Art and the Religious Image in El Greco's Italy

By Andrew R. Casper

Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy is the first book-length examination of the early career of one of the early modern period’s most notoriously misunderstood figures. Born around 1541, Domenikos Theotokopoulos began his career as an icon painter on the island of Crete. He is best known, under the name “El Greco,” for the works he created while in Spain, paintings that have provoked both rapt admiration and scornful disapproval since his death in 1614. But the nearly ten years he spent in Venice and Rome, from 1567 to 1576, have remained underexplored until now. Andrew Casper’s examination of this period allows us to gain a proper understanding of El Greco’s entire career and reveals much about the tumultuous environment for religious painting after the Council of Trent.

Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy is a new book in the Art History Publication Initiative (AHPI), a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Thanks to the AHPI grant, this book will be available in the following e-book editions: Kindle, Nook Study, Google Editions, ebrary, EBSCO, Project MUSE, and JSTOR.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PSUPress
• Release date: Jan 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9780271064819

Andrew R. Casper

Andrew R. Casper is Assistant Professor of Art History at Miami University.

Book preview

ART AND THE RELIGIOUS IMAGE IN

EL GRECO’S ITALY

ART AND THE

RELIGIOUS IMAGE IN

EL GRECO’S ITALY

ANDREW R. CASPER

The Pennsylvania State University Press

University Park, Pennsylvania

THIS BOOK IS MADE POSSIBLE BY A COLLABORATIVE

GRANT FROM THE ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Casper, Andrew R., author.

Art and the religious image in El Greco’s Italy

Andrew R. Casper.

p.     cm

Summary: "Explores the early career of Domenikos

Theotokopoulos, ‘El Greco,’ in particular his

engagement with Italian art around the time of his

sojourn in Venice and Rome (1567–76). Examines

the form, function, and conception of religious

images in the second half of the sixteenth

century"—Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-271-06054-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Greco, 1541?–1614—Criticism and interpretation.

2. Art, Italian—16th century—Influence.

3. Christian art and symbolism—Italy—Renaissance,

1450–1600

I. Title.

ND813.T4C237 2014

759.6—dc23

2013012119

Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University

All rights reserved

Designed by Jo Ellen Ackerman, Bessas & Ackerman

Printed in Hong Kong through Asia Pacific Offset, Inc.

Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,

University Park, PA 16802–1003

The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member

of the Association of American University Presses.

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University

Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on

uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements

of American National Standard for Information

Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library

Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

Additional credits: page ii, detail of El Greco, Pietà (fig. 44); page v, detail of El Greco, Annunciation (fig. 49); page vii, detail of El Greco, Annunciation (fig. 49).

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

The Divinity of Painting

CHAPTER TWO

The Devotional Image

CHAPTER THREE

Synthesis as Artistic Ideal

CHAPTER FOUR

The Theatrics of the Counter-Reformation Narrative

CHAPTER FIVE

The Artist as Antiquarian in Christian Rome

CHAPTER SIX

From Icon to Altarpiece

Notes

Bibliography

Illustrations

Index

List of Illustrations

1. El Greco, Dormition of the Virgin, ca. 1565. Holy Cathedral of the Dormition of the Virgin, Ermoupolis, Syros

2. El Greco, The Assumption of the Virgin, 1577–79. The Art Institute of Chicago

3. El Greco, Adoration of the Magi, before 1567. Benaki Museum, Athens

4. El Greco, St. Luke Painting the Virgin and Child, before 1567. Benaki Museum, Athens

5. Virgin Mesopanditissa. Santa Maria della Salute, Venice

6. Jan Gossaert, St. Luke Painting the Virgin and Child, ca. 1520. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

7. Giulio Bonasone, engraving showing Socrates painting, from Achillis Bocchii Bonon. symbolicarum quaestionum de Universo genere quas serio ludebat (Bologna: Novae Academiae Bocchanae, 1555)

