Editing El Greco (section)

==Art==
{{main|Art of El Greco}}

===Technique and style===
The primacy of imagination and intuition over the subjective character of creation was a fundamental principle of El Greco's style.<ref name="Plaka47-49" /> El Greco discarded classicist criteria such as measure and proportion. He believed that grace is the supreme quest of art, but the painter achieves grace only by managing to solve the most complex problems with ease.<ref name="Plaka47-49" />

El Greco regarded color as the most important and the most ungovernable element of painting, and declared that color had primacy over form.<ref name="Plaka47-49" /> [[Francisco Pacheco]], a painter and theoretician who visited El Greco in 1611, wrote that the painter liked "the colors crude and unmixed in great blots as a boastful display of his dexterity" and that "he believed in constant repainting and retouching in order to make the broad masses tell flat as in nature".<ref name="Landon330">A. E. Landon, ''Reincarnation Magazine 1925'', 330</ref>

{{Quote box
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|quote   = "I hold the imitation of color to be the greatest difficulty of art."
|source  =  {{mdash}} El Greco, from notes of the painter in one of his commentaries.<ref name="Mar80">Marias-Bustamante, {{lang|es|Las Ideas Artísticas de El Greco}}, 80</ref>
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Art historian [[Max Dvořák]] was the first scholar to connect El Greco's art with [[Mannerism]] and [[Antinaturalism (sociology)|Antinaturalism]].<ref name="Lopera20">J.A. Lopera, ''El Greco: From Crete to Toledo'', 20–21</ref> Modern scholars characterize El Greco's theory as "typically Mannerist" and pinpoint its sources in the [[Platonism in the Renaissance|Neoplatonism of the Renaissance]].<ref name="BrownMar">J. Brown, ''El Greco and Toledo'', 110<br />* F. Marias, ''El Greco's Artistic Thought'', 183–184</ref> [[Jonathan Brown (art historian)|Jonathan Brown]] believes that El Greco created a sophisticated form of art;<ref name="Brown110">J. Brown, ''El Greco and Toledo'', 110</ref> according to [[Nicholas Penny]] "once in Spain, El Greco was able to create a style of his own—one that disavowed most of the descriptive ambitions of painting".<ref name="Penny">N. Penny, [http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n05/nicholas-penny/at-the-national-gallery At the National Gallery]</ref>

[[File:El Greco View of Toledo.jpg|thumb|''[[View of Toledo]]'' ({{circa|1596–1600}}, oil on canvas, {{nowrap|47.75 × 42.75&nbsp;cm}}, [[Metropolitan Museum of Art]], New York) is one of the two surviving landscapes of Toledo painted by El Greco.]]
[[File:El Greco - St Andrew and St Francis (signature detail).jpg|thumb|Detail from ''[//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/San_Andr%C3%A9s_y_san_Francisco.jpg St. Andrew and St. Francis]'' (1595, oil on canvas, {{Lang|es|[[Museo del Prado]]|italic=no}}, Madrid), showing the artist's signature in [[Greek language|Greek]].]]

In his mature works El Greco demonstrated a characteristic tendency to dramatize rather than to describe.<ref name="Br" /> The strong spiritual emotion transfers from painting directly to the audience. According to Pacheco, El Greco's perturbed, violent and at times seemingly careless-in-execution art was due to a studied effort to acquire a freedom of style.<ref name="Landon330" /> El Greco's preference for exceptionally tall and slender figures and elongated compositions, which served both his expressive purposes and aesthetic principles, led him to disregard the laws of nature and elongate his compositions to ever greater extents, particularly when they were destined for altarpieces.<ref name="Lambraki57-59">M. Lambraki-Plaka, ''El Greco'', 57–59</ref> The anatomy of the human body becomes even more otherworldly in El Greco's mature works; for ''[[The Immaculate Conception (El Greco, Toledo)]]'' El Greco asked to lengthen the altarpiece itself by another {{cvt|1.5|ft|m}} "because in this way the form will be perfect and not reduced, which is the worst thing that can happen to a figure". A significant innovation of El Greco's mature works is the interweaving between form and space; a reciprocal relationship is developed between the two which completely unifies the painting surface. This interweaving would re-emerge three centuries later in the works of [[Cézanne]] and [[Picasso]].<ref name="Lambraki57-59" />

