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The Home of Evolutioneers

HOLY TOLEDO - El Greco at the Met

Crete was a Venetian colony when, in 1541, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, as El Greco never ceased to sign himself, was born there. He trained as an icon painter in a local variant of the archaic Byzantine manner, whose rigid formulas were aimed less at representing the divine than at magically summoning it. In Venice for three years, from the age of twenty-six, he assimilated the most advanced painting of the day: Titian, Tintoretto, Bassano. Venetian painterly rhetoric—bodies in dramatic motion, open brushwork, clarion color—imprinted o­n him, but without changing his metaphysics. He failed to start a career in Rome, where he seems to have burned bridges by disparaging Michelangelo, whose carnal sublimity—submerging the spirit in straining muscles—was bound to affront the young Greek. El Greco reportedly offered to repaint "The Last Judgment" in a more seemly manner. Still, he picked up tricks of composition from Michelangelo, as witness the rhythmic aggregate of contorted bodies in his several versions of "The Purification of the Temple"—Jesus scourging the sacrilegious. He was a quick study.

By 1576, when he was thirty-five, El Greco had followed his ambition to Spain, whose art-loving King Philip II was o­n top of the world after organizing European forces against the Turks for the monumental victory at Lepanto, in 1571. El Greco made an apparent bid for royal favor with a ghastly painting, "The Adoration of the Name of Jesus," which is an arduous hodgepodge of practically everything that he knew how to do, from medieval grotesquerie to Titianesque elegance, and features a passage of unforgettably hideous orange. (In El Greco, successful color comes and goes like a gambler’s luck.) Turned away at court, he alit in Toledo, the ecclesiastical capital of Spain, where he remained for the next thirty-seven years, until his death, in 1614. Records of furious litigation over payment for most of his major commissions bespeak an obstreperous character. He lived high, at o­ne point renting twenty-four rooms in a palace and employing musicians to play while he dined. He had, and acknowledged, a son by a Spanish woman soon after arriving in Toledo; he never married. Active intellectually, he pressed for official recognition of painting as a liberal art. To gauge the status of painting in Spain at that time, consider that El Greco was paid three hundred and fifty ducats for his first major Toledan commission, "The Disrobing of Christ," and (albeit ten years later) five hundred and seventy for crafting the picture’s frame.

El Greco’s temperament was o­n time for o­ne of the most disputatious eras in European history: the Counter-Reformation. The Inquisition and Ignatius Loyola’s Jesuits were o­n the march. At the same time, though with some reluctance, the Church chose to exploit rather than to suppress the intense, gorgeous, personalized writings of the mystics Teresa of Ã?vila and John of the Cross. The Protestant threat argued for letting popular wildflowers bloom. El Greco found his path to fame as a pictorial rhapsode of militant piety. Is his blend of iron dogma and unbridled spontaneity a paradox? It is certainly special.

El Greco’s later ecstatic paintings are somewhat downplayed in the Met show, which concentrates o­n his terrific, strange, less well-known portraits. Lacking any consistent look, the portraits adapt Venetian styles with antic originality—one tour de force after another, striking the odd spark of psychological insight but conveying little sense of everyday social engagement. El Greco’s two greatest portraits might as well be classed with his religious paintings, as spiritual images. o­ne conjures up the ravishingly alert friar-poet Hortensio Félix Paravicino. The other is "A Cardinal," who is generally acknowledged to be the Inquisitor General Niño de Guevara. Modern eyes see the bespectacled prelate—tensed in his vermillion robes, suggesting a frozen flame atop a torch—as repellently cruel; but I think that El Greco regards severity as part of the man’s important job and a good thing for everybody. The portrait is savagely upbeat.

Truth to nature didn’t interest him. He preferred variations to themes, stepping up to a canvas and whaling away. He was most himself—vulgar and supreme, pummelling and thrilling—when excitedly envisioning a force that I think of as upside-down gravity.

Try this: Turn a reproduction of o­ne of the tall mystical paintings o­n its head. Observe how the stretched, writhing figures snug down luxuriantly, enfolded by a thick liquid medium of clouds and sky, into which they are sinking. The figures’ elongation is like that of descending blobs in a lava lamp. Seen upright again, the vertical tug or, really, suck of the composition—a slow-motion celestial tornado—is easy to read. To enjoy the effect, you must let it commandeer your own body in sympathetic imagination. I find that I can soar readily o­n the thermal of, for example, "The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception" (between 1608 and 1613), with its bizarre rocket form of an angel’s wing seen end o­n. Clinching the deal is a visceral paint texture that makes the picture a kind of palpitating body in itself. El Greco’s great subject is the translation of matter into spirit, caught o­n the cusp.

Finally, the show left me with rather an overdose of exaltation—as I realized upon emerging from it into the Met’s gallery of early Baroque paintings, including two by Caravaggio of fleshy, louchely simpering boy musicians. I’ve never felt gladder in my life to loiter with those rascals. Not for them any divine updrafts. They’re fine with gravity, among other involuntary powers. Throw in music, wine, fresh fruit, and whomever they’re vamping, and Heaven can jolly well take the night off.

by PETER SCHJELDAHL
El Greco at the Met.
Issue of 2003-10-20

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