El Greco

Born Doménikos Theotokópoulos in Heraklion, Crete, trained as an icon painter in the Byzantine tradition before moving to Venice around 1567, where he absorbed the lessons of Titian's late work and Tintoretto's dynamic composition. He moved to Rome in 1570, failed to secure significant patronage despite his evident talent, and in 1577 accepted a commission to produce altarpieces for the newly built church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo, Spain. He spent the rest of his life in Toledo — thirty-seven years — becoming the city's greatest and most characteristic painter while failing repeatedly to win the royal commissions from Philip II that would have brought him national recognition. Philip II found his Martyrdom of St. Maurice (1580–82), commissioned for the Escorial, too contemplative and lacking in the devotional immediacy he required, and did not pay for further work. Toledo found him divine. El Greco's mature style — elongated, almost weightless figures in acid greens, acid yellows and intense cold blues; the sky a theatrical chiaroscuro of billowing cloud; faces of an almost Byzantine intensity — has no exact precedent in either Venetian painting or Spanish tradition. The View of Toledo (c. 1596–1600), the only pure landscape he painted, shows the city under a storm sky of extraordinary emotional power. He died in Toledo in 1614, leaving an estate and workshop to his son Jorge Manuel. He was largely forgotten for two and a half centuries — treated as an eccentric footnote to the Italian tradition — until the Symbolists and early Expressionists rediscovered him around 1900. Cézanne, Picasso, Rainer Maria Rilke and Roger Fry all championed his work in the years before and after 1900; Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) is inconceivable without the distorted figures of the late El Greco.