Domenicos Thetocopoulos was born in about 1561 on the island of Crete, a part of the ancient Byzantine Empire. Cretan painting at the time was more similar to the Byzantine art of the icon, or holy image, which strived to convey religious emotion through stylized drawing and design, than to the secular or “realistic” art of Renaissance Italy. When Domenicos, also known as El Greco, went to Venice in about 1566, he absorbed some of the Italian artist Titian’s techniques of Renaissance painting, using extreme light and shadow contrasts and dramatic compositions. El Greco settled in Toledo, Spain in 1577, one of the centers of Spanish Catholicism. There, he was well paid for his work and often commissioned by priests and other patrons.
An important aspect of El Greco’s work was the fusion of Italian and Byzantine art: the dramatic, realistic icon. In his work such as St. Martin and the Beggar (1597-1599), the Byzantine influence is apparent in the elongation of figures to symbolize importance and holiness. Saint Martin of Tours is the patron saint of the Chapel of Saint Joseph in Toledo, where the painting hangs. Martin was a soldier in Roman France who once cut his cloak in half to share with a beggar he encountered. Later, Christ appeared in a dream to Martin wearing the makeshift cape and saying “What thou hast done for the poor man, thou hast done for me.” Laocoon (1608-1614) by El Greco is the only pagan themed painting of all of his works, but following the custom of the time, the background setting is a city that resembles Toledo. In the Burial of Count Orgaz (1586), the picture is physically divided into three separate planes of existence: death, life, and the afterlife. This Byzantine custom is commonly seen in El Greco’s work.
Mannerism is a style of art from Italy that was profoundly influential and personalized by El Greco. The obvious elongation of bodies, the treatment of space, light and color, and the bizarre, beautiful and unnatural skies in El Greco’s paintings are all personal takes of the mannerist style. The Burial of Count Orgaz is perhaps the greatest example of El Greco’s mannerism. The painting has no ground line, no deep space, and a marked separation of the mourners from the saints and angels in Heaven. The use of pale yellows, greens, blues and rose are highly characteristic of Italian mannerist schools as well.
El Greco died in 1614.
History of El Greco