Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos)
Greek, Spanish; 16th-century, 17th-century
Toledo, Spain: Iglesia de Santo Tomé
93%
The Burial of Count Orgaz. 1586. Oil on canvas
It's obvious that the central dynamic of this painting is its exaggerated distinction between heaven's elasticity and a heavy, ordered earth. This makes the propulsion of Orgaz almost off the front of the canvas seem particularly extreme — his limp body toys with the limits of this picture to an extent his mortal confreres couldn't dream of, and in a way which the angels above him wouldn't dare — and it also makes the divine disorder surrounding Christ seem, by contrast, that much more ineffable. But this painting is a masterpiece not simply because its division into two parts is so perfectly keyed to its emotional and spiritual resonances, but because El Greco has managed, in fact, continually to corrupt this bisected logic without ever undermining its didactic and narrative effectiveness. The painting is not a statement on theology but a heaving organism. Figures throw glances between heaven and earth; staffs and torches jut from the lower realm into the upper; the firmament, despite its fluidity, actually comprises so many blockish planes of heads of saints; and the fabrics in among the mortals rhyme with the flow of the clouds above. (TFS, 2026)
Toledo, Spain: Catedral Primado de Toledo
93%
The Disrobing of Christ. 1577-79. Oil on canvas
I'm put in mind of Jacopo Bassano's painting of Christ on the way to Calvary, which maybe El Greco saw in Venice. Bassano's handling there doesn't have much to do with El Greco's typically broad and brushy application of paint. Both pictures, however, are not only crowded, but moreover seem to handle their crowding in similar ways. Bassano's painting has a lateral movement. It is characterized by a tireless ebb-flow that keeps reorganizing the picture's distribution of energy and weight, yet proceeds ineluctably leftwards, toward Christ's somber mug. El Greco's Disrobing moves along the Z- rather than the X-axis, constantly testing the picture plane but always pulling back at the critical moment. The painting contains many tiny systems of figure-to-figure relation that embody this dynamic. Most notable is the Christ-Marys column extending from bottom left to center: Jesus' robe is, of course, a battering ram aimed at the picture plane, but its outward thrust is caught and countered by the Magdalene with her yellow back to us, who likewise (literally) pushes the other two lurching Marys into the space of the image. And there's also the tumbling guy in green thrown back by the knelt workman; the pointing finger at top right that's rebuffed by the Lord's delicate gesture below it; the armor at left catching the robe's red reflection — even Christ seems to hold himself back despite the thrust of the whole scene, his hand to his heart. El Greco's color palette and his highlights and the psychedelic elongations of his figures are all, of course, hallmarks of genius, but what truly distinguishes him is this coquetry with which his images' dense arrangements engage their pictorial confines. It was Caravaggio who invented the "gallery picture," but it was El Greco who signalled the necessity of such an invention. (TFS, 2026)
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. (TFS, 2025)
Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
89%
Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino. 1609. Oil on canvas
This is a subdued El Greco, and it's all the better for it. The colors are muted but ecstatic, the brushwork held to the point just before bursting. Here's the picture's basic tension: the father's white robes below his mantle are stiff, straight, columnar, a plane (albeit folded) groping out towards the front of the image; but then the sitter's right hand, fingering the face of the arm of his chair, seems to push the robes and the whole rest of the picture behind them back into space. The whole arrangement, in fact, prepares this moment. The rightward tilt of the chair is not fully corrected by the priest's lean to the left, such that we fall down and to the right where his lap meets the book, which carries us up as it angles till the fingers of Father's left hand point us out towards the cross on his chest that carries us, in turn, up his right arm and out towards those pressing digits — and back again into the depth of the picture. It bears mentioning, however, that El Greco is better when he achieves similar structural effects without suppressing any of his painterly excesses. (TFS, 2025)
Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Art
84%
Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple. c1575. Oil on canvas
El Greco is great for his fissures and aporias. Space in his pictures introduces itself as orthogonal, well-ordered — but then it spends time in contortions, bending to conform to the bizarre arcs and elongations of his figures. This work lacks just some of the magic that El Greco's more brazen and broken pictures contain, and that's because it lavishes so much care on the thicket of action surrounding Christ. It's an impressive figure group, sure, but it's also such a dense and unified gravitational force that much of the rest of the image's oddities of space and proportion — the baby at left, the four figures pressing up against the picture plane in the bottom right corner — seem to correct themselves in obeisance to it. This isn't bad by any means, it's just somewhat limiting. (TFS, 2025)
Worcester, MA: Worcester Art Museum
82%
The Repentant Magdalen. c1577. Oil on canvas
El Greco tends to be better when he's either more refined or more hair-down than he is in this painting, which lies in his style's middle ground. The rock at left subdues and anchors the angry sky at right, allowing the clouds and the thick blue air behind them to rhyme more readily than they might have with Mary's features and her figure, especially that exoskeleton of a blue robe. The streaks in the clouds are light glancing off folds in her vestments, her head is that hole opened up in the clouds behind her. Small features of the picture's arrangement are to be commended, too, namely how the skull gazes into the space of the picture while Mary looks the opposite way (and up). Despite the famous El Greco flux, objects in this painting are remarkably well defined: not just the skull, but Mary's left arm and the bench she's sitting on and the vine at left. This distinctness (especially that of the arm, a rare and remarkable bit of modeling from this painter) grounds not only the sludgy background movement but also the pensive emotion on Mary's face. (TFS, 2025)
Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
80%
Saint Catherine. c1605-1610. Oil on canvas
If there's anything to fault this painting for, it's the degree to which its entire arrangement appears merely to serve the way it's been painted — Catherine's body bends wherever El Greco's brushmarks want to curve or break; her accoutrements seem like they're only there to stiffen up the composition, apologizing for the many flights of fancy that make up the background clouds. It's good, of course, that there's a correspondence between this painting's "what" and its "how," but El Greco, given the frequently unrestrained nature of his handling, often produces much better results when his scenes manage to reach some sort of accord with his facture, rather than subordinate themselves to it. But then again, it's amazing to see El Greco painting as freely as he is here, even if it's at the expense of composition. The efflorescent whites in Catherine's red robe make it seem like it's dissolving and coming into being at once. The hazy outlines of every object put the painting's whole surface into a pleasing all-over ebb. (TFS, 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 tiled 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 an instance of painterly indulgence remarkable for even a freak like El Greco. But in the end, it all fails to hang together. That separation of the arrangement into so many rhyming verticals — which works well on compositional terms — makes the painting 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 that brings his figures together, like the fabrics in the Met's Fifth Seal. No such tissue here. (TFS, 2025)
Madrid, Spain: Museo del Prado
...%
The Annunciation. 1597-1600. Oil on canvas
.... (TFS, 2026)