However, when the completed work was submitted to the king he failed to understand the strange new treatment, and though it remained at the Escorial, it was not placed over the appointed altar. His next important work was the famous "Burial of Count Orgaz" (El Enterrio), for the church of St. Tome at Toledo. It treats of a miracle. Don Gonzalo Ruiz, governor of Orgaz, had, during his lifetime, professed devotion to St. Augustin and St. Stephen, who descended from heaven when his body was about to be buried in the church of St. Tome, which he had rebuilt, and laid him to rest to the wonder of the attend ing clergy and mourners, who are shown in a long row of vivid Spanish heads, placed like a frieze horizontally across the picture. The upper portion of the painting depicts the reception of the court in heaven. The supernatural world is joined to the realistic scene below by the harmonious lines of a geometric design recall ing the tracery of a Gothic window. Again the price of the picture was the cause of a lawsuit. El Greco henceforth seemed wholly occupied by his imaginative vision. All elements of secondary value are discarded, and everything is subordinated to the realization of a rhythmical unity. In 1590 he completed, for the church of Dona Maria de Aragon at Madrid, an altar piece with subjects from the life of Christ. Three pictures in the Prado representing "The Crucifixion," "The Resurrection" and "The Baptism," came from this church. An "Annunciation" at Villanueve y Cetru, formerly in the Prado, probably also be longed to this group. Here colour and form are used as a means of emphasizing dramatic expression, with a result that, to many, is exaggeration and distortion. The figures are elongated, the limbs twisted, and strange streaks of light flash across. The artist does not represent nature as it is, but uses it for his own ends. Here is restless religious strife, tumult, agony and mystic absorption. His contemporaries thought he had gone mad; others explained that he was suffering from astigmatism.
In 1597 followed the works for the chapel of San Jose at Toledo, of which "The Coronation of the Virgin" and "The St. Joseph" are still in their original place over the high altar, and "The St. Martin" and "The Virgin with Saints" are in the Widener collection at Philadelphia. Fewer figures are introduced, the colouring is silvery, the style severer and simplified. The same sober tendency is displayed in the paintings for the hospital of the Caridad at Illescas, where the "San Ildefonso" combines poetry with realism in the interpretation of a Spanish legend. Other works of this period are : "The Dream of Philip II." and the "St. Francis," "St. Peter" and "St. Eugene" in the Escorial, and the splendid portrait of the Inquisitor, Neno Guevara (Have meyer collection, New York), which seems to anticipate Velaz quez's "Innocent X." The most representative work of the closing stage, character ized by an intensification of his imaginative qualities, is "The Assumption," in the church of San Vicente at Toledo, com pleted in 1613, a few months before his death. It is a powerful and original composition showing the Virgin rising through the air among clouds of angels. Other important works of the late period are "The St. Bernard" (1603) and "The Plan of Toledo," in the Greco museum at Toledo; "The Pentecost," in the Prado; "The Laocoon" in Munich, and his last work, "The Baptism" at the Hospital of Tavera. El Greco anticipates imaginative land scape painting of later periods in the romantic representation of "Toledo in a Storm" (Havemeyer collection) where the old city, with its Alcazar and its cathedral is seen towering over the ravine of the Tajo against a thundery sky. Another late work is the fine portrait of Fray Hortensio Felix Paravicino at Boston. The Prado possesses a number of portraits painted at various times.
Though few of his sitters are known to us by name, they are evidently all eminent men, of proud and distinguished race, types unchanged in Toledo to-day. These austere heads, with pointed
beards resting on white ruffs, emerge from a sombre background and are modelled in cool tones. The eyes are full of inward life and reserve, the hands white and sensitive. As a painter of women, El Greco produced two masterpieces; "The Lady with the Flower," in the collection of Sir J. Stirling Maxwell, and "The Lady with the Mantilla" in the Johnson collection, Phila delphia. The portrait of an old man in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, passes as a self-portrait of the artist. Palomino states that Velazquez greatly admired El Greco's portraits, and there can be no doubt that he learned much from his predecessor.
El Greco had but few pupils, among them Maim) and Tristan; they were unable to live up to his standard. Giuseppe Martinez explains : "None cared to follow his capricious and extravagant style, which was only suitable to himself." His son, Jorge Manuel, painter, sculptor and architect, born in 1578, worked with him, carrying out the paintings, which he left unfinished. The mother's name is given as Dona Jeronima de las Cuevas, but it is not stated that she was El Greco's wife. El Greco died at an advanced age, and was interred like a noble in the church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo on April 7, 1614, all Toledo mourning his death. When dangerously ill, he made his son universal heir, and gave him power to make his will. He left 115 finished paint ings, 15 sketches, 4 grisailles and 15o drawings. Many of the pictures were replicas ; the drawings no longer exist. There is but one authentic drawing by him, in the Biblioteca Nacional (Mad rid). From his will we may draw inferences about his mode of life. He occupied 24 rooms of a palace of the Marques de Villena, once situated in the Paseo del Transito, on the edge of the cliff overlooking the Jajo, near the present Greco museum. He owned a good library of Greek books, including Homer, Aris totle, Plutarch; also editions of Tasso, Petrarch and Ariosto, and numerous volumes on architecture. Pacheco, who visited the painter in 1611, says that he was a great philosopher given to witty sayings, a sculptor and architect as well as a painter. He speaks of a cupboard, in which were models in clay which he made use of in his pictures, and says he saw the originals of all that he had painted in his life, painted in oils on smaller can vases (Arte de La Pintura). The great orator, F. Ortensio, Paravicino, and the celebrated poet, Luis de Gongona, wrote sonnets in his memory. A quotation from the writings of St. Theresa, the mystic of Spain, who was his contemporary, will help to explain the trend of El Greco's art. "I see a white and a red of a quality as one finds nowhere in nature, for they shine more brightly than the colours we perceive; and I see pictures, as no painter has yet painted, whose models one finds nowhere in nature; and yet they are nature itself, and life itself, and the most perfect beauty imaginable." Forgotten for centuries, Greco's art has only recently come into its own. It makes a strong appeal to the younger artists of the day. Manet was already a great admirer, the followers of Cezanne lay special claims on him as a forerunner, and Expressionists search for the principles, deter mined emphasis and distortion of form in his works.
See M. B. Cossio, El Greco (1908) ; Lo que se sabe de la vida del Greco (1914); El entierro de sonde de Orgaz (1914); Borja de San Roman, El Greco en Toledo (Iwo) ; A. L. Mayer, El Greco (Munich, 1911) ; Domenico Theotocopuli, El Greco, Kritische Verzeichnis des Gesamtwerkes (Munich, 1926) ; J. F. Willumsen, Le Jeunesse du Peintre El Greco (1927) ; M. Barre's, Le Greco (191I) ; H. Kehner, El Greco (Munich, 1920) ; A. F. Calvert and C. G. Hartley, El Greco (1909) ; E. du Cue Trapier, El Greco (1925) ; Virginia Hersch, The Bird of God: The Romance of El Greco (1929). (I. A. R.)