As the main panel of a massive altar retablo, this painting addressed a larger public audience in a liturgical setting. By comparison, the soaring Assumption of the Virgin, part of the painter’s first commission in Spain, is enormous. 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. 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. The earlier icon is typical of the kind of painting in which El Greco had received extensive training in Crete.

However, without these declarations of creative agency, few would likely recognize that the same hand produced these dissonant works within only a dozen years.

Both paintings bear similar signatures: “ΟΜΗΝΙΚΟC ΘΕΟΤΟΚΌΠΟΥΛΟC Ο ΔΕΙΞΑC” (Domenikos Theotokopoulos displayed it) on the Dormition and the slightly more informative “δομήνικος θεοτοκόπουλος κρής ό δείξας α φ ο ζ” (Domenikos Theotokopoulos of Crete displayed it, 1577) on the later altarpiece. 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. 1) and the Assumption of the Virgin completed in 1577 for the high altar of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo (fig. Indeed, the stylistic discrepancies between the Dormition of the Virgin painted in Crete around 1565 (fig. 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. 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. Born around the year 1541, Domenikos Theotokopoulos started his career as an icon painter on the island of Crete. 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 gave him a better country, where he began / with his death, to attain eternity.” This essential biographical data is accurate. This volume is a substantial contribution to understanding how an icon-writer from the Greek Orthodox world came to accommodate himself to the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic society of Italy.” -Rev. Ostrow, University of Minnesota “Professor Andrew Casper’s densely illustrated essay on the ‘artful icon’ is an insightful study of the nine years that the philosophising painter Domenico Theotocopolo spent in Italy (1567–76), on his way from his native Crete to Spain, where he lived and worked in Toledo until his death in 1614. The El Greco we encounter here is a highly self-conscious, ambitious, and learned painter who, by virtue of his ‘Byzantine way of thinking,’ reconciled aesthetic concerns with contemporary attitudes toward sacred images in the form of what Casper brilliantly terms ‘artful icons.’” -Steven F. In a probing and illuminating fashion, Casper reveals the ways in which El Greco’s encounter with both Counter-Reformation theological ideas and Venetian and Roman art and art theory enabled him to transform himself from a provincial painter of icons in the Byzantine manner to a truly modern painter of devotional images. Casper’s Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy makes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on El Greco, one of the most original and, often, least understood artists of the late Renaissance. Thanks to the AHPI grant, this book will be available in popular e-book formats. 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.Īrt 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.

But the nearly ten years he spent in Venice and Rome, from 1567 to 1576, have remained underexplored until now. 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.

Born around 1541, Domenikos Theotokopoulos began his career as an icon painter on the island of Crete. 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.

Artful britches