Interesting Facts About El Greco
El Greco was a painter born on Crete whose real name was Domenikos Theotokopoulos, who began as a Byzantine icon painter, was forgotten for 250 years, and then inspired Picasso three centuries later.
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Almost everything about him surprises people, starting with the name on the wall label.
El Greco was only a nickname
El Greco means the Greek. His real name was Domenikos Theotokopoulos, and he signed his paintings in Greek letters his whole life, long after he settled in Spain.
He started out painting icons
He trained in the Byzantine icon tradition on Crete, then moved to Venice near the circle of Titian, and on to Rome. The gold ground discipline of icons never fully left his work.
He offered to repaint Michelangelo
In Rome he is said to have claimed he could redo the Last Judgment in a more decent manner. The remark, aimed at Michelangelo, did not win him friends in the city.
The stretched figures are a style, not a flaw
The old theory that astigmatism made him paint elongated bodies has been put to rest. The stretching is deliberate Mannerism. Rejected by Philip II, he settled in Toledo, lived lavishly, died in debt in 1614, and was largely forgotten until around 1900, when modern painters rediscovered him.
The long road to rediscovery
For roughly two and a half centuries after his death El Greco was largely forgotten, dismissed as a strange provincial oddity whose distorted figures looked like mistakes.
Around 1900 a new generation rediscovered him, and modern artists embraced exactly what earlier critics had hated. The young Picasso studied him closely, and the angular figures of his breakthrough painting The Young Ladies of Avignon owe a clear debt to the old master of Toledo.
More secrets to unlock
Questions that keep coming up
What was his real name? Domenikos Theotokopoulos.
Where and when was he born? On Crete, in 1541.
When did he die? In Toledo, in 1614.
Why are his figures elongated? A chosen style, not an eye condition.
The rediscovery has dates. The Prado staged his first true retrospective in 1902, and Toledo opened the El Greco Museum in 1911, three centuries after his death. The full journey from Crete to Toledo is in the complete El Greco story.