It is a singular fact, as I have pointed out, that such a painter’s influence on the town he lived in should not be more marked in every way than references to the period would lead us to assume. He had pupils certainly, but we only hear of two, Luis Tristan, his favourite, and Fray Bautista Maino. Tristan has left a good deal of work in Toledo which is often taken to be El Greco’s in decline. Apart from the master’s, it is notable in its way, still and rather colourless; but a story told of master and pupil bears retelling as an excellent trait in El Greco. The one characteristic we are permitted to gather from the obscurity that envelopes the man, is a haughty conviction of the value of his art. There was no lack of confidence here, no feeble self-depreciation, no meek concern for the judgment of others. In all altercations between him and the purchasers, the purchasers were naturally the blockheads, and in no circumstance whatever could he possibly err, not even when he was convicted of wilfully contorting and dislocating the human body. He only went on seeing more and more crooked by a natural perversity. Now, not content to worship art and its rights in his own emphatic work, he taught his disciples to do likewise in theirs. This is his uncompromising method of teaching such a lesson.
The monks of La Sisla, a vanished powerful monastery of the middle ages, ordered of young Tristan a picture for their chapel. Tristan painted the picture and brought it to the abbot, claiming in payment two hundred dollars. The abbot, noting the painter’s youth, objected to the price, and said it was far too high. Tristan modestly protested, and referred the abbot to his master, who shortly called on El Greco at an hour when Tristan was working in his studio. He opened the interview by remarking that he believed there was a mistake in the terms demanded by Tristan. “What were they?” dryly asked El Greco. The abbot blandly named two hundred dollars. “A mistake,” cried El Greco, “I should think so indeed.” He jumped up and flung himself violently on the astounded youth, and began to thump him. “How comes it, you rascal, you could make such a mistake? How dare you ask such a sum as two hundred dollars for a picture worth five hundred? This will teach you to go about the world asking such prices and proving yourself an ass.” Thump, thump, and the unfortunate abbot looked on while the blows hailed on the shoulders of the too humble artist. “I buy that picture for five hundred dollars,” said El Greco to the abbot, when he had finished Tristan’s castigation, whereupon the abbot, who knew his man and was glad enough to get off quietly by the immediate payment to Tristan of five hundred instead of two, politely requested permission to keep the picture. Here was a master worth having. If he did use physical violence to his pupils, he paid a lordly price for the privilege, and in the reckoning it may be said the pupils were more than compensated for affront or wound.
In space so limited, it is not to be hoped to find room for mention of all El Greco’s pictures in Toledo. All I can endeavour to do is to indicate the best, and thus, perhaps, provoke in the reader by whom his work is ignored, a desire for fuller knowledge than I am able to impart. The first picture he painted here, the “Assumption” of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, was purchased by Don Sebastian of Bourbon, and though the copy in its place is not good, a fair idea of the picture might be obtained if the nuns had not the bad taste to place a large and unutterable atrocity in the shape of a hideous tabernacle in front of it. Whatever virtues the ladies of St Dominick may possess, an understanding of art is not among them. Before all their painted retablos, they place offensive dressed statues and tawdry ornaments, out of keeping with the cold severity of this beautiful church of El Greco’s. The pictures on either side of the “Assumption,” all Greco’s, are fine; St John the Baptist and St Paul below, St Benedict and St Bernard above. The Annunciation at the end of the church is by Carducci, and the St Ildefonso opposite by Luis Tristan, neither equal to the master’s strong, harmonious work, which they show out in greater relief.
Interest is attached to this church by the curious fact that not only did El Greco build it, and build it so well with such cold and classical correctness and simplicity, but here he lies at rest forever in his own large temple. The precise spot of his grave is not known, and it is quite an accident that such indication has been found. All the writers have been content with the loose statement that he was buried either in Santo Tomé or San Bartolomé, without a word of regret that he who wrought such lasting monuments with his hand has found no reverent hand to carve a slab above his dust. It was only quite lately that the Spanish landscape painter, Señor de Berruete, to whose kindness I owe the information and a copy of the registrar of the death, by sheer dint of perseverance and conviction, brought to light the definite and correct knowledge at last of El Greco’s resting-place. He lies in some obscure corner of this church, forgotten by the nuns on whose business he first came to Toledo, and the record of his death and burial dryly runs:—Libro de entierros de Santo Tomé de 1601-1614, en siete del Abril del 1614 falescio Dominico Greco. No hizo testamento, recibio los sacramentos, enterose en Santo Domingo el Antiguo. Dio velas.
And that is all we know of his illness and death. He made no will, he received the sacraments, he died on the 7th of April 1614, and left tapers for his funeral. Under some stone of Santo Domingo he lies forever ignored and unhonoured!
