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El Greco had his failures. He never could get his angels to float properly. When doing a portrait, he contrived a pose that suited his view; if hands diverted attention from face, he would magisterially scumble them over, obliterating the knuckles without any sense of embarrassment. He might pair two saints (St. Andrew and St. Francis) who lived centuries apart, and for background, arbitrarily use a part of Toledo.
But withal, he also had the arrogance of genius. And when he really set out to paint the Toledo of his own mindscape, the result was one of the most magical landscapes of all time. Toledo is brown. He painted it green, its buildings outlined in phosphorescent light and displaced to suit his pictorial purposes. When he wanted something enough, he could do it—and did. —By A. T. Baker