Becoming El Greco

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Late in his life, El Greco painted St. John, whose elaborate vision became the biblical book Revelation, as part of a never-completed altarpiece. The scene may show the moment when the saint meets the souls of those who died for their faith. John is an impossibly stretched figure, throwing up his hands against one of El Greco's typically stormy skies, his face seen in violent perspective. The martyrs seem pallid and rubbery, but the scene has a strange intensity; even the drapery quivers with emotion and vibrates with light.

There may be more mundane reasons for the wan, otherworldly look of El Greco's people: he worked in light and shade before adding layers of color that don't always overcome the underlying gray tones, and he painted from wax models rather than directly from the figure. On his death in 1614, 50 models were found among his effects.

Despite disdaining anatomy, he loved the texture of fur, hair, trees and starched linen. St. Jerome as Scholar (ca. 1600-1614) is almost all oversized red cape, silky white beard, fuzzy hair and black eyebrows complete with stray white feelers. In The Crucifixion With Two Donors (ca. 1580) you can almost feel the left-hand donor's crumpled surplice. The other's ruff is scribbled in white paint, and his eye is made to shine with a pure black highlight. This picture rested on an altar, and when the priest said mass, he would be on the same level — and almost in the same space — as the waist-length donor figures at the foot of the cross.

El Greco's portraits are simply presented: a pale central figure looks straight out from darkness. Jerónimo de Cevallos (ca. 1610) has an immense, casually sketched-in white ruff and sable-hued clothes. There's a possibility that the subject of A Lady in a Fur Wrap (late 1570s) may be Jerónima de las Cuevas, the mother of El Greco's only son, Jorge Manuel (they never married). Her face is painted with tranquil smoothness, but her lynx fur is created by strokes dragged energetically from the wet paint of the gray wrap into the depthless background.

Unlike many contemporaries, he never painted himself. Our only clue to El Greco's appearance may lie in The Adoration of the Shepherds (ca. 1612-1614), which he painted to hang above his own tomb. The central figure kneeling before the Christ child is, some scholars believe, an image of the painter. A man with similar features appears in other works, sometimes with the direct gaze typical of self-portraits.

El Greco often put his adopted city, Toledo, in the background of his works. A blurred view of its fortified walls can be seen at the foot of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception (1608-1613), and he used it as a stand-in for Troy in Laocoön (early 1610s). (Laocoön and his sons were destroyed by snakes for suggesting that the wooden horse was not as innocent as it seemed.)

He did his home full justice in A View of Toledo (ca. 1597-1599). Bathed in a stormy light that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, the city with its castles, mighty walls and Gothic church spire looms above a lurid green landscape and a dark, rushing river. The silvery buildings are emphasized by dark halos; an unseen sun makes the clouds glow. No religious drama is going on anywhere: the only figures are manikins fishing, swimming, washing clothes. Yet this may be the most spiritual work he ever produced — a fitting symbol for a painter devoted to illuminating life's ethereal side.