El Greco St John the Evangelist ca. 1605 oil on canvas Prado, Madrid |
El Greco St John the Evangelist and St John the Baptist ca. 1600-1610 oil on canvas Prado, Madrid |
El Greco Laocoön ca. 1610-14 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
El Greco Christ on the Cross ca. 1600-1610 oil on canvas Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
El Greco Portrait of Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara ca. 1600 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
El Greco St Ildefonso ca. 1603-14 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
El Greco St Andrew and St Francis ca. 1595 oil on canvas Prado, Madrid |
El Greco Christ healing the Blind ca. 1570 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
El Greco Burial of the Count of Orgaz 1586-88 oil on canvas Iglesia de Santo Tomé, Toledo |
"Not many words are needed to explain why Greco was bound to be increasingly forgotten in the subsequent two centuries, the centuries dominated by natural science, materialist thought, belief in causality and technical progress, when civilization was a matter of mechanization, of eyes and brain but no heart. Today this materialist civilization is approaching its end. It is less the external collapse I have in mind, for this was only a symptom, than the internal one that has been discernible for a generation now in all fields of life: in philosophy and intellectual life, where the humanities have again taken the lead, and where even in science the foundations of that old positivism, which were considered so firmly grounded, have been thoroughly shattered; literature and the arts have turned toward spiritual absolutes, as they did in the Middle Ages and in the period of Mannerism, and have turned their backs on fidelity to sensuous nature. There is a uniformity in all these events, which the mysterious law of human destiny seems to guide towards a new, a spiritual and anti-materialist age. In that eternal struggle between matter and spirit, the scales are inclining towards a victory of the spirit, and it is to this turn of events that we owe our recognition of Greco as a great artist and prophetic mind whose glory will continue to shine brightly."
– Max Dvořák (1874-1921), from On Greco and Mannerism, a lecture delivered in October 1920, quoted (in translation) in Norm and Form by E.H. Gombrich (London: Phaidon Press, 1966). In 1920, intelligent observers like Dvořák were still able to believe that humanity had actually learned something from the ghastly futility of World War I, and must inevitably perform better in the dawning future. One generation later his "victory of the spirit" expressed itself in Auschwitz and Hiroshima. But he was right about El Greco.
El Greco and workshop Holy Visage ca. 1586-95 oil on canvas Prado, Madrid |
El Greco Portrait of Julián Romero and his patron saint ca. 1594-1604 oil on canvas Prado, Madrid |
El Greco Annunciation ca. 1590-1603 oil on canvas Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan |
El Greco Madonna and Child with St Martina and St Agnes ca. 1597-99 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
El Greco The Trinity 1577-79 oil on canvas Prado, Madrid |