8. Caravaggio, Inspiration of St. Matthew, 1602. Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome

9. Giorgio Vasari, St. Luke Painting the Madonna and Child, ca. 1565. SS Annunziata, Florence

10. Maerten van Heemskerck, St. Luke Painting the Virgin and Child, 1532. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem

11. Raphael, Sistine Madonna, ca. 1513. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

12. Raphael [after?], St. Luke Painting the Madonna, sixteenth century. Accademia di San Luca, Rome

13. Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Allegory of Painting, ca. 1564–70. Albertina, Vienna

14. Federico Zuccaro, Father of Disegno, late sixteenth century. Viviani Collection, Palazzo Ducale, Urbino

15. El Greco, Escutcheon with St. Veronica’s Veil, ca. 1577–79. Private collection

16. El Greco, St. Veronica, ca. 1580. Formerly Colección Maria Louisa Caturla, Madrid

17. El Greco, St. Veronica, ca. 1580. Museo de Santa Cruz, Toledo

18. El Greco, St. Veronica’s Veil, ca. 1580. Private collection

19. Ugo da Carpi, St. Veronica Altarpiece, ca. 1525. Reverenda Fabbrica di San Pietro, Vatican 36

20. Copy of Jan van Eyck, Holy Face, ca. 1438. Gemälde-galerie, Staatlichen Museen, Berlin

21. El Greco, Baptism of Christ, ca. 1567–70. Historical Museum of Crete, Heraklion

22. El Greco, Modena Triptych, showing Adoration of the Shepherds (left), Christ Crowning the Christian Solider (center), and Baptism of Christ (right), ca. 1567. Galleria Estense, Modena

23. El Greco, Modena Triptych, showing the Annunciation (left), View of Mount Sinai (center), and Expulsion from Paradise (right), ca. 1567. Galleria Estense, Modena

24. El Greco, Baptism of Christ from Modena Triptych, ca. 1567. Galleria Estense, Modena

25. Giovanni Battista d’Angeli (del Moro), Baptism of Christ, mid-sixteenth century

26. El Greco, Adoration of the Shepherds, ca. 1567. Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

27. El Greco, Adoration of the Shepherds from Modena Triptych, ca. 1567. Galleria Estense, Modena

28. El Greco, Adoration of the Shepherds, ca. 1572–76. Private collection

29. El Greco, Expulsion from Paradise from Modena Triptych, ca. 1567. Galleria Estense, Modena

30. El Greco, Annunciation from Modena Triptych, ca. 1567. Galleria Estense, Modena

31. Jacopo Caraglio, after Titian, Annunciation, ca. 1527–37

32. El Greco, View of Mount Sinai, ca. 1570. Historical Museum of Crete, Heraklion

33. El Greco, Washing of the Feet from Ferrara Triptych, ca. 1567–68. Collezione Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Ferrara, on deposit at the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Ferrara

34. El Greco, Agony in the Garden from Ferrara Triptych, ca. 1567–68. Collezione Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Ferrara, on deposit at the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Ferrara

35. El Greco, Christ Before Pilate from Ferrara Triptych, ca. 1567–68. Collezione Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Ferrara, on deposit at the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Ferrara

36. El Greco, Crucifixion from Ferrara Triptych, ca. 1567–68. Collezione Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Ferrara, on deposit at the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Ferrara

37. Giovanni Battista d’Angeli, Crucifixion, mid-sixteenth century

38. Georgios Klontzas, Scenes of Christ’s Passion, ca. 1550–1600. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

39. El Greco, St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata, ca. 1570. Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa, Naples

40. El Greco, St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata, ca. 1570. Private collection, Madrid

41. El Greco, Burial of Christ, ca. 1568–70. National Gallery–Alexandros Soutzos Museum, Athens

42. Michael Damaskinos, Madonna del Rosario, ca. 1572. High altar of the Cappella del SS Rosario, Church of San Benedetto, Conversano, Italy

