The Magic of Spain

The light of the torches burning in long thin flame and the upward look of the priest in plain surplice draw the eye up to the second part of the picture, the Gloria, where the Conde de Orgaz appears before Christ and the Virgin in a heaven thronged with apostles and saints and supported by angels. The beauty of the lower part is as easily recognizable as that of a picture of Velázquez, but the Gloria takes longer to appreciate, having a fuller measure of El Greco’s mannerism. Partly for this reason the picture may displease at first, permanently displease if seen once only in a cursory glance, but on a more leisured study it assumes its right place as one of the wonderful and most beautiful pictures of the world. It requires time, too, to realize the infinite beauty of detail, the figures on St. Augustine’s robe, the scene of St. Stephen’s stoning on that of St. Stephen, and the skill with which all monotony is avoided in the mourners, in spite of their being nearly all of the same height, and nearly all wearing white ruffs and pointed beards.

In his later pictures El Greco increased the mannerism of his style; the figures are longer, more angular, the intensity of expression becomes an obsession, a paroxysm: he paints as one for whom the whole world has ceased to exist. Sometimes, as in the “Baptism” at Toledo, these exaggerations seriously spoil the beauty of his work; but the “Asunción” of the church of San Vicente, at Toledo, also belongs to his later style, and is not the least beautiful of his pictures: in no other work of art has the sense of motion been so marvellously expressed—the Virgin, saints, and angels seem actually floating upwards before our eyes. El Greco’s mannerism, jene unglaubliche Manier, Herr Carl Justi calls it, is more evident in some of his pictures, in others less; but there is not a sufficiently wide gulf between them to justify the saying that “they are so different that they appear not to be painted by the same hand,”[119] nor to countenance Palomino’s statement that “What he did well no one did better, and what he did badly no one did worse.”

It was not carelessly nor ignorantly that El Greco drew his figures out of proportion, making them preternaturally long and thin. He did so deliberately, just as Bacon said deliberately that “In all beauty there is some strangeness of proportion,” and the effect in El Greco’s pictures often, indeed as a rule, justifies his boldness. We see him

Naturally the peculiarity of his style has at once struck all observers. So the French have spoken of his “maladresses enfantines, audaces troublantes,” his “attitudes strapassées,” his “draperies cassées et chiffonnées á plaisir,” his “dessin fantastique.” So Sir Edmund Head wrote of some of El Greco’s pictures as “extravagant in length, of an ashen-grey tone, most singular in so fine a colourist.” If only glanced at once, this is perhaps the impression that the majority of his pictures would leave, and he thus remains a sphinx to many. “He will always remain caviare to the multitude,” wrote Sir J. C. Robinson in 1868; “the uninitiated observer passes over [his pictures] with wonder and bewilderment, the grim angular figures and draperies and the flickering unrest of all the details affecting him as would a harsh tumult of discordant sounds.”

Palomino said of El Greco that “he ended by making his painting despicable and ridiculous alike by extravagance of drawing and harshness of colour.” His contemporaries explained the singularity of his work either as due to madness or to craving for effect, por valentía, para salir del día, or to a wish to prevent them from being confused with those of Titian!

Not less than his drawing, El Greco’s colouring has been a stumbling-block and an offence. We read of his “teintes presque cadavériques,” “coloris grisâtre, pâle blafard,” “symphonies en bleu mineur;” and Ford characteristically wrote that his pictures were often “as leaden as cholera morbus.” After the rich reds and golds of Italian painting, the subtler tints of El Greco, evolved by him partly under Tintoretto’s influence, partly under the influence of Toledo, could not please his contemporaries, but we feel now that they are no slight ingredient of his charm. In colouring El Greco largely influenced Velázquez, and through Velázquez all subsequent painting. Velázquez learnt from him, in the words of Señor Cossío, “his harmony of silver greys and the use of certain carmines.” But it was not only El Greco’s colouring that affected him. Señor Cossío sees in the construction of “The Surrender of Breda” vague reminiscences of the “San Mauricio,” and one may also see in it reminiscences of the “Expolio.” Palomino, in his Life of Velázquez, says that “in his portraits he imitated Domenico Greco, for he considered that his heads could not be sufficiently praised.” Velázquez rejected El Greco’s mystic intellectuality, but possibly without El Greco’s influence the realism of Velázquez might have been excessively exact and less inspired.

