{"id":88839,"date":"2019-11-16T14:23:42","date_gmt":"2019-11-16T13:23:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/egidimadeinitaly.com\/ecomsite\/el-greco\/"},"modified":"2025-10-30T13:31:21","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T12:31:21","slug":"el-greco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/egidimadeinitaly.com\/en\/el-greco\/","title":{"rendered":"El Greco at the Grand Palais"},"content":{"rendered":"

El Greco at the Grand Palais<\/h1>\r\n
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El Greco Exhibition at the Grand Palais<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Today we’re talking about the lovely, very crowded exhibition of El Greco, whose name was Dom\u00ednikos Theotok\u00f3poulos<\/strong> (1541\u20131614).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\nFirst, I have something to confess. Before even going in, I was really prejudiced because this painter was definitely not one of my favorites.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nAnd so, when I came out…My opinion was confirmed (with one exception I’ll tell you about).\r\n\r\n\r\n
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\nBecause to my eyes \u2014 so immersed in classical culture, as classical as you can get \u2014 El Greco has a serious strike against him, being the purest heir of Byzantine art<\/strong> (he actually started as an icon painter<\/strong>).\r\n\r\n\r\n
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Saint Louis King of France and his Page<\/i><\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\n
<\/figcaption>We know that Byzantine art was frozen in its form that had always been the same since the time of the Eastern Roman Empire<\/strong>.<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nTo this day, the artisan workshops and artists of the Orthodox area still keep to the same themes and forms of the icons that their colleagues used centuries ago.\r\n\r\n\r\n
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A Boy Blowing on an Ember and Fabula by El Greco<\/i><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/figure>\r\n
Of course, this has nothing to do with artistic skills, being about religion.<\/figure>\r\n
For Orthodox countries, representing the sacred has the sole purpose of evoking the spiritual impetus to carry the faithful into intimacy with images, such as the Virgin Mary.According to this principle, changing the “style” of a painting makes no sense.<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nThe opposite is true of Western art.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nAfter the human and cultural catastrophe of the fall of the Roman Empire, from Giotto on, art developed at a dizzying speed.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n
<\/figcaption>The Western artist seems in the grip of an irrepressible need to keep on evolving, changing, and inventing new approaches and styles almost every generation.<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nIs this a good thing? Considering the direction that Western contemporary art has gone, I have very serious doubts about it.\r\n\r\n\r\n
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The Risen Christ by El Greco<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\n
<\/figcaption>I’ll end my digression there, and let’s get back to our exhibition.<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nVisiting the exhibition, we realize how hard it is for a painter who started as Byzantine to establish himself in the sophisticated worlds of 16th-century Venice and Rome.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nThere is good reason that he made his name in Toledo where he had failed in Italy, i.e. getting commissions from royal families.\r\n\r\n\r\n
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right:Portrait of a Trinitarian Friar
left:Portrait of a Man of the House of Leiva<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\n
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\nEl Greco’s style and color would owe a great deal to his time in Italy.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nIn Venice, he learned the use of color from his teachers Titian and Tintoretto. And the invention of new classicist forms came out of seeing Roman masterpieces by Michelangelo and Raphael.\r\n\r\n\r\n
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St Luke portrait by El Greco<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n\r\n
<\/figcaption>Looking at the paintings in the exhibition, I kept on getting the feeling that our artist was held back in his creations, as if something was keeping his instinct in check.<\/figure>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nI know nothing about El Greco’s story, and the exhibition panels offered no help, but I think this aspect has to do with the realm of religious denomination.\r\n\r\n\r\n