One of the last portraits El Greco painted was of a man dead some 70 years. The picture is one of the most striking, and least familiar, in a fine new book of reproductions released last week under the brief title, El Greco (Harry N. Abrams; $10). In the accompanying text, Critic Leo Bronstein explains that El Greco painted his portrait of Spanish Cardinal Tavera from a death mask, kept the whole picture correspondingly austere.
"Everything is reduced to the very idea of economy," observes Bronstein. "One erect triangle for the architecture of the figure ... a beautiful single hand . ....
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