Dhomínikos Theotokópoulos, Spanish painter of Cretan origin

In spite of an always vigilant Enquiry, Spain of the Century of gold, whose power radiates with Amsterdam to Palermo, sees emerging from the medieval gangue a modern and free man of spirit, of which pictorial at the same time translated mannerist and expressionist style, by the unreality of the compositions and lighting, intense interior life.

It is around 1575 that Greco comes to be established in Tolède, in Spain shaken by economic disorders, but of a culture scintillating, whose stars are, in the musical field, Tomás Luis de Victoria, in the literary and theatrical field, Cervantès or Guillén of Castro.

Spiritual Master of Vélasquez, forgotten until the XIX ^E century, which resurrect it as a cursed painter, Greco, from now on labelled reassuring qualifier of mannerist, remains the splendid painter of the corrupted color and the tortured forms. It is in the light of the conceptism of Góngora - of which he was the friend - and of the mystical climate of the time that it is necessary to read the work of Greco.

Dhomínikos Theotokópoulos is born in 1541 in Candie. His/her father and his brother are civils servant with the service of the Venetian Republic, to which Crete is then attached. The family is undoubtedly catholic but it is probably with the orthodoxe monks, who maintained in the island the Byzantine tradition and the traditional teaching of the Athos mount, that Dhomínikos learns painting. It remains that one is unaware of almost very this first formation. According to a deed drawn up by a solicitor of 1566, the painter is then already an estimated Master, whose works are sold expensive. It is thought that this same year, or the following one, it leaves the island for Venice. Did he become the pupil of Titien, or did it do nothing but join the school of créto-Venetian painting which the city of the Doges shelters then, whose Cretan community rises with some four thousand people?

Greco is soon in Rome and is registered with the Academy of Saint-Luc, as the register testifies some to the institution: “Messer Dominico Greco, painter, gave (...) on on September 19th, 1572 two ecus for its complete inscription to Article” the anecdotes which circulate on the painter draw up the portrait of a man to the behavior strange, and convinced of its genius. Thus, whereas one wonders about the means of covering the nudities painted by Michel-Angel in his last Judgment of the Sixtine vault, it should have left Rome following an impudent appreciation: “If all this work low were thrown, I would remake it with a honesty and a decency nonlower than these, and I would carry out a painting of quality.”

It is probable that before its installation in Spain Greco goes back to Venice, where, as only authorize to think it the analysis of its paintings and a certain relationship of sensitivity, it could have been the disciple of Tintoret. Though the chronology of works of Greco is difficult to establish, one goes back to these years following 1565 the Holy Communion preserved at the art gallery of Bologna and the polyptyque one of Modena.

The meetings which it made with Rome and its stay with the Farnèse palate would have been the occasion for Greco to tie relations with Luis of Castillán, whose brother, Diego, obtain his first Spanish orders to him: they are paintings intended for Santo Domingo el Antiguo, in Tolède. The reasons of its departure for Spain therefore are not cleared up formally. The glory of Philippe II and the installation of Escurial are undoubtedly not foreign with the decision of the painter.

The installation with Tolède

After a short stay in Madrid, this one settles in Tolède around 1575. This city, then forsaken by the court, is not less the metropolis of the Church of Spain, the intellectual and spiritual capital, “the glory of Spain, the light of arts, the holy city”, according to Cervantès. But Tolède is also a cosmopolitan city where marranes, morisques, foreigners of all sources compose a variegated and animated company, into which the Cretan painter is integrated without difficulty. Since 1578, from its union - undoubtedly free - with Jerónima of mow Cuevas is born a son, Jorge Manuel, whom it will very early associate with his business.

The first known work of this time is Espolio (1577), intended for the cathedral of Tolède. The unusual iconography of this fabric, which shows the three Marie in the angle lower right of the table, will be called upon by the silent partners like pretexts to dispute the price of Tranché work later four years, the litigation will show the public recognition of the talent of the painter.

This incipient glory tolédane is darkened by disappointed hopes: Philippe II hardly appreciates the fabric that it had ordered in Greco on the topic of the martyrdom of Maurice saint and the legion thebaine. Intended to decorate a vault with Escurial, the table will be relegated in the chapter houses, and Greco will give up its technical and iconographic audacities temporarily - as these naked bodies treated with a brutal simplicity -, although its fame is not reached by it. Indeed, if its style and its iconography do not fulfill the requirements of temporal and royal glory, they are on the other hand in perfect resonance with the spiritual and intellectual life of Tolède.

The many Franciscan convents will be its main customers. Except for some portraits, the work of Greco is exclusively nun and remains in this direction faithful to the teaching of its first years: to paint an icon, it is to request.

In 1584, the Burial of the count d' Orgaz is ordered to him by the priest of Santo Tomé, in Tolède. If it succeeds the failure of the Martyrdom of Maurice saint, whose audacities will be found only about fifteen years later, this fabric does not materialize therefore a renouncement. It expresses, in a perfect adequacy with the climate tolédan, the fusion of the worlds terrestrial and celestial. With a minimum of means, the painter deploys a mystical vision where the moving and coloured divine universe is linked at the assembly of the men, whose diversity of the faces does not break the black and white line to which it is reduced.

Ease and glory

The multitude of the orders leads Greco to constitute a workshop, but, especially, a great material ease brings to him. It carries out a way of life luxurious and refined in the apartment which it rents with the marquis de Villena since 1585. Six years later, its brother, Manussos, which has financial problems, joined it in Tolède, thus following the route of many Cretan. Greco, which does not forget its origins, signs its. works in Cyrillic characters.

The contracts signed with the silent partners and the controversies relating to the payment of its tables make it possible to follow year per year the work of Greco. The production of its workshop is sold in Madrid, Seville and in all Castille. One of his/her collaborators, Francisco Preboste, is sometimes charged to treat the realization of certain orders - such construction of the high altar of the church of the college of Augustins in Madrid -, sometimes to represent it to touch the sums which are due for him.

Mysticism and austerity

Among the multiple contracts that Greco signs with the churches and the convents appears that concluded in 1595 with the Tavera hospital, in Tolède, for which, between 1608 and 1614, year of its death, it carries out the Baptism of Christ, the Annunciation and the Fifth Seal of the Apocalypse, which translate, with a freedom that some could call madness, the divine presence which animates the man. The three fabrics, born in Tolède in brutal decline, are them. works of a visionary who puts his scholarship and his technique at the service of the supernatural one. Under a crossed night sky of the surreal, human forms, naked or wrapped gleams fabrics whose width inflates or piles up in folds thick and dark, without losing their carnal presence, radiate with an interior fire. The hands, as grabbed towards the sky, concentrate in them all the expressive force of these beings resulting from the text of Jean saint: “When it opened the fifth seal, I live under the furnace bridge the hearts of those which had been immolated for the word of God and testimony that they had carried. They shouted of a strong voice.” (Apocalypse VI, 9-11).

It is in the last few years, 1610-1614, which Greco carries out its single fabric on mythological subject: Laocoon. The inventory after death established in 1614 will show the great destitution in which Greco lives then. Probably voluntary destitution, if one judges some by the flow of orders ever dried up. As if this austerity were necessary to the interior freedom with which the painter continues his research.

Quickly forgotten the large ones, it will not cease enjoying the popular admiration, which will continue to feel in him the expression without spot of its intense devotion.

Of its formation near the Cretan monks, in addition to an exclusively religious design of painting, Greco will preserve a certain number of techniques and of principles of composition.

It practices indifferently oil (the Lady with the stoat, 1577-1578) or softens it (the Holy Communion, after 1565). According to the Byzantine practices, its layer of preparation is ocher, white, black or green, and the various parts of the table, delimited by lines, are carried out successively.

Its activity of sculptor, appreciated of his time to equal of that of painter, is expressed in particular in the realization of small figurines which it uses for the installation of his compositions. Those privilege shortened prospects and low horizons, where the characters, struck by an unreal light, structure space by abolishing it.

Inspired by the Venetian mannerism, then Roman, Greco preserves a long time the color of Titien and Véronèse, but gives to its figures a monumentality on which nonthe finito confers a pressing presence. Work on the plays of the shade and the light, as from 1590, translated at Greco a spiritual principle that its contemporary, Francesco Patrizi, define as follows: “The light is the synthesis and the expression of the divinity.”

The inventory of its library, drawn up after its death, reveals and clarifies research which underlies the work of Greco. Concurrently to Pétrarque, of the Cup, Arioste and many Greek works, of Homère and Euripide with Aristote and Lucien, appear of many books of architecture, due to Vitruve, Vignole, Serlio or Alberti.

It is sometimes difficult to date works from Greco. From its time were preserved in its workshop of the reductions of its successive works. Perhaps this practice explains the recurrence of certain ideas or certain details which will accompany it all its life: vertical compositions, stormy ciels, eloquent hands. But she does not explain the coherence of the advance which leads it, without concession, with the triumph of the “dynamism, intoxication, mysticism”, according to Eugenio d' Ors, who adds: “It was said that the painter had a disease of the sight… Not. The truth, it is that it was drunk. Drunk of God, and twilights.”