The Greek's way.(Art)(El Greco)(Biography)

SOME artists are known to the public chiefly as caricatures of themselves. Mondrian is one example. The fact that Mondrian made ravishing pictures of flowers and haunting landscapes is overshadowed by our association of the name "Mondrian" with the image of a certain type of pared-down geometrical abstraction in primary colors.

Something similar can be said about Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541-1614), the Cretan-born artist known to posterity by his Spanish sobriquet: El Greco, "the Greek." El Greco's distinctive mannerisms--drastic foreshortening and elongation of figures, acidulous colors, an aura of mystical asceticism--have burned an image of his work into our collective unconscious. His idiosyncrasies--the idiosyncrasies of his oft-reproduced paintings--have assured him a high degree of name-brand recognition. The memory--the association--is not wrong, exactly, but it is partial. El Greco, like Mondrian, was more than his received reputation. It is one of the great merits of the large overview of El Greco's work that just closed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (and that opens at London's National Gallery in February) that it introduces us to the full spectrum of this remarkable artist's achievement. Consider, for example, "A Lady in a Fur Wrap" (late 1570s), a full-boned, secular work that might have been painted in the 18th instead of the 16th century. El Greco's fervid hankering for the transcendent is on holiday in this urbane and elegant portrait.

El Greco lived through one of the great hinges of history: the Protestant Reformation; the defeat of the paynim foe (how I've been longing for a chance to use that phrase!) at Lepanto, 1571; the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation; the high hopes and crushing defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Not for nothing did some ironically malevolent Chinaman wish that his enemies might "live in interesting times."

El Greco was born to a prosperous family in Crete, which was then a possession of the waning Venetian Republic. His early training as an icon painter permanently inflected his work with a Byzantine astringency, but his emigration to Venice in 1567 softened and enlarged his palette, adding a tonal sumptuousness to the brittle energy of his pictures. Like nearly everyone in Venice at the time, El Greco came under the spell of Titian (1485-1576)--well, he rubbed up against it, anyway. You can see the influence of Titian, all right, but El Greco was far too prickly a character to be anyone's disciple, personal or stylistic.

There's a lot we don't know about El Greco, but his reputation as a touchy, litigious character survives. He moved to Rome in 1570, found protection in the Palazzo Farnese, but was writing to Cardinal Farnese in 1572 to complain that he "did not deserve to be thrown out and sent away because I had committed no fault." We do not know what El Greco is alleged to have done to give offense, but the voluminous if sketchy record of his squabbles with friends and patrons suggests that giving offense was something he came by naturally. Although the work of Michelangelo (1475-1564) clearly made a deep impression on his own work, El Greco is said to have offered to replace Michelangelo's "Last Judgment" at the Sistine Chapel with something else just as good but more decorative.

Such remarks were not appreciated by his fellow painters in Rome, and El Greco is said to have found it convenient to leave precipitately. He went briefly to Madrid, in 1576, and then on to Toledo, the tense, cosmopolitan city that became his home and in which he did most of his greatest work. Fray Hortensio Felix Paravicino, a noted poet and Trinitarian friar, was one of El Greco's closest friends and the subject of one of his greatest late portraits (c. 1609, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). In one of the four sonnets ...