A Weird, Unique Lushness

Brian Allen

El Greco: Ambition and Defiance. Réunion : Ambition and Defiance is the des musées nationaux–Grand Palais, Paris, new survey organized by the Grand Palais in Oct. 14, 2019 to Feb. 10, 2020; The Art Paris and the Art Institute of Chicago. I saw Institute of Chicago, May 7 to Sept. 7, 2020. it at both places. Over the past years, I’ve seen a dozen El Greco shows, starting with El Greco: Ambition and Defiance, edited by the 1982 retrospective. He’s the gift that Rebecca J. Long, with essays by Keith keeps on giving. Both the exhibition and Christiansen, Richard L. Kagan, Guillaume the book dazzle. Kientz, Rebecca J. Long, Felipe Pereda, Ambition and Defiance follows El Greco’s Jose Riello, and Leticia Ruiz Gomez, career, beginning with his early days making and contributions by Jena K. Carvana. icons, small and rote, with flat airless spaces Distributed by Yale University Press, and stiff, isolated, stern figures. In his 200pp., 148 color ills., $50 cloth. mid-twenties, he moved to Venice in hopes of entering the high-end market for portraits ike a huckster, I tell whoer ve and religious pictures. There, he absorbed a L listens: “If there’s an El Greco show, warm Venetian palette and painterly style, run, don’t walk, to see it.” Domenikos and learned volumes about composition. Theotokopoulos, called El Greco (1541-1614) Possibly, he worked in Titian’s shop. He is almost always arrestingly good. You don’t found an ally and mentor, the prominent have to believe anything spiritual to find miniaturist Giulio Clovio, then in his yourself bewitched by his acidic palette, seventies, who introduced him to Cardinal fantastic settings, and writhing, soaring Alessandro Farnese, Rome’s biggest and saints. He’s exotic, with an amalgamated most discerning art patron. name evoking Crete, Italy, and Spain. Over He arrived in Rome in 1570 and worked nearly forty years in Toledo, his exoticism, among Farnese’s stable of artists until he aided, no doubt, by a disputatious, risk offended someone important, possibly the taking character, fermented more than cardinal, possibly for claiming Michelangelo ripened. Today, he’s seen as a unique genius. couldn’t paint figures and that, by the way,

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Athenaeum Review_Issue 5_FINAL_11.04.2020.indd 19 11/6/20 1:23 PM he’d happily repaint his Last Judgment in the and it’s the centerpiece of El Greco’s first Sistine Chapel to show everyone how figures Toledo commission. The Holy Trinity from ought to be painted. We don’t know. We know the Prado is in this gallery, also by El Greco he was bounced from Farnese’s clan. Since and originally displayed above The artists say insulting things about other artists Assumption as part of the nine-painting all the time, it’s likely his crime was to have chapel extravaganza from the convent of aggravated everyone through consistent Santo Domingo el Antiguo (Figure 2). pushiness. Though he had a modest portrait The exhibition marks the first time that business in Rome, off to Toledo he went. the two have been reunited in over two Moving to Toledo to decorate a new hundred years. This commission has been chapel—and a showstopper it is—he tried exhaustively explored over the years, but it’s to enter the circle of Philip II’s court, painting worth repeating that El Greco was recruited The Martyrdom of St. Maurice and the for the job in Rome by the Toledan patron, Theban Legion, which the king didn’t like, who wanted a complex program done in the and for the cathedral latest Roman style. El Greco was by then in Toledo, which the sacristans there didn’t floundering, scorned by the Farnese court like. Neither king nor cathedral hired him and stuck on a portraitist’s treadmill. He again. He spent the rest of his career in offered a good price and, presumably, some Toledo, doing some big altarpiece projects good lines, and he was willing to go to Toledo. but mostly devotional pictures for homes A wall mural in this gallery in Chicago shows and small chapels. the altarpiece as it exists now, with some of Run, don’t walk, to see an El Greco show, El Greco’s nine paintings still in situ and and Ambition and Defiance is a good one. copies of The Assumption and The Trinity. The works on view—about fifty-five, more or This wall mural is a good idea. It’s the best less, with some changes at each venue—are way to show art that didn’t or couldn’t make splendid. There are roughly forty lenders, it to the galleries. It also conveys the size of showing that the curators sought the best, the project. The exhibition is, after all, about wherever it was. Awe is the operative emotion El Greco’s ambition, and he’d never done in seeing so much great work, so adroitly anything as remotely complicated in terms of arranged. numbers of figures and narrative complexity, El Greco’s Assumption of the Virgin, painted nor had he ever designed altar architecture. in Toledo in 1577-79 and owned by the Art The Assumption of the Virgin is gorgeous on Institute, dominates the main gallery in both its own, but it’s about thrust and, installed Chicago and Paris (Figure 1). Both shows have in Toledo, was of a piece with The Trinity, subsequent galleries dedicated to the artist’s placed above it and the denouement of big portrait business. Both devote much space Jesus’s life on earth. to El Greco’s repertoire of saints and to his When El Greco got to Toledo, he was, facility of drawing new angles on established after all, 35 and not young. What to do with tropes. Both treat his late work, differently but the work he did before? From the late 1560s nicely, and both consider how he organized until 1576, El Greco developed quickly from his studio and the issue of work done by making icons, which aren’t especially fetching both him and his assistants, usually his son. (and, in any event, present problems of Walking up the Art Institute’s grand attribution), to Saint Francis Receiving the staircase, there is the show’s star, The Stigmata from 1567-70, a figure in a landscape Assumption of the Virgin. It’s one of the and still a compositional push for the artist, museum’s big hits under any circumstances, to the movingly direct 1571 bust portrait

