Quotes of the Day

The genius known as El Greco started his working life as icon painter Doménikos Theotokópoulos on the Greek island of Crete. He ended it as the undisputed giant of 16th century Spanish art. Ever since they were rediscovered in the 19th century, his dramatic religious set pieces and dark, melancholy portraits have been regarded as groundbreaking, and 20th century modernists claimed him as a brother. But he used an alchemy all his own to fuse old and new for the greatest possible impact — at least, that's what one takes away from the exhibition of his work (amazingly, the U.K.'s first major show devoted to him) which opens this week at London's National Gallery and runs through May 23.

Born in 1541, Theotokópoulos moved to Venice soon after 1566, and then to Rome in 1570, where he lived in the Palazzo Farnese. While in Italy, he learned from Renaissance masters like Titian, Tintoretto and Michelangelo, and Mannerists like Parmigianino. He readily took on their style; one of several versions of the Purification of the Temple, from the 1570s, quotes extensively from Raphael and Michelangelo. Yet he failed to find great success in Italy, possibly because he made disparaging remarks about Michelangelo, and thus moved to Spain in 1576. He settled in Toledo and for the rest of his life worked for the religious establishment and the local intellectual élite.

Soon after his move to Spain, his work changed radically. By about 1600, in another version of Christ driving the traders and money changers from the sacred precincts, El Greco's borrowings have been transmuted; figures are distorted, gestures are balletic and exaggerated, and contrasts are stark. Though his new style departs from tradition, it also looks back. His flattened space, with figures up close to the picture's surface, is influenced both by Mannerism and by his icon-painting past. But there is a political backdrop as well. Threatened by the rise of Protestantism, the Catholic Church of the time began stressing individual piety and the spiritual reality that underlies appearances. El Greco's work, with its distortions for emotional effect and etiolated figures hovering in nonphysical space, reflects this. He even deforms eyes, and may have invented the ecstatic upward glance with a liquid highlight that can be seen on the strangely conical eyeballs of Mary Magdalen in Penitence (early 1580s). Not just a saint, she is also a symbol of repentance: a state of mind the church wished to encourage in its followers.

Late in his life, El Greco painted St. John, whose elaborate vision became the biblical book Revelation, as part of a never-completed altarpiece. The scene may show the moment when the saint meets the souls of those who died for their faith. John is an impossibly stretched figure, throwing up his hands against one of El Greco's typically stormy skies, his face seen in violent perspective. The martyrs seem pallid and rubbery, but the scene has a strange intensity; even the drapery quivers with emotion and vibrates with light.

There may be more mundane reasons for the wan, otherworldly look of El Greco's people: he worked in light and shade before adding layers of color that don't always overcome the underlying gray tones, and he painted from wax models rather than directly from the figure. On his death in 1614, 50 models were found among his effects.

Despite disdaining anatomy, he loved the texture of fur, hair, trees and starched linen. St. Jerome as Scholar (ca. 1600-1614) is almost all oversized red cape, silky white beard, fuzzy hair and black eyebrows complete with stray white feelers. In The Crucifixion With Two Donors (ca. 1580) you can almost feel the left-hand donor's crumpled surplice. The other's ruff is scribbled in white paint, and his eye is made to shine with a pure black highlight. This picture rested on an altar, and when the priest said mass, he would be on the same level — and almost in the same space — as the waist-length donor figures at the foot of the cross.

El Greco's portraits are simply presented: a pale central figure looks straight out from darkness. Jerónimo de Cevallos (ca. 1610) has an immense, casually sketched-in white ruff and sable-hued clothes. There's a possibility that the subject of A Lady in a Fur Wrap (late 1570s) may be Jerónima de las Cuevas, the mother of El Greco's only son, Jorge Manuel (they never married). Her face is painted with tranquil smoothness, but her lynx fur is created by strokes dragged energetically from the wet paint of the gray wrap into the depthless background.

Unlike many contemporaries, he never painted himself. Our only clue to El Greco's appearance may lie in The Adoration of the Shepherds (ca. 1612-1614), which he painted to hang above his own tomb. The central figure kneeling before the Christ child is, some scholars believe, an image of the painter. A man with similar features appears in other works, sometimes with the direct gaze typical of self-portraits.

El Greco often put his adopted city, Toledo, in the background of his works. A blurred view of its fortified walls can be seen at the foot of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception (1608-1613), and he used it as a stand-in for Troy in Laocoön (early 1610s). (Laocoön and his sons were destroyed by snakes for suggesting that the wooden horse was not as innocent as it seemed.)

He did his home full justice in A View of Toledo (ca. 1597-1599). Bathed in a stormy light that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, the city with its castles, mighty walls and Gothic church spire looms above a lurid green landscape and a dark, rushing river. The silvery buildings are emphasized by dark halos; an unseen sun makes the clouds glow. No religious drama is going on anywhere: the only figures are manikins fishing, swimming, washing clothes. Yet this may be the most spiritual work he ever produced — a fitting symbol for a painter devoted to illuminating life's ethereal side.

• LUCY FISHER | London
• The dark, towering, pensive figure of 16th century Spanish painting is the subject of a major London exhibition