El Greco (henceforth cited as Greco) constituted the first comprehensive North American exhibition of the work of Domenikos Theotokopolous (1541–1614) since El Greco of Toledo (henceforth cited as Toledo) of 1982–83, organized by the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio and traveling to Madrid, Washington, D.C., and Dallas, Texas. A groundbreaking exhibition, Toledo brought together a substantial proportion of the artist’s most important paintings for the first time. The success of that exhibition in defining a corpus of recognized masterpieces is suggested by the inclusion of thirty-seven of the sixty-six paintings from Toledo in Greco. With eighty-three autograph works of outstanding quality, Greco surpassed the size of the earlier exhibition. The inclusion of four drawings, two statues, and a miniature painting helped to broaden the scope of El Greco’s diverse activities. Moreover, two icons from the Cretan period enabled visitors to appreciate the relevance of his origins to his later work.       

Despite the splendor and range of the works on display, it is uncertain whether Greco will have the enormous impact on scholarship that Toledo did. The catalogue for that exhibition, El Greco of Toledo (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1982), remains a fundamental reference. Jonathan Brown, William Jordan, Richard Kagan, and Alfonso Pérez-Sánchez articulated a new and coherent interpretation of the artist, which differed significantly from earlier modern constructions of him as either a frenzied mystic or a bohemian rebel. The authors characterized El Greco as an “artist-philosopher” in the Italian Renaissance tradition and emphasized his skill in visualizing clearly and vividly fundamental doctrines of the Spanish Counter-Reformation Church. In one essay, “El Greco: The Man and the Myths,” Brown explained how diverse myths have distorted understanding of the artist since the late nineteenth century.

In the past two decades, numerous scholars have built upon the contributions of that catalogue by reconstructing major pictorial programs, examining interactions with patrons and other ecclesiastics and intellectuals, and analyzing the artist’s fragmentary comments on aesthetic theory. In addition, highly specialized studies have illuminated some of the specific ways that El Greco’s image has been used in the modern era. Several prominent scholars have rejected fundamental assumptions from the 1982 catalogue. Thus, Nicos Hadjinicolaou and others have questioned the construction of El Greco as an artist in the Italian Renaissance tradition as they explored the enduring significance of his Cretan origins.

It is indicative of the complexity of current scholarship that the catalogue for Greco does not present an interpretation that is as cohesive as that articulated by Toledo. Among the essays in the catalogue, John Elliott’s “El Greco’s Mediterranean: The Encounter of Civilizations” is particularly illuminating. Elliott concisely reviews the diverse religious, social, and political forces that shaped the artist’s work. Throughout, he succeeds in linking complex historical circumstances to vivid biographical details—for example, by revealing the impact of Turkish-Venetian conflicts on the artist’s family—but he cautiously refrains from endorsing any conjectures unsupported by documentary evidence. Only some of his points can be noted here. Elliott clarifies how the convergence of religious and cultural traditions in the Venetian colony of Crete had an enduring impact on El Greco’s artistic vision. Like many previous commentators, Elliott indicates the significance of the Farnese Palace in Rome (where El Greco resided ca. 1570/72) as a center of religious and artistic reform, but he also clarifies the relevance to El Greco of its function as a meeting place for papal and Spanish representatives. In Toledo, El Greco finally gained fame through his work for ecclesiastical patrons, who were both sophisticated connoisseurs and strong advocates of Tridentine reform. However, Elliott emphasizes that the “nature and extent of his own religious commitments are difficult to determine” (21) and that there is no evidence to indicate the artist was influenced by any of the mystical writers of the era.        