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Athenaeum Review_Issue 5_FINAL_11.04.2020.indd 20 11/6/20 1:23 PM Christ Carrying the Cross, two Annunciations, though waiting for the next new thing to and San Diego’s group picture, Adoration of occur, which, of course, it did in Caravaggio. the Shepherds from about 1576. In Chicago, We call it the death throes of . this storyline is pushed to the side. In Paris, Christensen’s essay develops a milieu these small pictures were in cases, in a packed where El Greco saw work by Federico narrow space where no one could see them. Zuccaro, Girolamo Muziano, Marcelo Venusti, The rush to get to Chicago’s Assumption Scipione Pulzone, and Marco Pino, artists he is understandable. It’s the splashiest thing in knew and from whom he learned. Titian and the show, with weighty figures and bold Tintoretto were always in his mind as his animation, thirteen feet from top to bottom. beacon lights but here are Correggio, The Art Institute’s the host and wants to strut Beccafumi, Bassano, and Parmigianino, too. its best stuff. The Trinity, though inspired Does that essay outline a freestanding directly by a Durer print, is a sinuous male exhibition, on El Greco in Rome? Yes, and a nude, Jesus, held convincingly by God and very rich one, but it wouldn’t be a blockbuster surrounded by angels. Together, the two are and it would end, not begin, with the considered by scholars as El Greco at the Chicago painting. very moment he became El Greco, an atomic blast of vision and confidence. You don’t have to believe Still, I knew we’d taken a big shortcut. I wanted to know more about Rome. The first anything spiritual to find two essays in the catalogue explore in yourself bewitched by gratifying depth El Greco’s development there. Keith Christensen’s essay explains the El Greco’s acidic palette, obvious—El Greco didn’t spring fully formed from the head of Zeus or anyone else—yet I fantastic settings, and didn’t know the backstory, or at least the writhing, soaring saints. Rome story. Neither, I suspect, did the visitors to the show. I’ve done many exhibitions, and I know the The old take on El Greco’s style is that he show in the galleries and the show interpreted arrived in Toledo a good Roman Mannerist. in the catalogue can’t always match. To a His figures are serpentine, even limber, his degree, for brevity’s sake and because of the brushstrokes sweeping, and his colors given challenges of getting loans, the show we see to neon, all held in check by a classicizing at the museum sometimes seems like the reserve. He absorbed some of this in a Rome movie version of a long novel. Some storylines still redolent of Michelangelo. Inspired by and characters need to be dropped. Alas, this Michelangelo, he balances sprezzatura with happens a lot in Ambition and Defiance. solidity. As balletic as his figures are in both There hasn’t been an exhibition of El Greco The Trinity and The Assumption of the Virgin, in Rome, and I couldn’t help thinking that they’ve got ballast, too. In Toledo for nearly Rome forged El Greco, making of him the forty years—not a backwater but, rather, a artist he became in Toledo. Rome in the 1570s company town where the big business was was not quite in an aesthetic hangover. It’s established religion—El Greco kept his core better to say that after the deaths of Mannerist philosophy and merely pushed it Michelangelo in 1564 the bees in the hive to an extreme, the serpentine and sprezzatura moved less quickly, with less focus and elan, tripping the light fantastic, leaving reserve not directionless but set in their ways as in the dust.

