Works by El Greco
151 works · 153 msEl Greco usually signed his paintings in Greek letters with his birth name, Doménikos Theotokópoulos, often adding the word for “Cretan”, though from 1577 until his death he lived and worked in Toledo.
He trained as an icon painter in the post-Byzantine school of Crete and was already called a master there in 1563. Around 1567 he went to Venice, and in 1570 to Rome. Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple, from about 1570–75, shows what Italy taught him: a deep hall of columns opening on a blue sky, and a crowd twisting away from the whip in Christ's raised hand. Bottom right, four heads look on: Titian, Michelangelo, probably Raphael and the miniaturist Giulio Clovio.
His first big Toledo commission was for the convent church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo. Its centre, The Assumption of the Virgin of 1577–79, splits a tall canvas in two: apostles crowd round the empty tomb below, while the Virgin rises above them on a crescent moon among angels. Philip II ordered The Martyrdom of St. Maurice but disliked it and gave him no more work, so he stayed in Toledo. He liked tall, thin figures and stretched his compositions ever further, most of all for altarpieces. In the late Laocoön, pale stretched bodies wrestle with snakes on a rocky bank while a small brown horse heads for a city under a stormy sky. His portraits are fewer but equal in quality: Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara sits in folds of crimson silk and peers through round black-rimmed glasses. The paintings below are mostly religious and mythological scenes, with portraits and single figures.
Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Art Institute of Chicago.
