He began his career in Crete, then fell under Michelangelo's spell in Rome. But it was in Toledo that he thrived, writes Aidan Dunne
One of the most striking paintings in the dazzling El Greco exhibition at the British National Gallery, in London, is a relatively small work, View Of Toledo, painted in the last years of the 16th century. This tempestuous composition, in which the city's roller-coaster topography is starkly illuminated by the glare of light falling through massed storm clouds, depicts just a section of the subject and plays fast and loose with the facts. The cathedral has been shifted, and it seems likely that the monastery on the left is shown floating on a cloud.
In its sheer excessive rapture, however, this visionary evocation of the painter's adopted city is true to form and in keeping with the giddy drama of his religious works. Toledo, at the time a larger city than Madrid, was not only a centre of trade and culture but also the ecclesiastical capital of Spain, its holy city. The Counter-Reformation was at its height, and although Protestantism had never gained much of a foothold in Spain the Spanish clergy were deeply involved in the Council of Trent and ensured that its decrees were vigorously applied.
On the face of it the fervour of El Greco's religious paintings can be seen against this background as the forceful restatement of the basic tenets of a resurgent Catholicism, pointedly emphasising the centrality of saints and sacraments, the cult of the Virgin, transubstantiation. Yet as an exponent of his own relatively extreme form of Italian mannerism El Greco was hardly likely to find a comfortable niche in Spain.
In art, Tridentine principles demanded classical poise, didactic clarity and exemplary moral purpose. To get the message across to the faithful it should be populist and accessible. Mannerism was intellectual, relatively abstruse and anti-naturalistic. So in many respects the odds were against the expatriate Greek.
El Greco was born Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541-1614) in Crete, where the tradition of Byzantine icon painting still flourished. By his early 20s he was an accomplished icon painter. But Crete was then a colony of Venice, and it was natural that he should go to the city to further his artistic experience. While there he may have studied with Tintoretto. He was certainly stylistically influenced by him, assimilating a number of characteristic mannerist touches - the lurid, broken light, for example, that falls unevenly and dramatically across compositions.
Titian was also an influence. But El Greco also spent about two years in Rome, where he was immensely impressed by Michelangelo, whose expressive male nudes, with their contorted physicality, he went on to re-create in his singular way for the rest of his life: witness his extraordinary, monumental Saint Sebastian, a conventional figure by comparison with the distorted, elongated presences he later conjured up.
Not that he was overawed by the Italians. One story, probably apocryphal, has him offering to redo Michelangelo's Last Judgment more decorously when Pius V objected to its prodigious nudity. And he noted in the margins of his copy of Vasari's Lives Of The Artists that it was a pity that Michelangelo, not a bad sculptor, couldn't really paint. For whatever reason he failed to establish himself at a level he would have liked in Italy, and he decided to try his luck in Spain.
He set his sights on finding a royal patron in Philip II, who was setting about decorating the vast Escorial palace. He made a bid for royal favour with The Adoration Of The Name Of Jesus, which did prompt a commission.
Again, though, he was stymied. The king rejected the picture he painted, The Martyrdom Of St Maurice. In fact he made it clear that he hated it, which must have been disconcerting for El Greco, as he had based its compositional structure on The Adoration Of The Name Of Jesus.
Philip II acquired and commissioned a broad range of work, but it seems fair to say that he was not instinctively sympathetic to the extremities of mannerism. Temperamentally he was more in tune with Titian, from whom he also commissioned paintings.
El Greco's dramatically fractured spaces, unnaturalistic colouring and the edgy, nervy agitation of his picture surfaces were not at all to his taste. They are the very qualities, of course, that eventually led to his rediscovery and engaged the admiration of Picasso and even Jackson Pollock.
So El Greco moved on to Toledo, once the political capital and now a spiritual centre, Spain's New Jerusalem. Despite its size and importance it was essentially a city in decline - a decline accentuated by the gradual expulsion of the Jewish and Morisco populations. There is little sense of this mundane reality in El Greco's ecstatic, celebratory visions of his adopted home. Rather it attains a mythical status as an otherworldly backdrop. And certainly it was good to the painter. He thrived there, finding a learned circle of friends and patrons.
It provided the conditions for the flourishing of his strange, mature style, in which his Byzantine inheritance comes to the fore and fuses with elements of mannerism and the High Renaissance to produce something novel and inimitable. In Byzantine icons the picture is a window on to a spiritual reality, and there is increasingly a sense that El Greco is looking inwards, moving away from Renaissance naturalism and mannerist distortion to another realm entirely. Even matter itself seems to dissolve in his ethereal visions of weirdly elongated figures, vast billowing drapery and incandescent light.
As the exhibition vividly demonstrates, however, there is another El Greco, a realist painter of tremendous talent. He wasn't entirely given over to transports of religious ecstasy.
He was also an intellectual, versed in the humanism of the Renaissance, who built up an extensive library and moved in learned circles. This man is startlingly evident in a number of brilliant portraits included in the exhibition. Startlingly, because the painterly realism, the empathy and psychological insight of the portraits still have the power to take us aback with their immediacy.
While the religious work becomes increasingly enraptured with the heady theatricality of Catholic mysticism, the portraits remain firmly grounded and real.
• El Greco is at the National Gallery, London, until May 23rd