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Athenaeum Review_Issue 5_FINAL_11.04.2020.indd 21 11/6/20 1:23 PM Figure 1 El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos). The Assumption of the Virgin, 1577–79. The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Nancy Atwood Sprague in memory of Albert Arnold Sprague.

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Athenaeum Review_Issue 5_FINAL_11.04.2020.indd 22 11/6/20 1:23 PM Figure 2 El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos). The Holy Trinity, 1577–79. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

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Athenaeum Review_Issue 5_FINAL_11.04.2020.indd 23 11/6/20 1:23 PM Figure 3 El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos). Vincenzo Anastagi, ca. 1575. The Frick Collection; Henry Clay Frick Bequest. Photo: Michael Bodycomb.

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Athenaeum Review_Issue 5_FINAL_11.04.2020.indd 24 11/6/20 1:23 PM Even in Rome, El Greco had an inventive It was a time in Rome when great portraiture edge having nothing to do with his was thin on the ground. Taddeo and Federico personality, which we can all agree was Zuccaro, Federico Barocci, Scipione, immensely disagreeable. I wanted more than Bartolommeo Passeroti, and Lavinia Fontana the nice tip of the hat the exhibition gives were portraitists, all talented—but the to El Greco’s Roman period. Christensen, Anastagi portrait uniquely shines. for instance, draws new attention to El Greco’s The point I’m making is that in any show biggest Roman work—what he calls the examining El Greco’s ambition and the glee “astonishing” portrait of the soldier he felt in flouting authority and convention, Vincenzo Anastagi at the Frick Collection in the Rome story needs more than a slice of New York. El Greco painted it in 1575 space. Gallery space, I know, sometimes is (Figure 3). One of my favorite paintings at what it is, but giving this period short shrift the Frick, it’s displayed at the end of its does the show’s themes and the visitors a grand gallery next to Velazquez’s sparkling disservice. A second essay in the catalogue portrait of Philip IV and Goya’s The Forge— considers in depth the outsized role of the the Frick’s power corner. painter Giulio Clovio in El Greco’s life. Christensen says it best: Clovio disappears almost entirely from the show in the galleries—unavoidable, I know, There is nothing remotely comparable in this extraordinary work in contemporary since El Greco’s great portrait of him is in a Roman art: the audacious way in which traveling show of treasures from the the figure confronts the viewer, his Capodimonte, which owns it. The essay, armor brilliantly described by broad however, is one of the catalogue’s highlights brushstrokes, his silhouette against a and features great, original research. simply articulated background with the There’s a medium-sized replica of shutter of the window open and the line of the floor receding at a slight diagonal... The Disrobing of Christ, from the 1580s, in the exhibition. El Greco did the mammoth That’s great praise. The picture’s a key version (112 by 68 inches) in 1577-79, which ingredient in understanding El Greco as an is another chapter in the artist’s career of experimental, risk-taking, freethinking artist. risk taking and, alas, litigiousness. He did it It’s a daring portrait, ambitious and more for the sacristy of the cathedral in Toledo, original than defiant. His brushstrokes veer where it hangs today. I think it’s one of the from velvety to brisk to thick, and augment great achievements of his career and, up to Anastagi’s virility and girth. A single blaze of that point, his most ambitious painting. light, like a tiny bolt of lightning, glazes off It depicts at least twenty-five figures his armor. He’s ruddy from the sun, and his surrounding Jesus, whose red robe is dense calves are as big and hard as a tree trunk. and expansive, its folds made from sweeps He’s what used to be called a man’s man. No of white paint. wonder he freed Malta. The crowd around Jesus isn’t anonymous It’s not in the exhibition. The Frick doesn’t or suggestive. Real, rough Spanish faces, lend art Frick himself bought, and there’s each with a different turn of his head and nothing to be done about that. It’s not gesture, make for a convincing mob, and considered in the galleries, though, at all. making a mob look convincing requires an This is a hole in El Greco’s story. The Anastagi extraordinary sense of design. A man in portrait seems to be the moment the artist shining armor to Jesus’s left is a version of merged rich Venetian color and gauzy Vincenzo Anastagi, tough, sure, mean, and brushwork with that Roman sculptural look. glittering. One figure in the mob looks and

