DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.68073#0286
a6o
OLD WORLD MASTERS
and student, Quiroga expresses a narrow bigotry and remorseless
cruelty.
The picture is also known as St. Jerome; and there are five replicas
of it, one of them being in the National Gallery, London.
“El Greco” is the name by which Domenico Theotocopoulos be-
came known to his contemporaries. He was born in Crete, and in
1570, when he was about twenty-five or thirty, he went to Venice,
and, it is said, studied under Titian. About 1575 he settled in Toledo,
where he lived for thirty-four years until his death in 1614, and where
“La casa del Greco” is still shown to tourists. El Greco painted a
number of pictures, chiefly religious, notwithstanding the fact that
“the individuality and strangeness of his work always more or less
disconcerted his patrons.” El Greco also painted portraits and seems
to have elongated every sitter to conform to his own ideas. Every-
thing that he painted proclaims his own fervor and love of motion.
El Greco also designed the dome for the then unfinished tower of the
west front of the Toledo Cathedral, which presents a very strange
contrast with its companion, the ornate Gothic tower.
Hugh Stokes says:
“El Greco stands apart, both in his portraiture and his large sub-
ject compositions. A Greek by family, Theotocopoulos does not fail
to remind us of the archaic Byzantines. At first his limited palette,
his crudity, his angularity excite repulsion. All his figures are muscu-
larly distended as if they had recently passed the ordeal of the rack.
Gradually these very defects attract. There is a movement and pas-
sion in his pictures which can be found in very few purely Spanish
works. These agitated patriarchs and apostles, with draperies caught
by every wind of heaven, are almost demoniac. Nature herself assists,
for each horizon in the background frowns with a gathering maelstrom
of black thunderclouds.”
OLD WORLD MASTERS
and student, Quiroga expresses a narrow bigotry and remorseless
cruelty.
The picture is also known as St. Jerome; and there are five replicas
of it, one of them being in the National Gallery, London.
“El Greco” is the name by which Domenico Theotocopoulos be-
came known to his contemporaries. He was born in Crete, and in
1570, when he was about twenty-five or thirty, he went to Venice,
and, it is said, studied under Titian. About 1575 he settled in Toledo,
where he lived for thirty-four years until his death in 1614, and where
“La casa del Greco” is still shown to tourists. El Greco painted a
number of pictures, chiefly religious, notwithstanding the fact that
“the individuality and strangeness of his work always more or less
disconcerted his patrons.” El Greco also painted portraits and seems
to have elongated every sitter to conform to his own ideas. Every-
thing that he painted proclaims his own fervor and love of motion.
El Greco also designed the dome for the then unfinished tower of the
west front of the Toledo Cathedral, which presents a very strange
contrast with its companion, the ornate Gothic tower.
Hugh Stokes says:
“El Greco stands apart, both in his portraiture and his large sub-
ject compositions. A Greek by family, Theotocopoulos does not fail
to remind us of the archaic Byzantines. At first his limited palette,
his crudity, his angularity excite repulsion. All his figures are muscu-
larly distended as if they had recently passed the ordeal of the rack.
Gradually these very defects attract. There is a movement and pas-
sion in his pictures which can be found in very few purely Spanish
works. These agitated patriarchs and apostles, with draperies caught
by every wind of heaven, are almost demoniac. Nature herself assists,
for each horizon in the background frowns with a gathering maelstrom
of black thunderclouds.”