Subjects in El Greco's Art


After the completion of the Burial of the Count of Orgaz some ten years were to elapse before, in 1596, he was again given any comparable commissions. In this decade he formulated his repertoire of subjects and worked out their individual interpretation.

Painting in Spain in the sixteenth century, still partly medieval in character, was almost totally confined to religious subjects, and especially concerned itself with the devotional image. El Greco was in sympathy with this. He did not so much extend the range of subjects as revivify them, giving meaning and reality to the images.

The Old Testament does not figure in his repertoire of subjects, which concerns itself with the central personalities and mysteries of the Faith, in which were embodied the essential meaning of the Universe. The mysteries were those which expressed the essence of the spiritual, essentially divorced from ordinary human experience: the Virgin of the Annunciation receiving the Spirit, and the Christ on the Cross releasing the Spirit; the Christ of His Mystic Birth and of the Resurrection; the Christ of the Baptism and the Pentecost, both themes of the descent of the Spirit. These six subjects he composed together in the grand unified programme dedicated to the 'life of Christ', for the Colegio de Doña Maria in Madrid. It is clear he must have played an important part in the devising of the programme, and certainly in its interpretation.

An important place in his repertoire of subjects was taken by the image of Christ, and the Saints near to Christ. These images were of two types. The one is the simple image of the Saint, in which he sought to express by a characteristic type and gesture, and by pattern, colour and movement, the essence of the personality and its meaning. The other type is that of the Saint in ecstasy or inspired, and related to some specific and characteristic situation. The presence of St Francis and St Ildefonso in his repertoire, which otherwise confines itself to the New Testament, can be explained by the closeness to Christ of St Francis who receives the Stigmata, and the fact that St Ildefonso was the patron saint and the first Bishop of Toledo.

The idea of the pairs of Saints which appear at this time was not his own, and he would have known the great series painted by Navarrete for the Escorial. El Greco introduces them into his repertoire in the 1590s, and the juxtaposition of two different personalities in the one painting was an invaluable exercise in bringing out the character of each. Saint Peter and Saint Paul, the two Saint Johns, were obvious pairs, but he also brings together such diverse characters as the Saint Andrew and Saint Francis. The Holy Family was also depicted in several versions.

Beside the evolution of a subject, the development of a pose can also be observed on the example of the pose of St Sebastian painted in 1580. El Greco did not use this pose again for a Saint Sebastian, a related figure is the Christ in the Prado Baptism of some fifteen to twenty years later, and the compositional motif of the pose, with the outstretched leg taking the movement upwards appears also in the Adoration of the Shepherds of similar date. The Saint Jerome of his last year shows the culmination of this development.

Paravicino in his sonnet dedicated to his friend recognises the great significance of the atmosphere of Toledo to the great painter, and El Greco confesses his debt to the town by introducing into his paintings the landscape of Toledo, as earlier in Italy he had introduced the portraits of the great painters of Venice and Rome. The view of Toledo first appears in the Saint Joseph and the Christ Child, painted in 1597. In this painting, whose theme is that of Man cherishing the spiritual meaning of the Universe and guided by it in his path through the World, the spiritual view of Toledo seems to symbolise the World. The painting in the Metropolitan Museum was probably conceived in connection with the same commission, for the view is the same, and the result was one of the most remarkable independent landscapes ever painted. The view of Toledo in the Laokoön from 1610 appears to have been taken from the same view-point as that of the Metropolitan Museum painting, which it continues to the right, the two together completing the panorama of the town. The town appears subsequently in a number of paintings, where its presence is appropriate: in the Christ on the Cross leaving this World; and in the late Immaculate Conception, where it is little more than a vision. Significantly, in the Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness, the setting is the austere landscape of the Escorial. While the views keep close to the actual features of the landscapes, they are given a completely spiritual interpretation. The same thing occurs in his portraits.

After several portraits (and only a few female portraits) in the 1590s the years 1600 to 1610 witnessed the full development of his powers as a portrait painter. His personal style of portrait painting begins with the Burial of the Count of Orgaz, and closes with his great masterpiece, the portrait of his friend Paravicino, painted in 1609 or 1610. (It is supposed that he included his self-portrait in some of his compositions.) The picture of the Orgaz entombment contains a plenitude of portraits. In earlier paintings, too, like the Martyrdom of St. Maurice, models were employed for portraiture; but they transcended the individual and were deftly woven into the composition. In the Entombment of Count Orgaz the portraits retain their full individual character, so much so as to arouse perpetual curiosity concerning the names of the persons represented. The intention here seems to be the contrary of that which the Protestant North later strove to attain: Frans Hals's groups of musketeers, Rembrandt's Night Watch, give groups of portraits in the form of narrative; in the Orgaz picture the portraits of contemporaries are introduced into a legend without re-casting it. Through this group of naturalistic portraits the Catholic miracle story of the Entombment of Count Orgaz receives its worldly attestation, just as the Dutch portrait groups by stylistic transformation touch with poetry the burgher world.

The portraits in this painting have all the qualities of Greco's art of portraiture. A scholar found the portraits by the hand of Greco 'corpse-like in colouring, shadowy in modelling'. Others again have been struck by the somnambulism in the expression of the faces, the ascetic and the ecstatic, the cruel and the passionate, kept under by self-repression and outward coldness, a nervous laceration, suggesting Toledo blades, so sharp as in course of time to penetrate the sheaths in which they rest. Others again have emphasized the colourlessness of the portraits, the night-dark backgrounds, into which the black garments and the grey and olive-green faces melt. But Greco's best portrait, that of the Grand Inquisitor, is at the same time one of his pictures that are strongest in colour. What is common to all these portraits is only their impressionistic quality, which in the later period is strikingly reminiscent of the technique of Dutch contemporaries, their freedom from deliberate 'distortions', their relative naturalism.

Essentially related to the development of his portrait art was his great exercise in interpreting the characters of the Saints. In both he sought to express the reality of the spiritual personality.

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