El Greco. Second period

Toledo, 70 km. south of Madrid, was the capital of Spain until 1563. Toledo could find no notable painters in Spain for paintings in churches and monasteries. The trend this time was set by the Netherlands and Italy. In 1576, El Greco was brought to Toledo where he started a studio, where many pupils more or less multiplied his paintings and etchers gave his work great international fame. He never made it to Madrid, the new capital. However, he did receive a commission from Philip II, who recognized the quality of his work.

El Greco was a mannerist painter, extremely precise and artificial, think of his long stretched figures. He belongs in the top three of Spanish painting with Velasquez and Goya.

My intention was to look at El Greco in Brussels at this exposition with the eye of the Greek icon painter. It has immediate results. However, there are sometimes Flemish skies in the background. But in the use of color we recognize ancient Greek recipes. So when you look at the blue of The Tears of Saint Peter, you see exactly the hue of the undergarment of many icon painters. In Saint Ildefons, you see an ochre light on dark green. Color harmony is also maintained. Thus the small intense green neutralizes with the large faint pink. Or the clothing is set up on orange-red grounding, which sometimes shines through. On blue, red or green as the ground color, white lights are put, which become transparent at the edges. The icon painter also knows this process as glykasmós, softening, smoothing or sweetening. Richer and richer the garment or face becomes in color, more and more is highlighted. In every painting there is a garment in the color as we are still fabricating with the school syllabus in hand.

So, so we have subject matter when we get to speak to him. “That red is the color of Mary Magdalene's outer garment, isn't it, Domínikos?” He has remained very faithful to the color schemes of the Byzantine garments on the icons. Sometimes not: Alexandre Embiricos in his L'école Crétoise (1967) mentions “ a range of strange colors, twilight and fire colors, lead darkness, nightmare lighting ...”.

Furthermore, this Greco was able to move from stylized Byzantine painting to depicting reality. He makes that realism his own in Toledo, so that bishops and abbots look like gray monkeys, probably because he refused to present things more beautifully than they were. He paints in the beard loose hair in an inimitable curl in blacks, whites and grays alone.

Surely it could be that he thought the Spanish were beautiful people, because long eyelashes, dark eyes and eyebrows are seen everywhere - the Spanish “look.”

There is another link to icons. In Crete, only icons were painted. The icon was the religious world - it was not a picture to look at but it was a picture of the eternal world, of the transcendent. In that way, the icon was sacred.

Toledo was a church town. In his religious paintings, El Greco noticeably returned to that sense of that the painting should convey holiness, transcendence, the bliss of eternal life and the grace of the Savior of the world. See the stately pose and the burning look in the evangelists' eyes. Certainly in his Burial of the Count of Orgaz he used the composition of a Dormition of the Mother of God icon, because below it has an earthly register with the deathbed and a heavenly register with Christ in the clouds.

It is up to art historians to determine whether El Greco took the inspiration for this painting from Damaskinós' icon from his Venetian period, or perhaps from Titian or Ramondi's etchings. Simon Vestdijk in “Het Vijfde Zegel” (p.66) has El Greco say that the inspiration came from the Deësis. Which one then?