Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos)
Greek, Spanish; 16th-century, 17th-century
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
91%
St. Paul. 1598-1600. Oil on canvas
One shouldn't put too much stock in museum wall texts, but credit where it's due: the label for this painting points out Paul's "quivering proportions," which is a baller phrase that gets at a big part of what can be great about Mannerist painting. However, elongation and the softness of borders (“quivering proportions” — check out that pointer finger!) aren't all of what makes this a masterpiece. They're not even the main things. Rather, it's the three shocks of orange — really just dashed literal lines — sitting right atop the picture plane, two by Paul's left hand and one at the crest of the bunched fabric on his shoulder. In one sense these marks serve a function that's immanent to the painting. They call back to the orange underpainting behind the brown of the background, involving the very back of the scene with its very front such that the whole of the picture feels distinct, enclosed, despite the wiliness of El Greco's handling. (The way he paints in streaks that lump with light makes masses seem to shift and melt.) In another sense, though, those orange touches are extrinsic to the image; traces of a hand more brazen than even the streakiest stroke beneath them, they destroy resemblance. (2025)
Rochester, NY: Memorial Art Gallery
77%
The Apparition of the Virgin to St. Hyacinth. c1605-1610. Oil on canvas
Though this is a somewhat minor El Greco, there's still much to recommend it. For one, the arrangement is interesting: four firm verticals (saint, statue, columns, altar) frame out the space upon which the apparition — a curve conveying a tilde through soft formless clouds — intrudes. This contrast is aesthetically productive, and it also makes the Virgin seem that much more spectral and heavenly in comparison to the hard reality which Hyacinth inhabits. (Color does this as well.) There's a curious mixture, too, of types of paint handling: the figures and the columns and the clouds are (for El Greco) characteristically streaky; less characteristically, the bit of wall beneath Mary is hard and flat, the floor comprises bounded clouds of color, and the altar at left is a strange spongy plane of dots. It's provocative that this painting contains such a disjointed variety of facture. The altar, especially, is a remarkable bit of painterly indulgence, even for a freak like El Greco. But in the end, it fails to hang together. That separation of the arrangement into so many rhyming verticals — which works well on compositional terms — makes the piece in toto seem like a series of so many disconnected experiments in paint application. Often when El Greco veers into complicatedness with his compositions, he justifies it by including some sort of painterly connective tissue to bring his figures together, like the fabrics in the Met's Fifth Seal. (2025)