43. El Greco, detail of Cleansing of the Temple, ca. 1570. Minneapolis Institute of Arts

44. El Greco, Pietà, ca. 1570. The Philadelphia Museum of Art

45. El Greco, Pietà, ca. 1575. Hispanic Society of America, New York

46. Michelangelo, Pietà, ca. 1547–55. Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence

47. El Greco, study after Michelangelo’s Day, ca. 1570s. Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich

48. Titian, Annunciation, ca. 1559–64. San Salvador, Venice

49. El Greco, Annunciation, ca. 1570. Museo del Prado, Madrid 85

50. El Greco, Annunciation, ca. 1570–76. Colección Muñoz, Barcelona

51. El Greco, Annunciation, ca. 1570–76. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

52. El Greco, Christ Cleansing the Temple, before 1570. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

53. El Greco, Cleansing of the Temple, ca. 1570. Minneapo-lis Institute of Arts

54. El Greco, Christ Healing the Blind, ca. 1570. Gemälde-galerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

55. El Greco, Christ Healing the Blind, ca. 1570. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

56. El Greco, Christ Healing the Blind, ca. 1572. Galleria Nazionale, Parma

57. Battista Franco, after Raphael, Peter Healing the Lame, ca. 1554–61

58. Giulio Clovio, Blinding of Elymas, ca. 1528–34. Louvre, Paris

59. Scena tragica, from Sebastiano Serlio, Il secondo libro di perspettiva (Paris: Iehan Barbé, 1545)

60. Theater cross-section, from Sebastiano Serlio, Il secondo libro di perspettiva (Paris: Iehan Barbé, 1545) 116

61. Stage scenographies by Vincenzo Scamozzi in Andrea Palladio, Teatro Olimpico, ca. 1585. Vicenza

62. El Greco, Portrait of Giulio Clovio, ca. 1572. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples

63. El Greco, Portrait of an Architect, ca. 1570–75. National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen

64. El Greco, Portrait of a Sculptor, ca. 1576. Private collection

65. Giuliano da Sangallo, sketch of the Temple of the Sibyl from Libro di disegni, Codice Baberiniano Latino 4424, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

66. Maerten van Heemskerck, Temple of Vesta in Tivoli, ca. 1532–36, from the Roman Sketchbook II, inv. 79 D 2 A Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

67. El Greco, detail from Christ Healing the Blind, ca. 1572. Galleria Nazionale, Parma

68. Giovanni Antonio Dosio, Arch of Constantine, mid-sixteenth century. Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, Uffizi, Florence

69. Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalieri, Baths of Diocletian, from Urbis Romae aedificiorum illustrium quae supersunt reliquiae (Rome, 1569)

70. After Giovanni Antonio Dosio, woodcut illustration of Baths of Diocletian, from Bernardo Gamucci, Le antichità della città di Roma (Venice: Giovanni Varisco e i Compagni, 1569)

71. Interior of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, Rome 141

72. El Greco, Boy Blowing an Ember (Soplón), ca. 1570–72. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples

73. El Greco, Fable, ca. 1577. Museo del Prado, Madrid

74. Michelangelo, Erythraean Sibyl, ca. 1508–12. Sistine Chapel, Vatican

75. El Greco, high altar at Santo Domingo el Antiguo, Toledo

76. Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, ca. 1516–18. Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice

77. Jacopo Tintoretto, Assumption of the Virgin, ca. 1555. Chiesa dei Gesuiti, Venice

78. Cherubino Alberti, Assumption of the Virgin, ca.

79. El Greco, Trinity, ca. 1577–79. Museo del Prado, Madrid

80. Albrecht Dürer, Holy Trinity, ca. 1511

81. Michelangelo, study for the Colonna Pietà, early 1540s. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

82. El Greco, Resurrection, ca. 1577–79. Santo Domingo el Antiguo, Toledo

83. El Greco, St. Sebastian, ca. 1577–78. Museo Catedral-ico, Palencia

84. El Greco, Adoration of the Shepherds, ca. 1577–79. Fundación Botín, Santander

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book culminates a journey that began during my doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania. I am most grateful to Michael Cole for pointing out the importance of this material and teaching me that the most arduous endeavors yield a unique joy. I credit any advancements I may have made as an art historian along the way to his guidance. I would be remiss not to thank Larry Silver for holding me and my work to ever higher standards while remaining fair, kind, and generous; Renata Holod for spurring my interest in theories of vision; and indeed the entire Penn community—the most nurturing intellectual environment I could hope for.