Many of the convents that possessed pictures of El Greco have disappeared, amongst them the old convent of the Visitation called the Queen’s, which contained a superb Crucifixion. Of the figures at the foot of the cross, Palomino wrote: “They are very Titian-like, and how superior to anything else here!” We are told of a certain Magdalen, a lovely bit of colouring, painted while the influence of the Venetian school was still marked in his work, but this has become private property. Some of his best pictures were painted for the little town of Bayona near Cienpozuelos. The scenes from the dramatic life of Magdalen were so beautiful that Cardinal Portocarrero offered 5000 pesos (about a crown piece) and the same quantity of Giordanos to replace them to the church, which were indignantly refused. In the College of Atocha and the monastery of La Sisla there were considerable collections of some of the best Grecos. Into whose hands have they since passed? and in how many obscure parts of Spain may not these treasures lie hidden and unrecognised? Palomino tells us of “an unapproachable Judgment.” Alas! nobody to-day knows anything about it.
Three other great pictures, however, remain. In the little chapel of San José, opposite the Exchange of Carlos III., a painted insignificant edifice that has fallen into deserved decay, there are five or six Grecos, two of which arrest immediate attention. On the left is the singularly beautiful figure of St Martin, a portrait of the painter’s son, a delicate high-bred and dreamy young knight in armour, inappropriately cutting his mantle in two with Toledan steel to bestow half on the beggar standing beside his white horse. No Roman soldier this conception of Martin of Tours, making a gift of half of his single cloak, but a charming youth who is playing at charity as he rides out beyond the town, while above the river, in some Gothic-Arabian palace, he has his choice of variously-hued satin cloaks as well as damascene armour, and as he cuts his mantle, he has the dainty and sentimental air of one who muses tristefully on the absent or perfidious beloved, and hugs despair as the more graceful part of passion, the while anxiously asking himself if he shall meet her glance as he rides past her lattice. Except the lovely girl’s head of the Expolio, also said to be a family portrait, and if so proving, along with the St Martin, that El Greco was the father of beautiful children, El Greco has done no more witching and romantic work than this boyish figure of St Martin. The colouring is extraordinarily cold, and grey of an exquisite tone, with shadows of a dull silvered blue. It suggests the pale borderland where dream and reality meet and merge. When El Greco first came to Spain, he was fresh from the warm voluptuous school of Venice. Nothing proves more than the rapid alteration of his style, the invading influence of atmosphere. The austere and hieratic capital of Spain developed a racial coldness, till his art became like the city that remained its temple, something aloof from and above the gusts of temperament, an art unmoved by passion or the senses, too violent to be called serene, too reflective and intellectual to touch the heart. One would look in vain for the exquisite sweetness of Andrea del Sarto, for a particle of the delight and radiance the Italians had the secret of gathering into their canvases, for any of the superlative charm of da Vinci or the surpassing tenderness of Raphael. El Greco has much of the modern hardness, much of its quick impressionability, much of its accentuated indifference to mere loveliness, much of its cold force and deliberate self-cultivation. Instead of learning from error, he cultivated error as part of his individuality, a thing that was right in him since it defined his peculiar perception of things. Even in this fine picture, the horse is out of drawing, since it is a settled thing that no large work of his can utterly satisfy, can come to us without some distinguished blemish and oddness by which we recognise our Greco all in greeting him.
Opposite the St Martin is a Virgin and child, with two angels on either side, and below two saints. The angel, on the left hand, almost confronts me with inaccuracy in denying El Greco warmth. Nothing could be warmer, even on a Murillo canvas, than the soft brown head and shadowed cheek and eyes bent over the infant with an ineffable inward curve that suggests, but does not reveal, the hidden smile. There is a melting sweetness about this drooped visage that El Greco has not accustomed us to expect from him. Underneath, St Agnes strains upwards a very different cast of countenance: dark, severely outlined, intense, and full of pain and yearning, the brows are tragically marked, and the expression of the mouth is that of scornful resignation. By no means the legendary Saint Agnes, meek and mild, but vigorously individual and passionate, with a soul and intellect inconveniently above the little joys of maidenhood. The Virgin, too, as are all El Greco’s Madonnas, is off the beaten track. This maiden-mother has none of the bland and unintelligent sweetness of the Italian Madonna. The face is long and pointed, and about the brow and eyes there is something Greek, a scarce perceptible imperiousness, an intellectual quality in the expression of reverie, more marked still in the Virgin of San Vicente. As a whole, the picture is one of commanding interest.
