Doménicos Theotokópoulos, better known as El Greco (1541-1621), gained his training as an artist in Crete,Venice and Rome, the three centers of art that he passed through.Yet even though he learned from the great Italian artists of the 16th century, his arrogance was such that he went so far as to say that Michelangelo ?was a good man but he did not know how to paint?, remarking that the Last Judgment could be painted over and that he could be commissioned to re-do it ?with honesty and decency and no less quality in the painting?. His contemporaries found him a difficult personality. In 1577, he moved to Spain and made his home in Toledo. As an artist, he was capable
of effective realism, but in his quest for ideal forms, he adopted a number of personal methods: elongated figures, thin faces, distorted foreshortening, dramatic rhythms and constant inventiveness in his use of color far beyond anything others of his day dared to do. El Greco was acclaimed in his own lifetime and was able to penetrate the mystical feeling of Spain under Philip II. In this lavishly illustrated volume, Professor Santiago Alcolea i Gil describes the most notable aspects of the life and work of this artist, one of the true masters in European pictorial art.