Research was supported in part by grants from the Fulbright Program, Miami University, the Newberry Library, and the University of Pennsylvania. Additional support for publication has been provided by the Art History Publication Initiative, which covered the extensive costs of production and copyright permissions. Chapter4 spring 2008 incorporates material previously published as "Experiential Vision in El Greco’s Christ Healing the Blind" in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte in 2011. I thank the editors of the journal for granting permission to offer a fuller and more nuanced contextualization of those themes in this book.

The process of this book’s development has brought out the best in my colleagues and fellow scholars, friends and strangers alike. I am grateful for their generosity of time, knowledge, and patience. In particular I thank David Cast, Una Roman D’Elia, Jack Freiberg, Christian Kleinbub, Margaret Morse, and Ian Verstegen for commenting on various chapter drafts from the vantage of their boundless expertise; Nicos Hadjinicolaou for providing a forum, and an audience of specialists, for me to present my research on El Greco’s paintings of the Veronica at the Fourth International El Greco Symposium in Crete in 2005; Edo Gamba, Angela Roberts, Allison Sherman, and Krystina Stermole for an unforgettable year in Venice; Rosi Mosca-Herrera, Stephanie Pilat and John Romano for their friendship while in Rome; Grant Peterre for a crucial photograph; my colleagues in the Early Modern Studies Collective at Miami University, and especially Renee Baernstein, Wietse de Boer, Charles Ganelin, and Cindy Klestinec, for interrogating my work and patiently enduring repeated requests for affirmation, which they indulged; and Daniel Tonozzi for his help with many of the Italian translations (though all mistakes, infelicities, or inaccuracies are my own doing). My colleagues in the Department of Art at Miami arranged for the research leave and course releases necessary for completing the manuscript despite the attendant strain on our curriculum. Further, they have greeted every stage of this book’s creation with an enthusiasm whose sincerity has been nothing short of exemplary. Not least of all I thank my students, and in particular the participants in undergraduate seminars on early-modern vision (spring 2010) and the icon (spring 2008 and 2012), for their impressive insights and dedication to helping me work out key ideas central to my development of this material. The anonymous reviewers for Pennsylvania State University Press provided feedback that was both supportive and challenging, making this a better book. Ellie Goodman has been a truly superb and encouraging editor since the moment I timidly submitted extracts of the manuscript for review. Of course, I would not be able to write these words without the support of Pepper Stetler, who has been supportive beyond what is reasonable and certainly beyond description. I dedicate this book to our beautiful Louisa, just for being who she is.

INTRODUCTION

THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY POET and preacher Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino summarized the life of the painter commonly known as El Greco (The Greek) by writing, Crete gave him life and his paintbrushes / Toledo [Spain] gave him a better country, where he began / with his death, to attain eternity.¹ This essential biographical data is accurate. Born around the year 1541, Domenikos Theotokopoulos started his career as an icon painter on the island of Crete. He was later better known as Dominico Greco, and today simply as El Greco, but these monikers signify the same émigré to Spain whose legacy is preserved in stirring paintings that have provoked both rapt admiration and scornful disapproval since his death in 1614.