Toledo, in the words of a modern Spanish poet, stands “dark, ruinous, forgotten and alone;” but Domenico[120] Theotocopuli, who lay there unremembered for three centuries, now rises to spread his fame through the world—

Foreigners from many lands climb up and down the cobbled lanes and passages, in search of hidden churches here and there with pictures by El Greco—Santo Tomé, San José, San Vicente, Santa Leocadia, San Nicolás, and many more:

He loved to paint the city, and, besides his famous view of it, we find it in the background of his pictures. The Cathedral and the Bridge of Alcántara and the Castle of San Servando are perfectly distinct in the “Asunción” of the Church of San Vicente. The city figures again, though less clearly, in the magnificent picture of St. Martin (of Tours) dividing his cloak, an act of charity that certainly receives a new significance in this bleak, unsheltered Toledo country. And Toledo, not Troy, appears in the “Laocoon,” the only picture by El Greco that has a classical subject. El Greco, the Cretan, lived at Toledo for some forty years, and the charm of Toledo seems to have entered into his soul. His house was not in one of the smothered streets, but in an open space high above the Tagus, opposite the Synagogue of the Jews.[121] It has a cool patio with a floor of red bricks and glazed tiles, and four white pillars, with a tiny well near the entrance, and a grey wooden gallery above, resting on the pillars, and open on one side, so that in spring swallows occasionally enter and whirl round the court. To the right a door leads to a quaint, old-fashioned kitchen, with its immense open fireplace and seats on either side beneath the chimney. That El Greco, a foreigner, should have become the most Spanish of Spanish painters, was due no doubt to the influence exercised over him by this stern yet luring city of Castille. It is impossible to dissociate his colouring from the many greens and greys and browns of the city and surrounding country, the rust-coloured soil of the Cigarrales thinly covered with many greens that are not green, grey hill-plants, dull tints of thyme and olive, the shriller green of pomegranate and other fruit-trees, the grass sun-parched to patches of yellow. And perhaps it is not altogether fanciful to connect the metallic gleams visible in certain lights on the surface of the Tagus with the glazed effects so frequent in El Greco’s pictures, or even the ragged, wind-tormented elms by the river with some of his more extravagant figures. The city points upward like a grey sword; and whether seen in shafts and foils of orange light against a stormy sunset, or fainting and crumbling greyly beneath a relentless sun and sky of cloudless blue, it has the austere intensity that we find in El Greco’s work. Yet, as in the greyest pictures of El Greco occurs some relieving touch of colour, so Toledo is not merely a monotonous symmetry of brown or grey. A procession, white and gold and red and purple, passes through the narrow streets under a shower of roses from the balconies of houses gaily hung in white and red, red and yellow; or the bright colours of peasants’ dresses are to be seen against the ancient Alcántara bridge as they come in to market; or in some street of stifling, windowless walls that lead up to a line of blue sky by day, and at night to a ribbon of stars, comes a glimpse, through doors of massive ancient stone, of a patio of bright flowers—carnations, nasturtiums, geraniums—as one may find a picture of El Greco in some old forgotten Church; and beneath the yellow-brown walls and grey rocks of the city are gardens of fruit-trees, where in spring nightingales sing from pomegranates in scarlet flower. It is a city of continual surprises, not to be understood or appreciated in a single day or a single visit; it gives, like El Greco’s pictures, a strong original impression at a first glance, but its inner being, its softer moments, its true significance and charm it reveals only to a patient study. Its attitude is indeed that of reserve; it seems to be holding judgment on modern civilization. It represents all that is noblest, most individual, and unbendingly austere in the spirit of Spain.

INDEX

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, Z