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Athenaeum Review_Issue 5_FINAL_11.04.2020.indd 25 11/6/20 1:23 PM points at us, his gesture painted with spatial ducat valued at 3.5 grams of gold. An ounce of perfection. gold, or 31.103 grams, was priced on August 7, Rebecca Long’s catalogue essay reports 2020 at $2042.68, making one ducat worth the unhappy reaction at the cathedral once $229.00. El Greco agreed to a bargain price of El Greco finished the painting. The gang there 500 ducats for the entire Santo Domingo el perceived two narrative improprieties: most Antiguo project—nine paintings and altar of the bobbing, animated heads in the mob architecture—since he was new to Toledo and rose above Jesus’s head, and the three women wanted the job. At $114,000, it’s a good deal for in the corner, who El Greco explained as the the patron. El Greco and his two longtime three Marys, weren’t noted in the Gospel of studio assistants moved to Toledo to do it. Matthew as actually being there. A furor arose. He worked on the program for two years. The cathedral didn’t reject the painting. Not exactly starvation wages, however. Rather, patron and artist engaged in a long In their first pass, the cathedral’s assessors legal battle over what El Greco should get valued The Disrobing of Christ at 227 ducats. for payment. El Greco’s assessors said it was worth 900 Here’s another moment missing from ducats. The arbitrator assigned the final value this exhibition about El Greco’s defiance. at 318 ducats—$73,000 using today’s gold Long’s superb essay plumbs the quirks of value. Not bad, but not $206,000. And the the marketplace El Greco experienced in cathedral would not pay even that sum unless Spain, especially the tasacion system, which El Greco corrected the errors, which El Greco determined how much an artist got paid. refused to do since, he correctly felt, it would As a general proposition, it’s well-plowed ruin the scene. A rancorous, four-year legal territory but, for El Greco, the devil’s in the battle ensued. El Greco eventually accepted details. Scholars in the past have delivered 318 ducats, promising to make the changes, the outlines of the system, rushing to make which he never did. The cathedral never the point that El Greco felt that it treated hired him again for a painting commission, him as a craftsman rather than a philosopher. although in 1585, they hired him to make an (I’m certain these scholars felt they, too, elaborate frame for The Disrobing of Christ, were underpaid.) for which the catalogue essay reports he was Using this system, artist and patron would paid more than he made for the painting itself. negotiate a contract for a commission, It’s a great story, and it’s missing from the which might or might not be detailed on galleries. I wonder why. El Greco had many subjects, poses, and even costumes, and the disputes of this kind. It’s part of his story, artist would get some money up front to buy and it’s not greed. Rather, it’s a point where supplies. He might get progress payments, ambition and defiance merge as essential too. Once the work was done, the artist and elements in the El Greco saga. I don’t know patron each appointed one appraiser to whether it was a question of space, or a determine what he was to get as a final price. judgment that arithmetic would ruin the Since the two never agreed, an arbitrator was experience. Arts people don’t like to talk selected randomly by the local court, which about money, but money was indeed at the would rather have a settlement reached than heart of so many of El Greco’s problems in deal with a lawsuit. Toledo. He defied any authority over his El Greco’s work wasn’t cheap, even in the vision, and that’s a point of intellectual tasacion system. We can determine what his honor, but he disputed authority over prices were in today’s money since the Spanish money. Gallery visitors ought to know ducat was pegged to the price of gold, with one about this.