However, Paravicino’s abridged account of the life of this Greek-born Spanish painter fails to acknowledge any formative influence from the artist’s stay in Italy from 1567 to 1576—a time and place that witnessed great consternation concerning the proper form and function of sacred art. Indeed, the stylistic discrepancies between the Dormition of the Virgin painted in Crete around 1565 (fig. 1) and the Assumption of the Virgin completed in 1577 for the high altar of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo (fig. 2)—paintings that frame El Greco’s nine-year sojourn in Venice and Rome—prove that the artist’s Italian phase was more pivotal than what Paravicino’s omission of it might suggest. Both paintings bear similar signatures: [Δ]ΟΜΗΝΙΚΟC ΘΕΟΤΟΚΌΠΟΥΛΟC Ο ΔΕΙΞΑC (Domenikos Theotokopoulos displayed it) on the Dormition and the slightly more informative δομήνικος θεοτοκό-πουλος κρής ό δείξας α φ ο ζ (Domenikos Theoto-kopoulos of Crete displayed it, 1577) on the later altarpiece.² However, without these declarations of creative agency, few would likely recognize that the same hand produced these dissonant works within only a dozen years. The earlier icon is typical of the kind of painting in which El Greco had received extensive training in Crete. Resplendent in its use of gold, the composition follows a standard Byzantine formula to depict Mary’s death and the transitus of her soul into heaven. Its intimate size would have made it suitable for the use of a single viewer meditating on this subject of deep theological and spiritual significance. By comparison, the soaring Assumption of the Virgin, part of the painter’s first commission in Spain, is enormous. As the main panel of a massive altar retablo, this painting addressed a larger public audience in a liturgical setting. Stylistically it owes much to the practices and techniques employed by painters in Venice and Rome that evidently remained fresh in the artist’s mind after having spent nearly a decade in Italy. But what really happened after El Greco’s visualization of Mary’s Dormition that inspired him to paint the Assumption so differently just a short time later? More important, what does this shift in artistic practice indicate about the environment in which he worked in the intervening period and its impact on his attitudes regarding the images he made?

Answering these questions requires a fresh look at an artist whose life achievements resist his being assigned a single cultural identity. El Greco’s itinerancy has persuaded many to cast him as an exotic foreigner working on the fringes of local artistic establishments at every stage of his career. His stay in Venice and Rome frequently stands as an anomalous footnote to his more famous Spanish period or is ignored altogether. When El Greco’s Italian period is recognized, it is too often subjected to the same unsubstantiated biographical embellishments that since the nineteenth century have cast him as a victim of debilitating ophthalmological conditions, an eccentric mystic, and a proto-modernist visionary.³

This book frames early El Greco differently. I reveal that he was far more conventional than what is normally said about him. He consciously broadened his artistic repertoire from the production of post-Byzantine icons to local conventions of Italian painting in order to respond calculatedly and productively to contemporary preoccupations about the proper form and function of sacred imagery. The only thing unusual about him was the astonishing brevity in which he underwent a drastic stylistic metamorphosis as part of his reformulation of the religious image. Only three years after arriving in Venice in 1567 as a Cretan icon painter, he went to Rome having mastered Venetian color. In 1576 he went to Spain as an eager student—and informed critic—of Michelangelo. The paintings from this period exhibit a range of sixteenth-century Italian artistic trends, including an extensive reliance on prints for compositional inspiration, a thoughtful implementation of Venetian art theory in his working practice, a studious application of perspective for formal and symbolic effects, and an informed use of ancient architecture for the settings of religious narratives. Recognizing these characteristics, not only augments our understanding of El Greco’s early artistic activities, but also invites speculation on how some of the most formative artistic discussions of his time helped shape his output and his conception of how his paintings functioned as religious images in late sixteenth-century Italy.

Any analysis of El Greco’s early career must overlay the unusual itinerary that took him from Crete to Spain via Venice and Rome within a span of only ten years. Thanks to its position as a trading crossroads, Crete and its capital, Candia (today Heraklion), was a major center for the exportation of icons throughout the Mediterranean.⁴ Moreover, the cosmopolitan culture that nurtured El Greco’s first artistic activities fostered a predisposition to follow Italian models, resulting in a distinct pictorial hybridity.⁵ The widespread dissemination of Italian art provided access to these sources.⁶ His frequent borrowings from prints show how extensively he relied on this medium in particular.⁷ The icon St. Luke Painting the Virgin and Child (see fig. 4 in chapter 1) models the Evangelist after a figure in Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving of Raphael’s Last Supper drawing.⁸ The angel descending to crown the saint with laurel originates in a print by Giovanni Battista d’Angeli (del Moro) after a drawing by Bernardino Campi titled Victory Crowning the Roman Vestal Tucia.⁹ The candlestick in the foreground of the Dormition of the Virgin derives from prints by Marcantonio Raimondi and Enea Vico.¹⁰