Contrary to Elliott, David Davies emphatically insists in his lengthy essay, “El Greco’s Religious Art: The Illumination and Quickening of the Spirit,” that El Greco was profoundly influenced by such mystics as Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross, and he declares that, for El Greco, “life was a pilgrimage; its quest was the City of God” (71). Although Davies stops short of characterizing the artist as a mystic, his interpretation in many ways seems to correspond with the image of the devout painter, so vividly articulated by Maurice Barrés in Greco ou le Secret de Tolède (Paris: Émile-Paul, 1912). Thus, the artist’s own yearning for union with God is regarded as the primary impetus for his invention of distinctive formal devices. El Greco’s profession of faith at the time of his death is cited as proof of his profound religious convictions, even though his brief declaration is in no way exceptional for the era. In paintings of the 1580s and 1590s, Davies finds a consistent movement away from naturalism toward abstraction and stylization. Throughout these decades, however, El Greco seems to have worked simultaneously in a variety of manners (compare, for example, the relatively naturalistic and classicizing Saint Martin and the Beggar [cat. no. 38] with the intensively expressive Annunciation [cat. no. 40], both of the late 1590s). According to Davies, El Greco decisively abandoned Mannerist aesthetics and turned increasingly to Byzantine art for inspiration. On the other hand, catalogue entries by Keith Christiansen, Gabriele Finaldi, and others strongly emphasize the relevance of Mannerism to El Greco’s mature style. As Elliott notes throughout his essay, El Greco seems to have been stimulated by the fusion of diverse perspectives. Therefore, both the Byzantine tradition and Mannerism may have been equally relevant to the formation of his mature style.

In his other essays, Davies discusses the spiritual aspects of El Greco’s nonreligious work. Thus, he emphasizes the moralizing intent of El Greco’s various paintings of a boy blowing on an ember. However, in an entry on An Allegory with a Boy lighting a Candle in the Company of an Ape and a Fool (cat. no. 64), Finaldi convincingly proposes that the artist’s primary goal was to display his skill in competition with the classical models. Davies finds that El Greco was exceptionally successful in realizing the fundamental goal of Renaissance portraiture, which he defines as the acknowledgement of “the individual … as a creation ‘in the image and likeness of God’ (Genesis 1: 26–27)” (250). According to Davies, beginning in the 1580s, El Greco increasingly simplified and stylized the appearance of his sitters “in order to reveal their essence” (256). Yet, as several of the individual catalogue entries suggest, El Greco also seems to have intended to record distinctive physical features of his subjects. In analyzing Cardinal Niño de Guevara, Inquisitor General of 1600–1 (cat. no. 80), Davies finds that “the certainties of his office seem to have been stripped away” (259) through the revelation of inner anxieties. In the entry on this famous painting, Christiansen more subtly analyzes the complex issues involved in the viewing of this work; he notes, for example, that “it has been impossible to separate our responses from the dreaded institution this figure headed with notable inflexibility” (282).

The five authors of the catalogue entries employ very distinct methodologies. More uniformity in the content and organization of the entries would have made it easier for readers to correlate information on the various works exhibited. Despite their differences, all of the entries provide helpful overviews of existing scholarship on significant stylistic, iconographic, historical, and technical issues. Each entry includes a very brief list of citations; more comprehensive references would have been helpful to future investigators. However, the book does include a fairly comprehensive bibliography of major studies on the artist.

The assignment of dates to El Greco’s many undocumented works has long been an area of controversy for scholars. Therefore, Marcus Burke is to be especially commended for the care with which he supports his proposed dates through the examination of brushwork and other formal elements. Though minutely detailed, his analyses are so vividly written that they can engage general readers while enlightening specialists. In his entries, Christiansen provides notably informative overviews of varying interpretations of the works on display. In the process, he clarifies both the meanings of individual works and the numerous issues involved in modern analysis of the artist’s paintings. The Adoration of the Shepherds of ca. 1610 (cat. no. 61) is virtually the only piece involving substantial workshop participation; in his entry on this work, Christiansen clarifies some of the distinctions between paintings by El Greco and his assistants. Where relevant, entries note the existence of replicas and variants of compositions, but the origins and purposes of multiple versions of the same subject still need fuller consideration if the character and scope of El Greco’s artistic practice is to be fully understood.



The inclusion of varied scholarly perspectives constitutes a positive aspect of the catalogue for Greco, yet contradictory views are not explicitly acknowledged. Because scholarship on the artist is so complex and contentious, it is unfortunate that the exhibition was not used as an opportunity to review different approaches to his work. In several of his entries, Christiansen partly compensates for this deficiency by indicating the centrality of El Greco to the modern imagination and emphasizing “the very different views that have been brought to El Greco’s work” (213).