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Athenaeum Review_Issue 5_FINAL_11.04.2020.indd 26 11/6/20 1:23 PM Figure 4 El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos). The Martyrdom of Saint Maurice, about 1580-82. El Escorial, Patrimonio Nacional de España. Photo: Creative Commons / Wikimedia.

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Athenaeum Review_Issue 5_FINAL_11.04.2020.indd 27 11/6/20 1:23 PM Even in Rome, El Greco had an inventive edge having nothing to do with his personality, which we can all agree was immensely disagreeable.

They also should know that the tasacion then under development. El Greco’s own system sometimes delivered a windfall. El commission hasn’t been found, but we have Greco’s six-painting retablo for the Colegio de commissions for other Escorial altarpieces Dona Maria de Aragon, both sides agreed, of the same size. They’re detailed, down to a was worth 6,000 ducats, close to $1.4 million provision providing for “no dogs, no cats, in today’s money. The patron swallowed nor any other dishonest figure, but there hard and paid. should only be saints” so that the “What to do with El Greco in Rome” and composition “should provoke to devotion.” “what’s this tasacion system all about” are El Greco’s boo-boo is famous. He put the middling questions compared to “what to martyrdom of Maurice and his legion in the do with Saint Maurice.” This painting, from deep background, rendered in small figures. 1580-82 and El Greco’s foray into Philip II’s Maurice stands in the foreground, life-size, patronage, was a flop, however magnificent surrounded by his associates, all in poses it is. It’s not in the exhibition and not even that have been described as balletic—but I treated in the gallery interpretation. Again, would take it further, and suggest that the there’s nothing we can do if a lender won’t quartet of gate-legged men in tights recalls lend, and the thing, all sixteen feet of it, a pinup from a muscle magazine. never leaves the Escorial. According to Putting the crux of a religious, Felipe Pereda’s great essay in the catalogue, mythological, or historical story tucked in The Martyrdom of Saint Maurice and the the back wasn’t new. It happens a lot in Theban Legend is the ultimate, definitive Mannerist painting. So, too, do stretched, example of both El Greco’s ambition and his preening figure types. In 1605, José de Siguenza, defiance (Figure 4). It gets no coverage in the librarian, poet, and historian based at the the exhibition. It’s wrong to leave the Escorial, wrote that the painting “has much gallery visitors clueless about it. art” and El Greco “knows a great deal” but I don’t mind at all that The Burial of the that, the king felt, “saints should be painted Count of Orgaz from 1586 isn’t in the show. in such a way that our desire to pray to them It’s fantastic and famous but it’s not central to is not destroyed.” the plot. It’s a culmination and a triumph, Pereda’s essay develops an entirely new but El Greco at his best defies and overcomes interpretation of these lines, which have been heartbreak. Success? We assume that for him. thought to mean that Philip disliked the But It’s disaster that builds character and, central figures because they were too hammy I suspect, keeps him going and fighting. and too elegant, painted in a pretty, even glam The St. Maurice painting’s story is a deeply palette of blues, yellows, reds, and greens. mined one, as well as essential. El Greco, He finds that in putting the actual, gruesome once in Toledo, wheedled himself into the martyrdom off in the distance, El Greco did royal court’s circle. He was hired to paint something revolutionary. He emphasizes Saint Maurice for a marquee altarpiece at the instant when Maurice and his fellow Philip II’s signature building, the Escorial, Christians decide not to defend themselves