The most eclectic departure from Byzantine models among El Greco’s Cretan works is found in the Adoration of the Magi (fig. 3).¹¹ This icon exhibits a looser application of paint, a limited use of gold, and a more spacious background than in the artist’s other works. The mannered pose of the Virgin, with her legs crossed as she leans forward to present the Christ child to the retinue of adoring Magi, comes from an engraving titled the Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine by Marco d’Angeli after Andrea Schiavone.¹² The soldier appearing on the right with his back turned outward originates in Parmigianino’s Resurrection etching.¹³ The figure removing his crown may come from an engraving by Giovanni Battista Franco.¹⁴ The king on the left holding a gold urn and paten has its origins in Correggio’s Adoration of the Magi at the Brera in Milan, which also appeared in prints.¹⁵ The architectural setting featuring ruined buildings has northern origins, coming from a print titled Balaam and the Angel by Dirck Volkertsz. Coorn-hert after Maerten van Heemskerck.¹⁶

While this persistent lure of Italy was probably what brought El Greco to Venice in 1567, the exact circumstances of his move are unclear. What we do know is recorded in a handful of documents. On June 6, 1566, he served as a legal witness in Candia as a master painter, indicating that he left the island as a fully trained iconographer.¹⁷ Two other documents—from December 26 and 27, 1566—indicate that El Greco prepared for his journey by auctioning un quadro della Passione del nostro Signor Giesu Christo, dorato—putting 1566 as the terminus post quem for the artist’s arrival in Venice.¹⁸ Yet the only known document for his stay in Venice is a letter dated August 18, 1568, referencing drawings he was supposed to send to the cartographer Giorgio Sideris Calapodas.¹⁹

By the time El Greco arrived in Venice in 1567, the city’s Cretan population had become the largest ethnic minority in Italy. The community’s most prosperous period centered around the construction of San Giorgio dei Greci from 1539 to 1573, a period in which many Greek artists worked for both Venetian and Cretan clients.²⁰ El Greco’s arrival coincided with an unprecedented wave of immigrant artists from Crete.²¹ The most successful was Michael Damaski-nos, who had already proven to be an accomplished artist in Candia before his first stint in Venice from 1566 to 1569. After a short interlude in Messina, Damaskinos returned to Venice in 1574 and stayed until 1582 or 1583 to work on the iconostasis and the sancta sanctorum at San Giorgio dei Greci.²²

El Greco’s career path diverged markedly from that of his peers. Though he never lost sight of his Cretan origins—he never signed a painting in any language but Greek and often appended his name with the declarative of Crete—he distanced himself from the Greek community in Venice and does not appear to have been bothered by a lack of one in Rome.²³ Neither did El Greco come to Italy to work as a madonnero as was once thought. Twentieth-century scholars haphazardly applied this derogatory label to artists of the so-called Creto-Venetian school who produced cheap and stylistically hybrid panels of the Madonna and other religious subjects for an unsophisticated and low-paying clientele.²⁴ These immigrant artists were, in the words of Harold Wethey, totally unskilled, untutored, and ignorant of the very rudiments of good painting. Few today would challenge his declaration that the attempt to transform the young El Greco into a tenth-rate vendor of small religious panels is the most regrettable development in the critical history of the artist’s career.²⁵

Instead, El Greco’s Italian paintings reveal a more accomplished study after the styles and techniques of Italian masters than what we see in other Cretan painters. His short stay in Venice in the late 1560s exposed him to artists who helped shape his early development.²⁶ A letter from Giulio Clovio dated November 16, 1570, introduced El Greco to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese as a "young discepolo of Titian from Candia recently arrived in Rome.²⁷ It is unclear if disciple" signifies an established formal relationship or if the young artist merely admired and studied Titian’s works on his own.²⁸ Regardless, the elder master’s influence on the young El Greco was undeniably strong.