Another characteristic of El Greco's mature style is the use of light. As Jonathan Brown notes, "each figure seems to carry its own light within or reflects the light that emanates from an unseen source".<ref name="Brown136">J. Brown, ''El Greco and Toledo'', 136</ref> Fernando Marias and Agustín Bustamante García, the scholars who transcribed El Greco's handwritten notes, connect the power that the painter gives to light with the ideas underlying [[Christian Neo-Platonism]].<ref>Marias-Bustamante, {{lang|es|Las Ideas Artísticas de El Greco}}, 52</ref>

Modern scholarly research emphasizes the importance of Toledo for the complete development of El Greco's mature style and stresses the painter's ability to adjust his style in accordance with his surroundings.<ref name="Hatz89-133">N. Hadjinikolaou, ''Inequalities in the work of Theotocópoulos'', 89–133</ref> [[Harold Wethey]] asserts that "although Greek by descent and Italian by artistic preparation, the artist became so immersed in the religious environment of Spain that he became the most vital visual representative of Spanish [[mysticism]]". He believes that in El Greco's mature works "the devotional intensity of mood reflects the religious spirit of Roman Catholic Spain in the period of the Counter-Reformation".<ref name="Br" />

El Greco also excelled as a portraitist, able not only to record a sitter's features but also to convey their character.<ref name="Metropolitan">The Metropolitan Museum of Art, [http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/grec/hd_grec.htm El Greco]</ref> His portraits are fewer in number than his religious paintings, but are of equally high quality. Wethey says that "by such simple means, the artist created a memorable characterization that places him in the highest rank as a portraitist, along with Titian and [[Rembrandt]]".<ref name="Br" />

===Painting materials===
El Greco painted many of his paintings on fine canvas and employed a viscous oil medium.<ref>Waldemar Januszczak (Ed), Techniques of the World's Great Painters, Chartwell, New Jersey, 1980, pp. 44–47.</ref> He painted with the usual [[pigments]] of his period such as [[azurite]], [[lead-tin-yellow]], [[vermilion]], [[madder lake]], [[ochres]] and [[red lead]], but he seldom used the expensive natural [[ultramarine]].<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://colourlex.com/paintings/paintings-sorted-by-painter/greek-painters/|title=Greek painters|website=ColourLex}}</ref>

===Suggested Byzantine affinities===
Since the beginning of the 20th century, scholars have debated whether El Greco's style had Byzantine origins. Certain art historians had asserted that El Greco's roots were firmly in the Byzantine tradition, and that his most individual characteristics derive directly from the art of his ancestors,<ref name="PrBC">R. Byron, ''Greco: The Epilogue to Byzantine Culture'', 160–174<br />* A. Procopiou, ''El Greco and Cretan Painting'', 74</ref> while others had argued that Byzantine art could not be related to El Greco's later work.<ref name="Cossio">M.B Cossío, ''El Greco'', 501–512</ref>

{{Quote box
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|quote   = "I would not be happy to see a beautiful, well-proportioned woman, no matter from which point of view, however extravagant, not only lose her beauty in order to, I would say, increase in size according to the law of vision, but no longer appear beautiful, and, in fact, become monstrous."
|source  =  {{mdash}} El Greco, from marginalia the painter inscribed in his copy of [[Daniele Barbaro]]'s translation of [[Vitruvius]]' {{lang|la|[[De architectura]]}}.<ref name="Tzonis165">Lefaivre-Tzonis, ''The Emergence of Modern Architecture'', 165</ref>
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The discovery of the ''[[Dormition of the Virgin (El Greco)|Dormition of the Virgin]]'' on [[Syros]], an authentic and signed work from the painter's Cretan period, and the extensive archival research in the early 1960s, contributed to the rekindling and reassessment of these theories. Although following many conventions of the Byzantine icon, aspects of the style certainly show Venetian influence, and the composition, showing the death of Mary, combines the different doctrines of the Orthodox [[Dormition of the Virgin]] and the Catholic [[Assumption of the Virgin]].<ref>Robin Cormack (1997), 199</ref> Significant scholarly works of the second half of the 20th century devoted to El Greco reappraise many of the interpretations of his work, including his supposed Byzantinism.<ref name="Cormack">{{Cite journal|url = http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+baptism+of+Christ+new+light+on+early+El+Greco.-a0135246782|title = The baptism of Christ: New light on early El Greco.|last1 = Cormack|first1 = R.|date = 1 August 2005|journal = [[Apollo (magazine)|Apollo]]|access-date = 1 July 2015|last2 = Vassilaki|first2 = M.|issn = 0003-6536|via = [[The Free Library]]}}</ref> Based on the notes written in El Greco's own hand, on his unique style, and on the fact that El Greco signed his name in Greek characters, they see an organic continuity between Byzantine painting and his art.<ref name="Helm93-94">R.M. Helm, ''The Neoplatonic Tradition in the Art of El Greco'', 93–94<br />* A.L. Mayer, ''El Greco{{snd}}An Oriental Artist'', 146</ref> According to Marina Lambraki-Plaka "far from the influence of Italy, in a neutral place which was intellectually similar to his birthplace, Candia, the Byzantine elements of his education emerged and played a catalytic role in the new conception of the image which is presented to us in his mature work".<ref name="LambrakiVima">M. Lambraki-Plaka, ''El Greco, the Puzzle'', 19</ref> In making this judgement, Lambraki-Plaka disagrees with [[Oxford University]] professors [[Cyril Mango]] and [[Elizabeth Jeffreys]], who assert that "despite claims to the contrary, the only Byzantine element of his [[Works of El Greco|famous paintings]] was his signature in Greek lettering".<ref name="Mango">Mango-Jeffreys, ''Towards a Franco{{snd}}Greek Culture'', 305</ref> Nikos Hadjinikolaou states that from 1570 El Greco's painting is "neither Byzantine nor post-Byzantine but Western European. The works he produced in Italy belong to the history of the [[Italian art]], and those he produced in Spain to the history of Spanish art".<ref name="Hatz92">N. Hadjinikolaou, ''El Greco, 450 Years from his Birth'', 92</ref>