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Athenaeum Review_Issue 5_FINAL_11.04.2020.indd 28 11/6/20 1:23 PM but to accept martyrdom. It’s this moment, The gallery of portraits in Chicago is a filled with pathos, the pivotal moment of good reminder of El Greco’s facility here, courage and decisiveness, the intellectual and of the simple point that portrait-painting rather than the physical climax, that was was a big part of his business. The portraits the moment of martyrdom. It wasn’t the are all from his Toledo period. The cast of suffering (in Maurice’s case, over in an characters tells us who was buying from him. instant), but the grace and audacity that the The room also gives a good place for The View martyrs-to-be summoned. of Toledo from 1599 (Figure 5). It’s Pereda argues that these moments of topographical enough—the view is still intact deliberation, persuasion, conviction, today—but the buildings seethe and swell and acceptance, and submission inspired devotion, the sky’s apocalyptic. There’s nothing serene not the gruesome denouement where heads about it. Rather, it’s so roiling and abstract rolled. “It is the cause, not the suffering, that it can’t help becoming a thermometer that makes a true martyr,” Saint Augustine measuring El Greco’s imagination. wrote on the nature of martyrdom, and El Surely one of the most strikingly Greco acted on this impulse in making his beautiful galleries in America now is the picture. This wasn’t, Pereda argues rightly, El Greco show’s room of portrait-type a dry, historical, theoretical matter. paintings of saints (Figure 6). These were his Martyrdoms were actually happening in the bread and butter, and were produced in 1570s and 1580s, mainly in England. El Greco considerable number. I’ve seen many dozens took the risk that Philip II, immersed as he of them, in museums and in Toledo. With was in English religious wars, would see that many side by side comparisons, in a perfectly what is to be admired in the martyrs is not lit gallery against a saturated blue wall their suffering alone but their steadfastness color, these pictures are magical. Richard and bravery. He was wrong. Kagan’s essay in the catalogue is essential, This finding explains another defiant since he’s the living master of El Greco feature in El Greco’s work. The Martyrdom studies and, in his piece, does a deep dive in of Saint Maurice is an aesthetically effective the demand for art in El Greco’s Toledo. picture. Like all of El Greco’s work, it’s a El Greco did only eight or nine altarpiece sensual feast of color, painterliness, and programs, depending whether or not we figures whose structure is bracingly count his unfinished projects. He was cut unusual. He doesn’t offer the serene beauty from royal work and from the cathedral in of Raphael or the muscularity and tumult Toledo. The exhibition, via Kagan, makes a of Michelangelo but, rather, a weird, detailed study of the demand in Toledo for unique lushness that makes the viewer devotional pictures like those El Greco want to look. El Greco simply wouldn’t do produced in near assembly-line fashion. blood and gore. This, by the 1580s, became Toledo was the center of an immense El Greco’s brand, and it was a brand the archdiocese, with parish churches, king didn’t like. The meat and bones of this monasteries, convents, shrines, brand helps us understand El Greco’s brotherhoods, colleges, and hospitals, as famous statement that “painting deals with well as private chapels in affluent homes. the impossible.” A miracle is when an Rich people were always dying, which impossible thing happens. El Greco, in means the market for new tomb chapels designing the Saint Maurice story, wanted never ceased. Demand for mid-sized to visualize abstract thought, something painting grew simply because the Counter- impossible to see. Reformation’s battle plan was partly

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Athenaeum Review_Issue 5_FINAL_11.04.2020.indd 29 11/6/20 1:23 PM Figure 5 El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos). , about 1598–99. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929.

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Athenaeum Review_Issue 5_FINAL_11.04.2020.indd 30 11/6/20 1:23 PM Figure 6 Installation view of El Greco: Ambition and Defiance, 2020. Image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.

aesthetic and encouraged, if not demanded, It’s a medley of articulate gestures, like sign serious redecoration. language. El Greco’s characteristic long The saints’ gallery at the Art Institute fingers look like flying birds. The faces are shows art mostly from the 1580s to just past beautiful, especially Jesus’s, with big, brown, 1600. Saint Francis was popular since he bright eyes in full point-making mode. Both helped liberate souls from Purgatory. El Greco wear blue cloaks that feel and look like did versions depicting Francis meditating velvet with a sheen. It’s a very sensual on death, sometimes with Brother Leo, and picture, which makes the viewer want to Francis getting his stigmata. He offered look at it. The eye caresses the hands and versions of Saints Peter, Dominic, and fabric, not in a covetous or sexual way. Sebastian, and various takes on the Virgin. Rather, it cocoons and then co-opts both The gallery is a treat for many reasons. eye and mind, and that’s effective art and Side-by-side versions of St. Peter done from effective proselytizing. the 1590s into the 1600s show the change in His Mary Magdalene from 1577 is next to El Greco’s style: continued elongation of the same figure from 1580-85. Both figures, looser brushwork, more turbulent Magdalenes are blonde bombshells, but the nocturne skies. later one is not quite of this world. Her sexy Some of his saints are sacred conversations, sizzle seems to melt the figure, her hair too, and one, Christ Taking the Leave of His amplified and torso swelling—not to the Mother from the late 1580s, is dazzling (Figure 7). point of bursting, but certainly to where some

