El Greco Sold Us a Stairway to Heaven

In the early 1600s El Greco accepted a commission to do paintings for a hospital for the poor. One of the works was the Madonna of Charity in which an oversized Madonna opens her cloak to provide shelter for some men wearing ruffs – those fancy, white, frilly, circular collars that indicated wealth and privilege. The artist’s patrons were shocked by this and hired a new artist to paint over the ruffs, to make the men look more destitute. El Greco just did not seem to realize that it was appropriate to paint the Virgin protecting the poor, especially for a charitable hospital, as he seemed to have little use for those types of folks.

El Greco regularly haggled, argued and sued to get the most money he could per project, as he had a luxurious lifestyle to sustain (he sometimes paid musicians to do live performances for him while he dined). His goal seemed to be to establish himself, through art, as a well-heeled member of Spain’s class of the rich, cultured and famous. The commodification of the sacred, as a propagandist for the Counter-Reformation, was his means to this end. He not only sold a conception of grace and redemption he most likely did not embody, but he also innovated and added some panache to that ideal.

El Greco starts as an icon painter on the island of Crete, a colony of Venice, but finds icons a dead-end and moves to Venice to learn modern painting trends from Tintoretto and Titian. From Tintoretto he seemed to realize the potential of distorting body proportions for greater psychological effect and from Titian he seemed to learn lessons about chroma – the extent to which you can make certain colors much brighter than others to affect the mood or intensity of a painting.

From Venice (he found no patrons to support him) he goes to Rome to be influenced by Michelangelo, yet he makes enemies by denigrating the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, and he asks to be allowed to paint something better over it (a suggestion not taken). He struggles with perspective during this time, cannot find patrons in Rome either and travels to Spain, where his work is rejected by King Phillip II, the art czar over there. No matter. Toledo, erstwhile capital of Spain, is the hotspot for Catholic religious art and he sets up shop there, soon ingratiating himself into the company of the high-ranking religious elite, the literati, well-placed academics and anyone else who might help him establish and maintain a reputation. They begin calling him “The Greek guy” – “El Greco”.

After his death his work is ignored for 250 years until the European avant-garde rediscovers it. He becomes beloved by Picasso. Folks are amazed by his “Expressionism” before the development of Expressionism. They marvel at his apparent religious fervor expressed through visual experimentation.

El Greco seemed most preoccupied with establishing that he was an artist and not an artisan. He was painting works dictated to him by patrons, which made it seem as if he was merely an artisan. The way out and into the league of “real” artists was to establish a distinct style, an extreme artistic style so that he could transcend the label of mere artisan. His pre-Expressionism Expressionism was his biggest selling point. He was not able to secure patrons in three major cities and was compelled to establish his brand as someone so in tune spiritually that he needed a completely different and somewhat bizarre visual approach for his work. It was a bold move. The cultured, educated and monied in Toledo bought into it.

He might, therefore, stand as one of the two greatest hucksters in the history of art – with Gauguin – if it were not for the redeeming aspects of his work from which folks can derive meaning. Gauguin had to be saved because the myth he created of leaving an industrialized country for something untainted by the West was so fabulous and because he hewed a path away from realism that became so compelling to other artists. What exactly saves El Greco? His spiritual intensity in which he often employs counter-intuitive visual responses to our mundane expectations in many of his Gospel narratives. We expect a spiritual state to be reflected in a person one way, based on tradition, but he throws us a curve ball and depicts the spiritual in a much more unexpected, engaging, sometimes bizarre and profound manner. He plays with human emotional states unexpectedly in a way that helps reveal possible deeper spiritual states.

If you were to look closely at his Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple, you would notice that as Jesus makes his way through the crowd with his whip, there is no look of anger or aggression on his face. It is really difficult, if not impossible, to intuit what Jesus may be feeling. Of course, how could we? Jesus had attained to a higher spiritual level that we are probably still struggling toward. This seems to imply Jesus is not acting from the base motives or emotions that might drive us. The reactions of those being beaten and purged are unexpected and surprising as well as they are learning from the experience. Instead of defending themselves or fighting back, some seem to be showing regret, some seem to be feeling emotional pain or shame or even struggling through some type of transformation.

It is an emotionally non-violent depiction of what we would consider a violent episode, and this is truly unique. It is as if El Greco is pointing to the allegorical and non-literal nature of the story by divesting it of violence and filling it with an unnameable spiritual something that we can only aspire to. It is as if the painter, himself, has divested himself, for the cause of Christianity, of violence and is not capable of even painting it.

El Greco once did a painting of Jesus departing from his mother to enter Jerusalem and face his pre-ordained death. One sees, perhaps, the slightest hint of sorrow in the expression of Jesus, but none at all in Mary. Other artists had portrayed and would continue to portray Mary in the most lachrymose manner. But, it is as if El Greco invented a whole new emotional lexicon that would be foreign to the experience of most viewers. The figures being depicted are functioning on a higher level of Christian grace, therefore our expectations and experiences fall short so that their higher-level and more humane behavioral responses call us to examine how we live and respond and invite us to be open to higher spiritual levels.

In the Assumption of the Virgin, El Greco reinforces this divorce between our common experiences and expectations and a higher set by displaying the variety of lower-level human responses to the miraculous or spiritually transformative, as a crowd has gathered under the ascending Virgin unable to fully grasp what is happening on anything but a superficial level.

Yet, when we look at the portraits he completed, we are often back to predictable expressions and emotions. We now see obscure scholars, high-ranking priests, chubby monks, well-established poets. He was no longer in the realm of the spiritual. Having more freedom than Velasquez he still painted a more restricted range of humanity. He simply did not, like Velasquez, leave his source of income and go wandering to find life and joy and meaning among the people.

So the big question we are left with in regard to El Greco is the big question we should be asking and are close to asking about all producers of culture these days: whether a person driven by personal advancement and a desire for luxury can give us anything we really need. Can we benefit from the works of a person who does not believe in individual self-examination and self-change but knows how to paint it? The history of art, after all, seems to be rife with ordinary, flawed or downright lousy people creating saintly and inspiring works.

El Greco asserted through his work that a truly Christian message was so radical and possibly transformational that it might require a change in artistic form. A classical model could not contain nor express the Christian message (so the Last Judgment by Michelangelo simply, in his opinion, had to go). He also challenged the belief that predictable human emotions, everyday emotions, were enough for us to understand the profoundly allegorical stories in the Bible. El Greco frequently pointed to something higher. That he realized the value of the Christian message and the need for the attempt for each of us to rise possibly showed a defiance and awareness which may have counterbalanced his ambition, somewhat.

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Christ Cleansing the Temple is courtesy the National Gallery of Art, Samuel H. Kress Collection Christ Healing the Blind is courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum in New York City Public Domain

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This Post is republished on Medium.

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Photo credit: Author