It is back where it belongs at Castello Ursino in Catania - and it's more beautiful than ever.

El Greco

El Greco (“The Greek”) was an excellent portraitist, although he did fewer portraits than the religious paintings that made him famous. His portraits were of very high quality.
Who was Domínikos Theotokópoulos, widely known as El Greco? Why is such a small painting (10x14cm) still so important nowadays? El Greco was born in Crete, which was under Venetian dominion at the time, and he arrived in Venice at 26 years old, where he improved his skills by observing the sinuous and stretched lines of Tintoretto and the extraordinary use of colour of Titian.

Catania has always preserved this painting at Castello Ursino and, luckily, the quality of the paintings is not judged on the size of their surface - no matter what art dealers may say.
The Portrait was forgotten about for a long time in the Castle store room, from which it emerged only in 2017; its return to the Capital (where it was probably originally painted) is a very positive thing.

An effervescent soul

In fact, around 1570 El Greco left Venice and moved to Rome. The painter had an “effervescent” personality and, he made a good number of enemies in a short time.
The architect and writer Pirro Ligorio, for example, defined him, without half measures, a «stupid foreigner» and documents from the time chronicle a fight with the powerful Bishop Alessandro Farnese, who made the young artist leave his palace.
In 1575, El Greco left Rome to move definitively to Toledo, where he lived the rest of his life and obtained several prestigious commissions.

His particular character surfaces also in the episode that sees him involved in a argument with Pope Pius V, in front of whom he dared to state that Michelangelo “was a good man, but wasn’t able to paint”, and for this reason he, himself, should be given the task of repainting the entire Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel.

The importance of his art

This is the story, but what is the importance of El Greco today?
Huge.
El Greco has never been out of fashion and left a permanent footprint in the history of Western art.

 

One of the fundamental principles of his style is the importance of the imagination’s impact on the objective representation of subjects.
El Greco rejected the classical principle of dimension and proportion, and believed that colour was the most important element in a painting. He even declared the supremacy of colour over form.
Does that remind you of something?

An influential figure

Of course, a similar integration would come back only three centuries later in Cézanne’s works.
Moreover, El Greco’s use of colour influenced Delacroix and Édouard Manet’s works.
After the symbolists, Pablo Picasso in his blue period, drew inspiration from El Greco’s cold tones.
While Picasso was working on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, he visited the Paris atelier of his friend Ignacio Zuloaga and had the opportunity to study Opening of the Fifth Seal by El Greco.
The relationship between Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Opening of the Fifth Seal has later been highlighted by critics who analysed stylistic similarities between the two paintings. Moreover, in 1950 Picasso started his series of personal interpretations of other painters’ works with Portrait of a Painter after El Greco.

Even Jackson Pollock, leading spokesperson of abstract expressionism, was influenced by El Greco.
Before the end of 1943, in fact, Pollock had done sixty drawings following the path of El Greco and possessed three books on the works of the Cretan master.

Furthermore, El Greco’s personality and work were inspiration for the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
A collection of poems by Rilke (Himmelfahrt Mariae I.II., 1913) is directly inspired by the painter’s The Immaculate Conception.
In 1998, the  electronic music composer Vangelis released El Greco, a symphonic album inspired by the artist.
The album represents an expansion on a previous work  by Vangelis  “A Tribute to El Greco”.

For more information, visit this website.

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