HOLY TOLEDO.(El Greco, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York)

"We can define El Greco's work by saying that what he did well none did better, and that what he did badly none did worse," the Spanish painter and scholar Antonio Palomino wrote in 1724. That violently mixed assessment struck me as just right when I read it on a wall of the Metropolitan Museum's current, tremendous El Greco retrospective. Critical quotations, pro and con, pepper the show's superb installation by the curator David Davies; they vivify the warring opinions provoked by El Greco in his lifetime and ever since, except for a spell of near-oblivion that ended in the nineteenth century, when, like Vermeer, he was rescued by French aesthetes. A bit later, Picasso took him as a formative influence and thereby installed him in the boiler room of modern painting. El Greco feels at issue in art again today, as new painters, notably John Currin, raid museums for nuggets of refractory inspiration. To consider the Master of Toledo is still and always to engage in argument--with oneself, as likely as not. At the show, I found myself alternately cheering and cringing, inwardly, like the fan of a talented but goof-prone sports team.

The glory and the problem of El Greco are the same: spirituality. No other great artist takes this fundamental, usually ineffable aspect of experience so literally, as an open secret. He does so in terms of strict Catholic doctrine, but with an energy that a person of any faith, or of none, may recognize. His art affirms spirituality--the awareness that glimmers at the headspring of consciousness, prior to thought and feeling--as the primary fact of life, always on tap. This jolts people into love or loathing of El Greco, depending on how they relate to the spiritual in themselves. Spiritual intimations trickle through all minds, however obscurely, and even while discounted or ignored. El Greco delivers them with a fire hose.

Crete was a Venetian colony when, in 1541, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, as El Greco never ceased to sign himself, was born there. He trained as an icon painter in a local variant of the archaic Byzantine manner, whose rigid formulas were aimed less at representing the divine than at magically summoning it. In Venice for three years, from the age of twenty-six, he assimilated the most advanced painting of the day: Titian, Tintoretto, Bassano. Venetian painterly rhetoric--bodies in dramatic motion, open brushwork, clarion color--imprinted on him, but without changing his metaphysics. He failed to start a career in Rome, where he seems to have burned bridges by disparaging Michelangelo, whose carnal sublimity--submerging the spirit in straining muscles--was bound to affront the young Greek. El Greco reportedly offered to repaint "The Last Judgment" in a more seemly manner. Still, he picked up tricks of composition from Michelangelo, as witness the rhythmic aggregate of contorted bodies in his several versions of "The Purification of the Temple"--Jesus scourging the sacrilegious. He was a quick study.

By 1576, when he was thirty-five, El Greco had followed his ambition to Spain, whose art-loving King Philip II was on top of the world after organizing European forces against the Turks for the monumental victory at Lepanto, in 1571. El Greco made an apparent bid for royal favor with a ghastly painting, "The Adoration of the Name of Jesus," which is an arduous hodgepodge of practically everything that he knew how to do, from medieval grotesquerie to Titianesque elegance, and features a passage of unforgettably hideous orange. (In El Greco, successful color comes and goes like a gambler's luck.) Turned away at court, he alit in Toledo, the ecclesiastical capital of Spain, where he remained for the next thirty-seven years, until his death, in 1614. Records of furious litigation over payment for most of his major commissions bespeak an obstreperous character. He lived high, at one point renting twenty-four rooms in a palace and employing musicians to play while he dined. He had, and acknowledged, a son by a Spanish woman soon after arriving in Toledo; he never married. Active intellectually, he pressed for official recognition of painting as a liberal art. ...