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Athenaeum Review_Issue 5_FINAL_11.04.2020.indd 31 11/6/20 1:23 PM Figure 7 (top) El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos). Christ Taking Leave of His Mother, 1585/90. The Art Institute of Chicago, anonymous loan.

Figure 8 (right) El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos). The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1612–14. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

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Athenaeum Review_Issue 5_FINAL_11.04.2020.indd 33 11/6/20 1:23 PM Figure 9 El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos). The Vision of Saint John, about 1609–14. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1956.

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Athenaeum Review_Issue 5_FINAL_11.04.2020.indd 34 11/6/20 1:23 PM metamorphosis is happening. These two El Greco’s Adoration of the Shepherds from paintings are in Chicago. In Paris, El Greco’s 1612-14 is there, from the Prado (Figure 8). He Mary Magdalene from 1576-77 is on view. It’s painted it for his own tomb in Santo in Budapest and I’d never seen it before. In Domingo el Antiguo, the same church that this one, El Greco focuses the body and face housed his first great altarpiece. Comparing it more. There’s nothing gauzy about it. The to The Assumption of the Virgin, the lines don’t throb. All three are symphonies blockbuster at the start of the exhibition, in blue but this Mary is earthly, in her face, all rational space seems to have slipped away. which is portrait-like, and in the tightly The heavens explode with light, clouds, and a finished book, skull, and covered cup next band of ethereal, floating angels and putti. It’s to her and the very real-looking plants dazzling: both vibrant and unreal, even sprouting from the rocks next to her. supernatural. The figures become tall, Ambition and Defiance ends in Chicago flickering flames stretching toward the with a great blast of El Greco’s late work— heavens. El Greco’s colors are harmonious but ending with dazzle, which we like. I could harsh, and acidic set against pools of black. have lived without a wall of El Greco Like The Vision of Saint John from around paintings compared to work from his studio, between 1608 and 1614, it’s hallucinatory. and work started by El Greco but finished The Vision of Saint John is a fragment and by his son. I suppose this is obligatory in a unfinished Figure( 9). It ends Ambition and survey show, but it tells us what we already Defiance. Picasso used it as one of the models know. To borrow from Mark Twain, while for Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon. El Greco El Greco is lightning, his son and assistants planned it for an altarpiece at the Hospital of are lightning bugs. Saint John the Baptist in Toledo. It shows the On a more triumphant note, three of the opening of the Fifth Seal of the Apocalypse. artist’s Crucifixions are there, including the In color and composition, its audacity is of a big one from the Louvre dating to the 1580s, piece with his very late work, and here Christ on the Cross Adored by Two Donors. El Greco defies not old, established taste but Jesus is on the cross, as nude as El Greco the new. El Greco’s son tried to persuade the gets, still a convincing, living body, hospital to accept it, but failed. Not only was serpentine, and with a nice, firm pair of it unfinished, but it didn’t reflect the fresh, legs. Two smaller versions from after 1600 contemporary taste for naturalism. The drain the corporeality from Jesus. He’s more hyperreal had replaced the ecstatic and stretched, now emaciated, his body a rack fantastic, courtesy of Caravaggio. Once, of deep, dark creases and neon-white skin. El Greco had come to Toledo as the agent of The sky’s darker and malevolently agitated. the latest Roman style. By the time of his death, He’s a wraith. the latest Roman style pushed him aside.

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Athenaeum Review_Issue 5_FINAL_11.04.2020.indd 35 11/6/20 1:23 PM