Becoming El Greco

The genius known as El Greco started his working life as icon painter Doménikos Theotokópoulos on the Greek island of Crete. He ended it as the undisputed giant of 16th century Spanish art. Ever since they were rediscovered in the 19th century, his dramatic religious set pieces and dark, melancholy portraits have been regarded as groundbreaking, and 20th century modernists claimed him as a brother. But he used an alchemy all his own to fuse old and new for the greatest possible impact — at least, that's what one takes away from the exhibition of his work (amazingly, the U.K.'s first major show devoted to him) which opens this week at London's National Gallery and runs through May 23.

Born in 1541, Theotokópoulos moved to Venice soon after 1566, and then to Rome in 1570, where he lived in the Palazzo Farnese. While in Italy, he learned from Renaissance masters like Titian, Tintoretto and Michelangelo, and Mannerists like Parmigianino. He readily took on their style; one of several versions of the Purification of the Temple, from the 1570s, quotes extensively from Raphael and Michelangelo. Yet he failed to find great success in Italy, possibly because he made disparaging remarks about Michelangelo, and thus moved to Spain in 1576. He settled in Toledo and for the rest of his life worked for the religious establishment and the local intellectual élite.

Soon after his move to Spain, his work changed radically. By about 1600, in another version of Christ driving the traders and money changers from the sacred precincts, El Greco's borrowings have been transmuted; figures are distorted, gestures are balletic and exaggerated, and contrasts are stark. Though his new style departs from tradition, it also looks back. His flattened space, with figures up close to the picture's surface, is influenced both by Mannerism and by his icon-painting past. But there is a political backdrop as well. Threatened by the rise of Protestantism, the Catholic Church of the time began stressing individual piety and the spiritual reality that underlies appearances. El Greco's work, with its distortions for emotional effect and etiolated figures hovering in nonphysical space, reflects this. He even deforms eyes, and may have invented the ecstatic upward glance with a liquid highlight that can be seen on the strangely conical eyeballs of Mary Magdalen in Penitence (early 1580s). Not just a saint, she is also a symbol of repentance: a state of mind the church wished to encourage in its followers.