Stop and Look – El Greco’s View of Toledo

By the standards of the 16th century Mediterranean, Domenicos Theotokopoulos’ origins were somewhat unusual. As his name indicates, he came from a Greek island in the Eastern Mediterranean. This was Crete, a dependency of Venice at the time. He was trained in the pictorial traditions of the Eastern Church, which had preserved its practices and aesthetics through all the centuries of the so-called ‘Dark’ and Middle Ages. Few of the astonishing developments in the visual arts of Italy and Western Europe had percolated through to his remote homeland, and he had learned to see the world through the intensely spiritualised eyes of Orthodox Christianity. Figures were presented in time-honoured poses and costumes, always recognisable and rapt in awe of a pervasive epiphany, the manifestation of God in historical, that is, biblical and legendary action and narratives. 

But by the time he migrated in his mid-thirties to Spain he had been working in Venice and Rome and had absorbed many of the ideas of the artists who had flourished in those cities during the Renaissance and, most notably, the dramatic exaggerations of gesture and startling colour that characterised Italian Mannerism. But he wedded these to the intense mysticism that was a legacy of his Byzantine upbringing. 

In Spain he came to be known as El Greco, ‘the Greek’, and for the rest of his life, lived mostly in the religiously and politically significant city of Toledo, south of Madrid. In his highly unusual view – landscapes are extremely rare at this period in Spain, and indeed he only painted two himself – he seems to be trying to invest his adopted city with something of the grandeur and spiritual inwardness of a saint or religious leader: he gives the place an almost human personality. 

In doing so, he anticipates by several centuries some of the developments that were to come over landscape painting in the nineteenth century. Yet few 19th century Romantics could have achieved the eerie atmosphere of this ‘town-portrait’ – indeed, confronted by its strange forms and colours we are more likely to think of the German Expressionists or the English neo-Romantics of the post-war 20th century. The way the town is perched high in the composition, on the skyline of a steep hill, seems to indicate that it is a place of heavenly visions. But the lowering sky, with its cloud-wrack of intense tonal contrasts, certainly doesn’t augur calm or optimism. 

In spite of its formal quirkiness though, this is a landscape that betrays El Greco’s deep personal love of nature itself. The thundery light, with its heightened illumination of the principal buildings of the city, and the lovingly observed forms of the trees as they straggle up the steep hillside, help to present us with an artistic sensibility of rare individuality and intensity of feeling. The 17th century was to be a period of prolonged and growing interest in the depiction of the natural world, but at no point did it produce another painter with quite El Greco’s visionary approach to the grandeur that God had so powerfully created in the world the artist observed around him.

Oil on canvas 47 4/5 x 42 4/5 (121.3 x 108.6 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York