This letter is also one of the few documents recording El Greco’s activities in Rome, a destination where, as Giorgio Vasari described, many artists of the highest ambition felt the urge to visit in order to study works by the great masters.²⁹ Clovio, a miniaturist and long-time servant of the cardinal, asked that El Greco be granted a room in the Farnese Palace until he could find suitable housing elsewhere. Though El Greco was already in the city (Clovio’s letter mentioned a self-portrait that had already dazzled all the artists of Rome), the painter must have settled in the palace by Decem-ber 1570. His career might have ended up differently had his stay there not come to an abrupt end. A letter El Greco wrote to the cardinal on July 6, 1572, expresses remorse for a hasty dismissal from the court only a little more than a year and a half after his introduction.³⁰

El Greco’s loss of a potential patron in Alessan-dro Farnese may have expedited the artist’s decision to join the painters’ guild in Rome. The registry records that on September 18, 1572, just two months after El Greco’s release from the Farnese household, he paid the two scudi fee for admission.³¹ Neither the extent nor the nature of El Greco’s involvement is very clear. Confusion stems from the fact that when the guild documents were first published it was said that he registered as a pittore a carte. This would seem to classify him as a painter of miniatures, suggesting a continuing guidance under the miniaturist Clovio.³² However, the term comes from a seventeenth-century index of all individuals registered between 1535 and 1653 and therefore might not be the language used at the time that El Greco became a member. The earlier records categorize each member as pittore (painter), ricamatore (embroiderer), banderaio (banner maker), miniatore (miniaturist or illuminator), or battiloro (gold beater)—raising the question of why, if El Greco was a miniaturist, he was listed in the 1572 entry as a pittore and not miniatore.

El Greco’s admittance into the guild so soon after his departure from the Farnese court is indicative of an unwavering determination to stay in Rome. But this event initiates the most contentious period of the artist’s entire career. His precise whereabouts are unknown from the time he entered the guild until at least October 21, 1576, when he reportedly appealed for financial aid from the Royal Almoner in Madrid.³³ Speculation that the artist traveled elsewhere in Italy after 1572, especially the engaging theory that he returned to Venice for a few years before heading off to Spain, has been endorsed by a small but vociferous collection of scholars for much of the twentieth century.³⁴ Jens Ferdinand Willum-sen pointed out that Giovanni Baglione’s Le vite de’ pittori scultori et architetti dal pontificato di Gregorio XIII del 1572 in fino a’tempi di papa Urbano Ottavo nel 1642, an exhaustive list of artists working in Rome after 1572, does not include Domenikos Theotokopoulos.³⁵ Unfortunately, no existing documentation can confirm that the artist went anywhere else.³⁶ In fact, El Greco was likely still in Rome when he painted and signed a portrait of Vincenzo Anastagi in 1575.³⁷

The reasons for El Greco’s decision to go to Spain are also a subject of much speculation. Giulio Mancini alleged that El Greco made disparaging comments regarding Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, offering to rip the fresco to the ground and do another that was better and more modest. This libel supposedly drew the ire of El Greco’s peers, whereupon he fled Rome to seek the patronage of Philip II in Spain.³⁸ Though some have taken Mancini’s anecdote as evidence for the driving force behind El Greco’s departure, it is unlikely that condemnation of Michelangelo could have invited such repercussions.³⁹ The Last Judgment was subjected to widespread ridicule that culminated in Pius IV’s demand that Daniele da Volterra clothe Michelangelo’s writhing nudes in fresco a secco britches. Besides, El Greco’s comments would hardly have been unique or original. Vicious invectives against Michelangelo’s work were common, as his paintings became scapegoats for the formal offenses committed by religious painters in this period of heightened vigilance.⁴⁰ Pietro Aretino’s notorious outrage got expanded in Ludovico Dolce’s Dialogo della pittura of 1557. In 1564 the theologian Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano issued a treatise criticizing the fresco’s fullest range of indecorous improprieties.

