A wing of the immense museum complex of BOZAR [The Palace for Fine Arts] is dedicated from the 4th February to the 9th of May 2010 to the display of part of the collection of paintings belonging to the El Greco Museum in Toledo. The artist, Theotokòpoulos (Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος), aka El Greco, was rediscovered in the beginning of the twentieth-century.
The nome de plume with which he will pass to history was attributed to him in Spain, where the artist spent the last part of his life: his origins are in fact Greek.
Born in Candia in Crete Island in 1541, Domìnikos started to paint since he was young, producing mostly icons, as was currently happening in that part of Greece of orthodox tradition. When he was twenty he moved west and reached Venice, where he entered the workshop of Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, 1480/85 – 1576). In the lagoon city he could learn the secrets of chromatism, of that particular technique typical of Venetian painters, who used to paint directly without any preliminary sketches, just relying on their own perception of tonalities, of lights and shadows. A technique, this, that was hated by the Tuscan Vasari, who studied after the school of thought that was grounded by Leon Battista Alberti the previous century, which stated that without sketch there can be no work of art.
From the Venetian experience he inherited the soft and antique colorito of Bellini, especially in the pinks and in the vivid greens, the perspective construction of the backgrounds, deriving from the great S. Mark Miracles by Tintoretto (now Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice), and last but not loss, that brushstroke and pure colour of the last Titian, who, as it is said, because of his growing blindness, used to transfer the paint on the canvas through the juxtaposition of thick layers of colour, as in the famous Tarquinius and Lucretia, nowadays in Vienna at the Academy for the Fine Arts.
From Venice he moved to Rome, at the court of Pope Alessandro Farnese, where he could meet other great Italian Artists, like Michelangelo or the Carracci. But he did not appreciate the impressiveness of the fleshes in the Sistine Chapel by Buonarroti, but he could not avoid of remaining astonished in front of his statues in their physical contortions, in their expressivity: yes they are silent, but just because of the material they are made of.
Between 1575 and 1576 he moved to Spain, attracted by the promises of great commissions made by the new king Philip II, who wanted to establish a new order in his land, by setting up a sort of cultural dictatorship based on the devotional aspects of the Counterreformation.
And it is in this cultural context that El Greco has the chance to throw on the canvas all the experience he had achieved in Italy reinforced with the spirituality he grew with composing sacred orthodox icons in his homeland.
In Spain he cultivate a very personal way of acting, both in the technique and in the composition: if in fact usual Holy Families were populated with Madonna and Child and S. Joseph, with sometimes the presence of other Saints, disposed on a landscape or in a room illuminated thanks to a ray of Holy light coming from above, in El Greco’s paintings there’s no more the need of representing the surrounding space: only those characters, with contemporary features, are to be represented in a light blue space, crossed by white clouds, icons of the present on a background that is no more made in gold, but that is as a-temporal as the sky. In the Nativity dating 1604, space is again the biblical cave, where the donkey is sitting on the left side looking at the Madonna, dressed in red, who is staring at the creature that literally shines by his own light and who is spreading it all around. On the right side Joseph is sitting in all his human astonishment, while the bull, with a movement that leaves a futuristic trace behind, moves from right to left, ending with the curious muzzle right under the manger.
Appreciated from his contemporaries both in Italy and in Spain, El Greco was overburdened with commissions, and sometimes, as it happened already with Titian, he was asked to make copies of his masterpieces, that most of the times were brought to end by his workshop. In the rooms of the BOZAR some of these copies can be admired, as the famous Praying S. Francisco, an almost expressionist Crucifixion in its dark blue sky crossed with flashes of the worse of the storms, and the beautiful Entombment of Count Orgaz (1586), whom original is in Toledo in the S. Tomè Church. Here the artist tells the story of the entombment of the Count of Orgaz, who spent his life helping economically charity associations. The day of his funeral from the sky descended S. Stephen and S. Augustine to put his body in the ground in person. The astonishment of the people assisting the event is manifested through opened mouths, in opened arms, in the eyes looking at the opened sky, from the top of which the Madonna, Christ and all the Saints are witnessing the scene. The copy on show describes only the ‘earthly’ part, whereas a photographic reproduction gives the idea of the entire original composition to the audience.
As already anticipated El Greco was re-valuated in the beginning of the twentieth-century, thanks to personages like Manuel Bartolomé Cossío, who dedicated to him a monograph in 1908. The fortune of this publication must be seen also under the light of a Europe crossed and shaken from the ghosts of nationalism, omen of the imminent War. But it is also thanks to this rediscovered pride that two years later the collector Marqués de la Vega-Inclán, grounded in Toledo the museum from which the paintings on show come.
The interest for El Greco among contemporaries is to be searched in his extraordinariness in a literal sense, in respect to the flowering baroque European culture: his language is personal in spite of the already mentioned debts to the Italian tradition. He did too forget the preliminary sketch, throwing himself directly on the canvas with the colour, creating shapes that follow vertical lines, giving to the characters a hieratic elusiveness, sometimes without taking care of particulars, leaving figures incomplete, without contours. Figures that are transformed in ethereal creatures, non human, also in the colour of the flesh.
An upsetting painting in its modernity is the Adoration of the Name of Christ, where an immense crowd is devoutly kneeling and looking at the opened sky in the half of which can be read the monogrammed name of Christ. But on the right part, inside the mouth of an enormous dog, recalling the Divine Commedy’s entrance of hell, swarm the souls of the damned, represented with naked bodies, livid, with bluish reflexes that closely recall the fleshes by the nowadays much appreciated Lucian Freud.
The long blue corridor that takes the visitor through the works of art of the Greek and Spanish master, allows the viewer to get closer to the paintings, which are individually illuminated, to recreate that devotional atmosphere for which they were created. Majestic canvas are offered to the visitor, bare and raw, without the protective glass to better appreciate the cutting of lights and shadows on the wrinkled coloured surface. In this way the invitation to get closer, to observe the reflexes in the sparkling and vivid eyes turned to the sky, covered with a veil of tear, in that S, Peter with his opened mouth, in which one can see the white of the teeth (invisible in the photographic reproductions), who anticipate the theme of the room that closes the exhibition: the Twelve Apostles, Jesus Christ and S. Paul, who was not an apostle, but he came from Greece and travelled around the Mediterranean Sea, as the painter himself did. But before coming to them a little step back in his past made of icons, with the S. Veronica, so beautiful, who sustains a real tissue with a golden and blue border – symbolic colours related to Christ – with in the centre the marvellous face of Christ, closed by the soft curls of the hair and of the beard.
Closing the exhibition, the apostles, the last realized by El Greco, where his greens and pinks are as vivid as after his Venetian experience, livid are fleshes and whirling is the technique that makes visible the underground reddish colour used by the painter as preparation of the canvas.
_________________________________________
Related link:
http://www.bozar.be/activity.php?id=9431
No related media.