El Greco was a Greek artist whose painting and sculpture helped define the Spanish Renaissance and influence various movements to come.
El Greco was born Domenikos Theotokopoulos on the island of Crete, which was at the time a Venetian possession. His paintings belong the Late Reneissance period, which is often called also Mannerism.
Mannerism is the name given to art that seemed more of a rebellion against the complex naturalism of the Renaissance, instead of a distinct, cohesive style of its own. The unrelenting preoccupation with human proportions and mathematically accurate perspective common to Renaissance art gave way to exaggerated proportions, stylized facial features and utterly impossible, flat spaces.
Around age 20, somewhere between 1560 and 1565, El Greco went to Venice to study and found himself under the tutelage of Titian, the greatest painter of the time. Under Titian, El Greco began mastering the fundamental aspects of Renaissance painting—e.g., perspective, constructing figures and staging detailed narrative scenes.
In 1572, El Greco joined the painters’ academy and established a studio, but success would prove elusive, El Greco had criticized Michelangelo’s artistic abilities, which likely led to him being ostracized by the Roman art establishment, and he left Rome for Spain in 1576.
El Greco was a pious individual living in Toledo, the spiritual center of Spain. His artwork meant to show both the earthly and the heavenly, at once. These are the two worlds El Greco sought to reconcile in his art. Exaggerated proportion was a convention used in Byzantine art to solve such a problem as it related to, Jesus, being both God and Man at once.
There are some features in El Greco’s paintings, such as proportions, spaces, colors and so on, which have been discussed in the art world. Nevertheless, El Greco is a great master of renaissance art period.
El Greco’s effect on Picasso’s evolution is just one thread of his influence. The twisting figures and brash, unreal colors that form the very foundation of El Greco’s art influenced scores of artists, from the cubists following Picasso to the German expressionists to the abstract impressionists after them.
El Greco died on April 7, 1614, unappreciated in his time, with the art world waiting 250 years before embracing his status as a master.