Since it is unlikely that an unflattering appraisal of Michelangelo’s painting could have forced El Greco out of Rome, a more plausible premise for traveling to Spain was the promise of work. While Venice and Rome nourished El Greco’s artistic development, they did not provide an abundance of employment opportunities that would have allowed him to remain in Italy. For this reason, the artist set out in search of opportunities to advance professionally elsewhere, even if that meant going abroad for the second time in his young career. By 1577 El Greco signed contracts for the Espolio at the sacristy altar of the Toledo cathedral and the high altar retablo at Santo Domingo el Antiguo. He never stepped foot in Italy again.

The preceding biographical sketch serves as a backdrop for the largely nonbiographical aims of this book. My focus on early El Greco, to the exclusion of his more famous career in Spain, has two interrelated goals. First, it positions his time in Venice and Rome as formative and profitable to his artistic development. While his earliest paintings offer insights into his unique pictorial mind, they also aggregate key trends and ideas that shaped artistic production in the second half of the sixteenth century. Of course, El Greco’s Spanish works are no less valuable in that regard; but his art underwent such drastic changes in style, patronage, and even audience that attempts to find continuity across his career risk missing the meaningful nuances of this underexplored early phase that only a focused examination can provide.

Hence this book’s second, more expansive aim: to use El Greco’s early career as a vantage point for reevaluating the religious image in sixteenth-century Italy. I draw attention to the ties between El Greco’s art and the environment in which he worked by showing how he generated new ways of conceiving sacred imagery in response to the burgeoning need to reconcile artistic achievement with ever-evolving concerns for the aims of Christian art. It is by looking with greater sensitivity to the functional and religious—not just artistic—aspects of El Greco’s productivity in Italy that we can appreciate the connections between this misunderstood artist’s religious environment and the artistic output of his early career.

El Greco’s early career has figured very little in recent scholarly attempts to evaluate properly the mutual dependence of art and the religious image in the second half of the sixteenth century. For example, Marcia Hall’s The Sacred Image in the Age of Art highlights tensions between upholding the religious function of images promulgated by the twenty-fifth session of the Council of Trent in 1563 and maintaining the value of artistic virtuosity, as sanctioned by the otherwise unrelated founding of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence that same year. The author focuses on the efforts of select artists—El Greco included—to respond to ecclesiastical requirements that religious art foster devotion, while also asserting their creative autonomy.⁴¹ But the chapter on El Greco further perpetuates scholarly bias against his earlier phases by discussing his output in Spain—a profile made all the more curious by Hall’s otherwise Italocentric focus. Her book thus leaves the artist’s much more pointed pictorial statements on religious imagery, as well as the contextual nuances that shaped his artistic practice and philosophy in Italy, largely unexamined.

El Greco’s compositional and stylistic techniques articulate uniquely the interdependence of art and devotion in a way that broad period generalizations cannot fully accommodate. Federico Zeri highlights Scipione Pulzone’s approach to reforming the visual arts toward a more devotionally affective function through the formulation of a timeless and emphatically pious style.⁴² In one masterful and more recent case study of how a single artist negotiated this terrain, Stuart Lingo shows that Federico Barocci crafted paintings that were both artistically alluring and spiritually affective.⁴³ The nature of Barocci’s production says as much about his unique artistic inclinations as it does the environment in which he worked. Indeed, the artists El Greco admired most operated similarly. Una Roman D’Elia shows how Titian used literary formulae to shape his religious works into distinct genres in accordance with new concerns over decorum and propriety then emerging in Venice.⁴⁴ Alexander Nagel explores Michelangelo’s