The English art historian David Davies seeks the roots of El Greco's style in the intellectual sources of his Greek-Christian education and in the world of his recollections from the liturgical and ceremonial aspect of the Orthodox Church. Davies believes that the religious climate of the Counter-Reformation and the aesthetics of Mannerism acted as catalysts to activate his individual technique. He asserts that the philosophies of [[Platonism]] and ancient [[Neo-Platonism]], the works of [[Plotinus]] and [[Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite]], the texts of the Church fathers and the liturgy offer the keys to the understanding of El Greco's style.<ref name="Davies20">D. Davies, "The Influence of Neo-Platonism on El Greco", 20 etc.<br />* D. Davies, ''the Byzantine Legacy in the Art of El Greco'', 425–445</ref> Summarizing the ensuing scholarly debate on this issue, José Álvarez Lopera, curator at the {{Lang|es|[[Museo del Prado]]|italic=no}}, Madrid, concludes that the presence of "Byzantine memories" is obvious in El Greco's mature works, though there are still some obscure issues concerning his Byzantine origins needing further illumination.<ref name="Lopera18-19">J.A. Lopera, ''El Greco: From Crete to Toledo'', 18–19</ref>

===Architecture and sculpture===
El Greco was highly esteemed as an architect and sculptor during his lifetime.<ref name="Griffith">W. Griffith, ''Historic Shrines of Spain'', 184</ref> He usually designed complete altar compositions, working as architect and sculptor as well as painter—at, for instance, the Hospital de la Caridad. There he decorated the chapel of the hospital, but the wooden altar and the sculptures he created have in all probability perished.<ref name="Harris">E. Harris, ''A Decorative Scheme by El Greco'', 154</ref> For {{lang|es|El Espolio}} the master designed the original altar of [[gilded]] wood which has been destroyed, but his small sculptured group of the ''Miracle of St. Ildefonso'' still survives on the lower center of the frame.<ref name="Br" />

His most important architectural achievement was the church and Monastery of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, for which he also executed sculptures and paintings.<ref name="Allardyce">I. Allardyce, ''Historic Shrines of Spain'', 174</ref> El Greco is regarded as a painter who incorporated architecture in his painting.<ref name="Tzonis164">Lefaivre-Tzonis, ''The Emergence of Modern Architecture'', 164</ref> He is also credited with the architectural frames to his own paintings in Toledo. Pacheco characterized him as "a writer of painting, sculpture and architecture".<ref name="Plaka47-49" />

In the [[marginalia]] that El Greco inscribed in his copy of Daniele Barbaro's translation of Vitruvius' {{lang|la|De architectura}}, he refuted Vitruvius' attachment to archaeological remains, canonical proportions, perspective and mathematics. He also saw Vitruvius' manner of distorting proportions in order to compensate for distance from the eye as responsible for creating monstrous forms. El Greco was averse to the very idea of rules in architecture; he believed above all in the freedom of invention and defended novelty, variety, and complexity. These ideas were, however, far too extreme for the architectural circles of his era and had no immediate resonance.<ref name="Tzonis164" />