Hi Steemit family!

The Greco

A breakaway and renewer of the art of his time!

This year begins with an important commemoration: the IV Centenary of the death of El Greco. This event is full of events scheduled for 2014 under the name of "Year of The Greco" and will bring to several museums in our country and, in particular, to Toledo a large part of the artist's pictorial production whose creation is structured in three periods: Cretan, Italian, and Spanish. Without a doubt, this celebration will make history, it will be a milestone in the artist's revision and itineraries and for his last abode, Toledo. Throughout 2014, almost all the painted and cataloged works of the Cretan-Spanish artist will pass through our country.

source

But who was Doménikos Theotokópoulos? (the painter always signed his works in this way), a Greek born in 1541 in Crete, known in Italy as Il Greco and in Spain as Doménico Greco or El Griego. Hence, we now know him as El Greco. This enigmatic character and singular artist, stands in one of the most modern and innovative ancient painters that we find in the history of universal art, because he was an aesthete breaker and revolutionary with the art of his time and a promoter and renovator of forms and chromatics, to the point that artists like Manet, Picasso, and Pollock were seduced with their art and even drank from their plastic sources.

source

El Greco, for his peculiar style, for his groundbreaking spirit, always far from the artistic canons of his time, was treated with disdain from the Court. Let us not forget that King Philip II himself separated it from his great project to decorate El Escorial. Similarly, he felt rejected by much of the nobility and even by the artists of his time, which is why today we find no followers of his technique and style. If El Greco was then valued and understood by someone, curiously we have to give this merit to scholars and intellectuals linked to the Church.

source

Thanks to them, because of their patronage and stimuli, today we can enjoy a wide panoramic view of their creation which, as is evident, when the works are destined for places of prayer, they are mostly paintings with religious themes and content, apart from some portraits dedicated to their patrons and protectors. In proposing to elaborate a profile of this complex and plural artist, it is unavoidable for us to take a look at his artistic facets. El Greco's creation went through, broadly speaking, three moments or well-differentiated facets.

source

There was the first stage closely linked to his identity. That Cretan of his beginnings in which his painting shows a notable post-Byzantine influence, as a consequence of the traditional canons that predominated in his first environment. In his beginnings as an icon painter, some nuances of western influence were already accentuated, although the subjects he deals with are common to those of the Greek-Byzantine artists of the time. It is followed by the Italian stage where it shows a certain influence of the art of a pictorial evolution in whose details we glimpse Greco that we later discover. It is in his third and last stage in Toledo where he shows the fullness and maturity of his art.

source

In Toledo, from his solitude and incomprehension, he builds a whole universe of pictorial compositions in which he achieves the union of the earthly with the celestial. Here emerges the spiritual and mystical Greco we know, which gives his characters that singular stylization that elevates them to heaven. Here are fascinating artist of colour and light, who died in 1614, capable of portraying their souls, air and space, although he did not manage to convince or please the monarch and the nobles of his time, with the passing of the centuries he has managed with his art to captivate everyone who contemplates his work.

source