El Greco was a Greek painter, born Domenikos Theotokopoulos on the island of Crete in 1541. He trained as an icon painter, worked in Venice and Rome, and settled in Toledo, Spain, where he died in April 1614.
His figures are tall and flame-like, and his colors cold, with sharp yellows set against deep blues. For about two and a half centuries those bodies were dismissed as bizarre. Around 1900, painters decided they looked modern.
The question everyone asks in front of his saints is simple: why did he stretch them?
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The answer most people have heard blames his eyes. A doctor, the story goes, studied the long, thin saints and decided that El Greco was astigmatic, so that the world reached him already distorted. The idea has been repeated for generations.
It fails a simple test. If his eyes lengthened the model, they lengthened the canvas too, by the same amount. To make the picture look like the sitter, he would have painted true proportions, and the flaw would cancel itself out. Everyone else would see normal figures.
His portraits show that he could paint ordinary bodies. In Rome he painted the miniaturist Giulio Clovio, a specialist in tiny paintings for books, as a plain likeness of a real man. In Toledo he painted Cardinal Niño de Guevara, shown above, as a solid, heavy figure seated in a chair.
So the long bodies were a choice made on purpose, and he left no text that says why. What is known is how others reacted to his pictures. Some of the harshest verdicts came from the people who commissioned them, the king of Spain among them.
From Candia to Venice
His story begins in Candia, the city now called Heraklion, the walled capital of Crete…
What You'll Discover
Who El Greco was before Spain.
What he said about Michelangelo.
What the king did to his altarpiece.
Who is hiding in his masterpiece.
What historians think the stretching was for.
Which painters brought him back around 1900.