affair for Hogarth, and viewed through El Greco’s imagination, it ceased to possess proportion, and man became absurdly tall and grotesquely contorted. He bestows the finished hand of twenty on a child of ten, and shoots his saints up to such a height as would make them ridiculous in Frederick’s famous Potsdam regiment of giants. But this is no indication of madness, any more than any other exaggeration of a natural tendency. Even in the Expolio, his first known great picture, painted when he was a young man, his predilection for excessive height is visible in the tall figure of Christ, and as the years go on this predilection accentuates itself, till his figures cease to be natural. The same tendency to distort the human limbs reveals itself in his magnificent picture in the little church of Santo Tomé, in the upper portion of which one notes extraordinary figures of angels out of drawing, with twisted limbs over clouds.
Philip, in his dissatisfaction with his bargain was, however, as befits a prince, more honourable than the chapter of Toledo. He paid El Greco the price of his work, and only with difficulty did the unhappy artist obtain, for his reputation’s sake, a grudging admission of the picture into the Sala de Capitular, while Philip ordered for the chapel, in its stead, another picture of Romulo Cincinnato.
But these rebuffs were few in a truly brilliant career. The wonder is how he found time, as well as physical strength, for all the commissions he received. He built the extremely elegant façade of the Ayuntamiento, which makes an odd and formal note in its Gothic and semi-Moorish environment, in Greco-Roman style, but has a fine and dignified effect against an appropriate depth of azure to carry out the classical intention of a son of Greece. The side towers give lightness to the solidity of the immense base, and if the columns and arches do not succeed in producing a general impression of grace—a quality absent in nearly all El Greco’s work—there is no sin anywhere against harmony. The interior is worth a visit if it were only for the pleasure of reading on stone Manrique’s sententious and noble lines, with their indubitable ring of the plumed, dramatic ages and the hidalgo’s studious search for the fitting word, the fitting gesture, that shall send him down to posterity in the worthiest form: