Doménikos Theotokópoulos, known as El Greco (“The Greek”), was born in Candia (now Heraklion) on the island of Crete in 1541 and trained as an icon painter in the Byzantine tradition before moving to Venice around 1567, where he absorbed the lessons of Titian, Tintoretto, and Bassano. A subsequent period in Rome exposed him to Michelangelo’s figural grandeur. In 1577 he settled permanently in Toledo, Spain, where he spent the remaining thirty-seven years of his life creating some of the most distinctive and intensely spiritual paintings in Western art.
El Greco’s mature style is unmistakable: elongated, flame-like figures twist and soar in shallow, compressed spaces lit by cold, phosphorescent light. His colours — acid greens, electric blues, ashen grays — have no parallel in Renaissance painting. The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586), his masterpiece, divides its composition into an earthly zone of black-clad noblemen and a heavenly zone of swirling saints and angels, united by the ascending soul of the dead count. View of Toledo (c. 1600) is one of the first pure landscapes in Spanish art, its stormy sky and livid green hills charged with apocalyptic energy.
Largely forgotten after his death, El Greco was rediscovered in the nineteenth century by the Romantics and embraced by the Expressionists and Cubists of the early twentieth century, who recognized in his distortions a kindred spirit. Today he is acknowledged as one of the most original and powerful painters in the entire Western tradition.