Art: Theotocopuli

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Last week a picture was exhibited in Boston—"St. Martin and the Beggar" by El Greco. Carlos Meinhard of the Howard Young Galleries brought the picture to Boston; it had come to him from the collection of John Singer Sargent who owned it for 30 years, allowing it to be shown in public only once—at the exhibition of Spanish art in London in 1895. There is talk now that the Boston Museum of Fine Arts will buy it, give it a place beside two other El Grecos that hang there, "St. Dominic" and the Portrait of Fray Feliz Hortenzio Palavincio. These two are fine portraits; St. Martin is better. It is one of the most important works of a man whose intellect has had few equals among the minds of the world. Very little is known about El Greco. Even his name is in doubt; students believe that it was Theotocopuli, but the Spaniards of Toledo, in whose country he passed the richest part of his life, found this name barbarous, and never wrote or spoke of him except as Dominico Greco. Great princes of the 16th Century, whose eyes were unsealed, honored him by this name; the men of nearer times, putting on once more fetters laid off in the Renaissance, wondered only whether Greco was mad or astigmatic, a Cretan voluptuary, or a disciple of the art of Byzantium. So much, at least, is certain: he was born in Crete about the year 1547, he went to Italy to study; and there his work was influenced by Titian and Tintoretto. It is said that he lived in a little room in the palace of the Cardinal Farnese. He went to Spain when the Duke of Toledo asked Italian painters to work on his cathedral, and in Toledo, stony and enchanted on its hill above a desert where goats wandered with magicians, he painted until the end of his life.