We parted with Michele and Tom a few days ago. They dropped us off in Toledo, which is famous for two things: its steel (used most notably, in violent days of yesteryear, for the production of swords and knives; and being the home base of El Greco.
At the El Greco museum in Toledo, we saw the following image of Saint Matthew:
And Karen said, "That's not a hand."
Too harsh?
An indulgent critic might say that's a hand painted in a hurry without a lot of regard for detail. But it is indeed awkwardly executed.
I was interested to learn that El Greco fell into disfavor and essentially disappeared, reputation-wise, for a couple of hundred years after his death. The Baroque artists who succeeded his generation of Mannerists had no truck with his brand of expressive sloppiness. His reputation was revived in the late 18th century by -- who else? -- the Romantics, and he's been a staple of art history ever since.
There's an amazing room at the Prado (of course I couldn't take a photo of it, because photos are not allowed at the Prado) with five huge El Greco paintings side by side on a single wall; they're all tall and narrow, and chock-full of the artist's typically attenuated figures. Some of the anatomy is best passed over in silence. But the color! The dramatic highlights on his characters' robes is like silken neon -- green, gold, blue, silver, red...
His large-scale religious paintings are crowded and busy in a way that usually makes my eyes water; for some reason, I don't have that reaction in his case. Maybe the most memorable El Greco I saw on this trip was in the Toledo museum, a small, simple crucifixion scene:
The spooky half-light on the hilltop city in the distance; the trees on the left bending in the wind; the sky going insane with a storm behind the dead-white figure of Jesus -- for me, in this one, everything works. Even the anatomy.
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