El Greco was a Greek painter, born Domenikos Theotokopoulos on the island of Crete in 1541, who trained as an icon painter, worked in Venice and Rome, and settled in Toledo, Spain, where he died in April 1614. He is remembered for tall, flame-like figures and cold, acid colors. For about two and a half centuries those figures were dismissed as bizarre. Around 1900, painters decided they looked modern.
Everyone who looks at those bodies asks the same thing: why did he stretch them?
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The answer most people have heard is that his eyes were to blame. A doctor, the story goes, studied the long, thin saints and concluded that El Greco was astigmatic, that the world reached him already stretched. The idea has been repeated for generations, and it still travels as fact.
It falls apart on one point. If his eyes stretched everything, they stretched his canvas too. He would have looked at his model and at his own drawing through the same distortion, and the two would have matched. A flaw like that leaves a painter's figures looking normal.
And he could make them look normal. In Rome he painted the miniaturist Giulio Clovio holding his book, a plain portrait of a real man. In Toledo he painted Cardinal Niño de Guevara as a solid body in a chair. The long bodies were a choice, made by a painter who could have painted otherwise.
Why he chose them is harder to say, because no surviving text of his gives a reason. What survives is how his patrons reacted: a king who sent an altarpiece away, a cathedral that paid him far less than his own appraiser asked, and later critics who called his mature work ridiculous.
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.
Why his figures really stretch.
Who finally saw his genius.