Domenicos Theotocópoulos (Greece, 1541 – Toledo, Spain, 1614), trained as an icon painter on his native island, later moving to Venice, where he learned about the work of Titian and Tintoretto, artists who, together with Michelangelo, were the ones who They most influenced his painting.
After a seven-year stay in Rome, in 1570 he moved to Toledo to make an altarpiece for the church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo.
When he had been in Spain for 10 years, Philip II commissioned him to paint The Martyrdom of San Mauricio for the monastery of El Escorial, a work that, since it was not to the King’s taste, would not name him court painter.
However, his career continued to rise, and he was a highly sought-after painter among Toledo aristocrats and ecclesiastics, given the fervent religious atmosphere of the city.
El Greco would introduce to Spain his peculiar style of elongated figures that look like immaterial creatures, lacking physical solidity and imbued with an intense spirituality. All of them with a fluid brushstroke of cold colors of rare intensity and sharpness, with which he achieved surprising effects with reds, blues and particularly whites.
Although above all he painted religious works, such as The Sacking of Christ, The Baptism of Christ, The Adoration of the Shepherds, portraits of the Apostles, etc., of all his notable production we will highlight The Knight with His Hand on His Chest.
Although his most admired work is The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, a painting divided into two planes, an upper one -heavenly- and a lower one -earthly- where the main characters of Toledo at the time appear, including the painter himself and his son, in which the expressiveness of the faces and gestures is admirable.
In the last years of his career the artist painted two Landscapes of Toledo and the mythological painting Laocoön, which is surprising for its theme – unusual in Spain at the time – in which, against a background of beautiful landscape, Laocoön and his children are They writhe in their fight against the snakes. In the work, the artist skillfully uses these contortions to give it an admirable composition.
El Greco is considered one of the great geniuses in the history of world art, the first figure of universal projection in Spanish painting and the greatest exponent of pictorial mannerism in our country.
