GRECO, DOMENICO THEOTOKOPULI, DETTO IL

**GRECO, DOMENICO (THEOTOKOPOULOS, called EL GRECO). Painter, b. at Candia on 1 Oct. 1541, d. at Toledo on 7 Apr. 1614. Having come to Italy, at Venice, he was perhaps a pupil of Titian but also knew the art of J. Bassano, Tintoretto, Schiavone, Veronese, and, at Parma, that of Correggio and Parmigianino.**

At Rome, where he was from about 1570 to 1572, he saw the works of Michelangelo. He was also in Naples and perhaps in Malta; in 1576 he left Genoa for Spain; by 1577 he was certainly in Toledo, where he found an environment congenial to his temperament. There, in 1577, he painted for the church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo the *Assumption of the Virgin*, the *Resurrection*, the saints John the Evangelist and John the Baptist, and the *Adoration of the Shepherds*, works still in their original location except for the *Assumption*, now in the Art Institute of Chicago. This *Assumption* is one of the most Titianesque paintings by El Greco. In 1579 he was commissioned to work for the Escorial and painted three pictures representing St. Ildefonso, St. Peter, and St. Francis, in addition to the altarpiece with St. Maurice and the Theban Legion. Among his most famous works from the Spanish period are the *Espolio* for the cathedral of Toledo (1577) and the *Burial of the Count of Orgaz*, painted for the church of Santo Tomé in Toledo and certainly completed in 1584.

Among his works from the Italian period, during which the artist was forming himself on Venetian models, are cited: the triptych with the *Annunciation* in the Gallery of Modena, *Christ in the House of Martha* (Venice, formerly Brass collection), *The Healing of the Blind* (Dresden and Parma), *The Merchants Cast out of the Temple* (Richmond, Cook collection), *The Annunciation* (Florence, Contini collection), and *The Boy with a Candle* (Naples Gallery). But of his activity prior to these works, and indeed in the very heart of his early Venetian years, numerous examples have recently come to light, following the fortunate discovery of the signed polyptych in the Estense Gallery of Modena. With their aid, the hypothesis regarding the origins of El Greco is today confirmed: a broad study of the great Venetian painting—of which El Greco brought the magic of certain Eastern chromatic secrets—and of the suggestive linearism of Parma.

Among the works of his maturity, besides those already mentioned, are *The Pentecost* (Madrid, Prado, where there are other of his numerous canvases), *The Apostles* (Toledo, Provincial Museum), *The Adoration of the Shepherds* (New York, Metropolitan Museum), *View of Toledo* (Toledo, El Greco Museum), and, among his portraits, that of the Inquisitor *Nino de Guevara* (New York, Winterthur, Reinhart collection).

If one could speak of mannerism in his case, it would have to be of a coloristic mannerism that in him reaches hallucinatory effects, as in medieval Oriental art. And the color is commented upon by a line that is fantastically decorative, so that his paintings give the sense of surprising, instinctive anticipations of attitudes that modern art derives from theoretical premises. — See pls. LXXX.

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