Last week, while the skirted Evzones hammered at Mussolini's Albanian
Army, the greatest Greek since antiquity did his belated bit for
Greece. For a great Greek, he was practically a modern, having been
born on the island of Crete exactly 400 years ago. His name: Domenikos
Theotokopoulos, nicknamed El Greco . His aid to embattled
Greece: a one-man show of 18 of his paintings at Manhattan's Knoedler Galleries, the
proceeds to go to the Greek War Relief Association. The fanatic fire of
his ghostlike saints and flame-licked madonnas made many a
gallerygoer stop, look, and look again. Like many a later Greek, Domenikos Theotokopoulos as a young man found
Greece too small for him, went to seek his fortune elsewhere. But
Domenikos Theotokopoulos never forgot he was a Greek. Haughty, aloof
and fiercely independent, he went to Italy, studied with Titian, warmed
his hands at the dying flames of the Italian Renaissance. He got a
little too close to the fire. When he claimed arrogantly that he
himself could do a better job on the Last Judgment, than Michelangelo,
“a good fellow, but with no idea of painting,” Italy's art world became
too hot for him. He moved to Spain. In the dry, rocky town of Toledo, Painter Theotokopoulos found himself
on the rip-roaring crest of the Spanish Inquisition. Gaunt Dominican
monks prowled the streets, hunting heretics. Middle-aged St. Theresa,
businesslike in her hair shirt, wrote, declaimed, founded convents by
the dozen. King Philip II's weedy, emaciated aristocrats, shunning the
world with proud incompetence, vain of blood and sharp of feature, were
furnishing Miguel de Cervantes with ideas for his best-seller Don
Quixote. Domenikos Theotokopoulos didn't like the Inquisition. But he was a
devout Catholic, and Toledo's faded, invalid nobles, Quixotic bishops
and hagridden monks were pigments for his palette. Himself a mystic, he
painted the tortured, visionary aspirations of his subjects, seared the
flesh further from their hollow cheeks, elongated their bodies till
they looked like trembling candle flames, lit like flickering shadows
in the glow of the Inquisition. The best painter in all Spain,
Theotokopoulos became wealthy, got himself a 24-room palace, a
beautiful wife named Doa Jernima de las Cuevas, a scholar's library,
musicians from Venice to play for him at mealtimes. But to the
Spaniards he was never a real Spaniard. They called him,
condescendingly, ''El Greco.” Toledo's intellectuals and painters treated him like royalty, but
Spain's King Philip II didn't like him, and Toledo's ordinary citizens
thought his weird, restive, distorted canvases the work of a madman.
Critics suggested that he was astigmatic, if not insane. When he died
in 1614 his fame was already on the wane, and soon his greatest
paintings were tucked away in dim sacristies and behind altars. The
flashy, flattering portraits of brilliant Court-painter Velsquez
became the rage, and El Greco was forgotten. Forgotten he remained for
nearly 300 years.
