Monday, October 30, 2017

Mannerism Redeemed in 1920

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