56 Facts About El Greco

Domenikos Theotokopoulos, most widely known as El Greco, was a Greek painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance.

El Greco was a nickname, and the artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, often adding the word, which means "Cretan".

El Greco was born in the Kingdom of Candia, which was at that time part of the Republic of Venice, Italy, and the center of Post-Byzantine art.

El Greco trained and became a master within that tradition before traveling at age 26 to Venice, as other Greek artists had done.

In Toledo, El Greco received several major commissions and produced his best-known paintings, such as View of Toledo and Opening of the Fifth Seal.

El Greco is regarded as a precursor of both Expressionism and Cubism, while his personality and works were a source of inspiration for poets and writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Nikos Kazantzakis.

El Greco has been characterized by modern scholars as an artist so individual that he belongs to no conventional school.

El Greco is best known for tortuously elongated figures and often fantastic or phantasmagorical pigmentation, marrying Byzantine traditions with those of Western painting.

El Greco's older brother, Manoussos Theotokopoulos, was a wealthy merchant and spent the last years of his life in El Greco's Toledo home.

El Greco received his initial training as an icon painter of the Cretan school, a leading center of post-Byzantine art.

In 1563, at the age of twenty-two, El Greco was described in a document as a "master", meaning he was already a master of the guild and presumably operating his own workshop.

Prevelakis goes even further, expressing his doubt that El Greco was ever a practicing Roman Catholic.

El Greco lived in Venice until 1570 and, according to a letter written by his much older friend, the greatest miniaturist of the age, Giulio Clovio, was a "disciple" of Titian, who was by then in his eighties but still vigorous.

In 1570, El Greco moved to Rome, where he executed a series of works strongly marked by his Venetian apprenticeship.

In Rome, on the recommendation of Giulio Clovio, El Greco was received as a guest at the Palazzo Farnese, which Cardinal Alessandro Farnese had made a center of the artistic and intellectual life of the city.

Unlike other Cretan artists who had moved to Venice, El Greco substantially altered his style and sought to distinguish himself by inventing new and unusual interpretations of traditional religious subject matter.

El Greco's works painted in Italy were influenced by the Venetian Renaissance style of the period, with agile, elongated figures reminiscent of Tintoretto and a chromatic framework that connects him to Titian.

El Greco was sitting in a darkened room, because he found the darkness more conducive to thought than the light of the day, which disturbed his "inner light".

El Greco was determined to make his own mark in Rome defending his personal artistic views, ideas and style.

El Greco singled out Correggio and Parmigianino for particular praise, but he did not hesitate to dismiss Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel; he extended an offer to Pope Pius V to paint over the whole work in accord with the new and stricter Catholic thinking.

When he was later asked what he thought about Michelangelo, El Greco replied that "he was a good man, but he did not know how to paint".

In 1577, El Greco migrated to Madrid, then to Toledo, where he produced his mature works.

In Rome, El Greco had earned the respect of some intellectuals, but was facing the hostility of certain art critics.

When Fernandez died in 1579, the moment was ideal for El Greco to move to Toledo.

El Greco did not plan to settle permanently in Toledo, since his final aim was to win the favor of Philip and make his mark in his court.

Some scholars have suggested that Philip did not like the inclusion of living persons in a religious scene; some others that El Greco's works violated a basic rule of the Counter-Reformation, namely that in the image the content was paramount rather than the style.

Between 1607 and 1608 El Greco was involved in a protracted legal dispute with the authorities of the Hospital of Charity at Illescas concerning payment for his work, which included painting, sculpture and architecture; this and other legal disputes contributed to the economic difficulties he experienced towards the end of his life.

El Greco lived in considerable style, sometimes employing musicians to play whilst he dined.

El Greco was the mother of his only son, Jorge Manuel, born in 1578, who became a painter, assisted his father, and continued to repeat his compositions for many years after he inherited the studio.

El Greco was buried in the Church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, aged 73.

El Greco discarded classicist criteria such as measure and proportion.

El Greco believed that grace is the supreme quest of art, but the painter achieves grace only by managing to solve the most complex problems with ease.

El Greco regarded color as the most important and the most ungovernable element of painting, and declared that color had primacy over form.

El Greco believes that in El Greco's mature works "the devotional intensity of mood reflects the religious spirit of Roman Catholic Spain in the period of the Counter-Reformation".

El Greco excelled as a portraitist, able not only to record a sitter's features but to convey their character.

El Greco's portraits are fewer in number than his religious paintings, but are of equally high quality.

El Greco painted many of his paintings on fine canvas and employed a viscous oil medium.

El Greco painted with the usual pigments of his period such as azurite, lead-tin-yellow, vermilion, madder lake, ochres and red lead, but he seldom used the expensive natural ultramarine.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, scholars have debated whether El Greco's style had Byzantine origins.

Certain art historians had asserted that El Greco's roots were firmly in the Byzantine tradition, and that his most individual characteristics derive directly from the art of his ancestors, while others had argued that Byzantine art could not be related to El Greco's later work.

Significant scholarly works of the second half of the 20th century devoted to El Greco reappraise many of the interpretations of his work, including his supposed Byzantinism.

El Greco asserts that the philosophies of Platonism and ancient Neo-Platonism, the works of Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the texts of the Church fathers and the liturgy offer the keys to the understanding of El Greco's style.

El Greco was highly esteemed as an architect and sculptor during his lifetime.

El Greco is regarded as a painter who incorporated architecture in his painting.

El Greco is credited with the architectural frames to his own paintings in Toledo.

El Greco saw Vitruvius' manner of distorting proportions in order to compensate for distance from the eye as responsible for creating monstrous forms.

El Greco was averse to the very idea of rules in architecture; he believed above all in the freedom of invention and defended novelty, variety, and complexity.

El Greco was disdained by the immediate generations after his death because his work was opposed in many respects to the principles of the early baroque style which came to the fore near the beginning of the 17th century and soon supplanted the last surviving traits of the 16th-century Mannerism.

El Greco was deemed incomprehensible and had no important followers.

El Greco [El Greco] has discovered a realm of new possibilities.

Michael Kimmelman, a reviewer for The New York Times, stated that "to Greeks [El Greco] became the quintessential Greek painter; to the Spanish, the quintessential Spaniard".

The first painter who appears to have noticed the structural code in the morphology of the mature El Greco was Paul Cezanne, one of the forerunners of Cubism.

The Symbolists, and Pablo Picasso during his Blue Period, drew on the cold tonality of El Greco, utilizing the anatomy of his ascetic figures.

Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, who felt a great spiritual affinity for El Greco, called his autobiography Report to Greco and wrote a tribute to the Cretan-born artist.

The exact number of El Greco's works has been a hotly contested issue.

El Greco is seen as an artist with a formative training on Crete; a series of works illuminate his early style, some painted while he was still on Crete, some from his period in Venice, and some from his subsequent stay in Rome.