(3 of 4)
But throughout, until his death in Toledo at the age of 73, he stood high in the community of scholars, philosophers, intellectual merchants and such contemporary luminaries as Playwright Lope de Vega. One of his greatest admirers was Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino, a famed young preacher of his time and a poet-scholar who wrote four sonnets celebrating his idol. El Greco's portrait of him is, beyond cavil, a masterpiece. The picture somehow conveys both the casual elegance of youth and the inner power of an impassioned spirit.
Ironically, the National Gallery show demonstrates that the paintings that endeared El Greco to later generations of intellectuals are perhaps not his best. Those ecstatic faces and attenuated hands lifted skyward, the brooding sky, the hovering angel or two—these elements lack conviction in an era when faith no longer anchors them. To put it bluntly, they seem gauche, in terms of emotions and sometimes even in terms of painting. But it was in these paintings that El Greco developed the visual strategies that led to his rediscovery.
In El Greco, space had vanished. The clouds in paintings like Saint Dominic, for example, were like clouds that never were. His sky became a series of abstract, indeterminate forms, a background on which, it could be argued, abstract expressionists drew. His drapery, unlike the classical Greek drapery used to reveal human form, was instead a thing in itself, a dynamism of color that had not much to do with the form beneath and everything to do with the thrust of the painting's theme. It is here best illustrated by the towering painting of the Pentecost, the moment seven Sundays after the Resurrection when "a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind" descended upon a group of Christ's followers. The figure in the foreground has no known identity in fact or legend, but the swirling drama of his robe is essential to a composition topped by the dancing arabesque of the "cloven tongues like as of fire" that "sat upon each of them." This was, in a word, a precursor of Pollock and de Kooning, a visual effect aimed at a spiritual ecstasy.
What may disconcert both devoted admirers and settled skeptics is that El Greco knew exactly what he was doing. "El Greco clearly rejected the Renaissance concepts of perspective and proportion," says Fernando Marias, one of the scholars who discovered El Greco's surviving writings. These are notes scribbled into the margins of the artist's copies of Vasari's Life of the Painters and a 16th century editon of Vitruvius' On Architecture. Beside a passage on Michelangelo, El Greco wrote: "He would make his figures nine, ten and even eleven heads long, for no other purpose than the search for a certain grace in putting the parts together, which is not to be found in natural form." Like Michelangelo and his mannerist disciples, El Greco argued that intuition, not imitation, was the true purpose of art. Says J. Carter Brown: "To him, painters were philosophers who shaped ideas and communicated knowledge through their art."