The sacristan will assure you, despite the conviction of your eyes and senses, that the altar picture is a Murillo. Nowhere have I found sacristans so stupid and so ignorant as in Toledo. For that matter, stupidity reigns over the town. For a home of relics, never were relics more densely guarded, and there is not a single intelligent or recommendable guide to be had. One remembers a delicate little masterpiece of sensibility and pathos by Mr Henry James, “The Madonna of the Future,” with yearning, and wishes some learned monomaniac would start across one’s path, like the neo-Florentine hero of that story, to guide one wisely through Toledo’s forlorn treasures. But Toledo does not seem to have inspired disinterested love in any human breast. Those who know her decline to share their knowledge, and those in care of her inheritance, from the canons of the Cathedral to the sacristans and keepers of the Museum, are, without exception, wrapped in an impenetrable fog of ignorance, accentuated by indifference. The Murillo of the sacristan of San José is a very striking Greco—one would recognise it a long way off by the stupendous height of St Joseph, the hand of twenty of the infant Jesus, and the flowing wealth of drapery in dull green, dim yellow, and faded pink, with the big deep folds so peculiarly the master’s. The sacristan also denied El Greco to be the painter of a grey mystical St Francis, an emaciated, spiritualised head, in a dim twilight, livid grey, half shadow, and ghostly white, blurred with faint yellow. The hands show out whitely in the intensity of gloom, and the expression in this grey atmosphere is mystic and serene. Not one of the best examples, but good enough to suggest that there may be some truth in the supposition that El Greco was the sculptor of the famous little statue of St Francis of Assisi in the Cathedral Treasury, and not Alonzo Cano or Pedro de Mena. But doubtful of my sacristan’s knowledge, I struck a match, mounted a chair, and convinced him by reading out the half obliterated Greek letters of Theotocopulos’s signature. Nothing but the patronymic could be deciphered, but the signature of the picture of the Escorial M. Demetrius Bikelas deciphered more fully: Δομἡνιχος Θεοτοχὁπουλος Κρἡς, ἑποἱει, which is our sole assurance of his birthplace.
There remains another great picture of El Greco to draw attention to, overlooking, as I am compelled to, the very names of so many others. The Assumption of San Vicente is no less magnificent than singular. Most rare is its realistic impression of a scene mid air. You feel about it the very hurricane of the upper air, the dizzy velocity of flight. This is no image of calm soaring through space, the idea of dreamy swim most painters of the Assumption are content to convey. The very modernity and the violent realism of El Greco’s genius forced him to forsake in all things the notion of simple reverie. He seeks to convey distinct impressions; veracity as far as possible must stamp these. He does not delight in pampering the spectator with sentimental musings or the inanely beautiful. Ugliness, too, has its beauty when accompanied by strength. You must understand to enjoy, must bring the brain as well as the senses to the contemplation of his work. Like all preoccupied artists, he inevitably sins by excess, and overtaxes the bewildered spectator. Something of his spirit went into our own Browning. His drawing is often like Browning’s verse, inexplicably rough and out of gear. But nothing could change either genius. One leaves you to make what you can of his volumes; the other leaves you for ever exasperated by eccentricities of pencil and brush it is now no use seeking to understand. For instance, in this picture, shocking and glorious at the same time, who is to account for the profile of the angel in yellow with the grand beating wings of shaded purple and grey that support the lifted Virgin through the rushing air? The limbs are grotesque, the pointed nose almost stands away from the face, the ears protrude in graceless deformity, and the chin is nearly rugged in its absurd upward curve. A more painful presentment of an angel sane man never painted. Yet look away, and you will see two exquisite slender limbs and feet, pointed downward in the air, to show that El Greco knew a lovely thing as well as any other painter. And yet higher still, examine the Virgin with her dark, oval, intellectual, modern visage, beautiful with the beauty of our own troubled and eager times, half spiritual, half poetical, but partaking not in the least of the old-fashioned ideal of maiden-mother, the mild benignant Madonna of Italy, the soulless Virgin of Spain, Eastern peasant women painted from the mistresses of Italian artists or from the pretty dancing girls of the Spanish people. Here is an innovation, here is originality: a mournful Mary, leaving earth with doubt and pain in her expression rather than rapture; with small refined face and intense brows; a Mary who bears the mark of our fugitive common suffering, the deep, enigmatic impress of life accompanied by thought, and not the stereotyped dolorous brand of the seven times stabbed mother Catholic art accepts. He boldly rejects the old ideal both in maiden and in mother, and paints a Mary who is neither sweet nor quiet. How tall she is too, and slenderly outlined beneath the superb green-blue drapery that bears her on its floating folds, as it waves down from the rich pink garment that covers the slim bust. Surely, in spite of defects so monstrous as to provoke laughter, angel’s limbs like gnarled trees, such biceps as no athlete ever possessed, hands to fell the heaviest beast, this picture for composition, for the vivid impression of intense velocity of upward flight, for the grand treatment of drapery and colour, for the vigorous reality of those outspread wings, and above all for that beautiful, delicately-strong grieved face of Mary, with the soft dark cloud of hair marking its most charming oval, this original conception of the Assumption may be reckoned as one of El Greco’s triumphs of art. It does not enchant, or captivate, but it seizes. Elsewhere you must look for delight. Here your satisfaction is disturbed by deliberate and deplorable defections, but you have boundless compensations.