Petruschki’s Journey into the Blue - Chapter 14 - El Greco - The Green between Heaven and Earth
Für die deutsche Version des Blogposts bitte HIER klicken
In December 2019 we went on a journey by bus and train through Spain, France, Germany, Belgium, Great Britain and Ireland. The aim was the exhibition Protest! by Derek Jarman in Dublin, there was so much to see on the way there. We visited 21 exhibitions and discovered many stories. More about this in Chapter 1 Dreaming into the Blue. We are still at the very beginning of our trip in Paris, now visiting the Greco exhibition in the Grand Palais. Here is the first part about El Greco. And here the third part The long limbs dance in light and shadow.
The painting Saint Martin and the Beggar was made between 1595 and 1597. It can now be seen in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
In the exhibition we see already from a distance the beautiful colors of this picture glow. Green, blue, silver-white, gold and the colors of the skin. Somehow we are slowly pushed in front of the monumetal work from the stream of visitors. Lots of people, tight space. Up close you can see the strong brushstrokes. Expressionist to the abstract. Before our eyes, the bare, graceful, dirty feet of the beggar, very close. His leg wound. The horse's slender pasterns and hooves. The landscape around Toledo, magical in this green, blue and silver. A water wheel, the shimmering castle. From near to far, the picture undergoes an astonishing transformation. From a distance it becomes a lively theatrical scene.
This picture is monumental with the dimensions of almost two by one meters. From below you look up, up to the two people and the horse. They loom large over you and filling the background above is Toledo in the distance and the river landscape of the Tejo. In contrast to the beggar, Saint Martin is realistically depicted as a young nobleman in gilded armor on an Arabian horse. The figure of the beggar, on the other hand, is rather unreal, downright distorted, sharply outlined and yet blurred, as if he came from another world. Christ said to Martin in a dream: "What you have done or given to one of the most deprived, you have done or given to me." Perhaps the beggar comes from this dream.”
Saint Martin hands the beggar a wide, green part of his cloak. It covers the beggar's nakedness and connects heaven and earth. I want to look at this green all the time.
There is no eye contact between the two of them, so the story seems like a kind of ritual.
Saint Martin lived in the 400th century and was a member of the imperial cavalry under Emperor Constantine the Great. He was stationed in Armiens and one day when he found a freezing beggar outside the city gates, he shared his coat with him. Then Christ appeared to him in a dream and said these very words. He left military service immediately.
There is this letter it is said he has written to the emperor:
“Until today I have served you, my king, now I want to serve my God and the weak. I don't want to fight and kill any longer. I hereby give you my sword back. If you think I am a coward, tomorrow I will approach the enemy without weapons. "
El Greco, portrait of a nobleman from the Leiva family 1580
El Greco had been living in Toledo for some time when he painted this portrait of a nobleman from the Leiva family.
Again the gaze makes me curious. El Greco manages to make me brood over the young man. That look again, as before in the portrait of the architect. So direct and with the invitation to read it or to interpret it. As if you were in conversation with this person and had to find out what that look had to say to you. I am amazed because the serenity does not at all fit in with the obvious youth. The gaze is fixed without being arrogant, as it might be with a young man from a wealthy family.
As you can see, El Greco was also a fantastic portrait painter. Already in Rome he had great success with it. Allegedly, a self-portrait is said to have opened the doors of the Farnese Palace for him on the recommendation of Clovio in Rome. It no longer exists, but there is evidence that other painters greatly admired this picture. In portraiture, too, El Greco moved from the Venetian to a more powerful and expressive style of his own.
Saint Francis Receives the Stigmata 1585-90 Oil on canvas 102 x 97 cm Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
Francis of Assisi is certainly my favorite saint. He could talk to animals and there is the legend of the miracle of roses when he walked through the country with Saint Clare. Then the roses bloomed in winter as a sign that they should stay together.
The legend shown in this picture is as follows: In 1226 a Seraph, a six-winged angel, a high rank among all the angels, appeared to Saint Francis. Francis saw the crucified Christ in the three pairs of wings. From him Francis of Assisi received the stigmata, the wounds of Christ, which he suffered on the cross.
The face is illuminated and you can see a small wound on the long, narrow hands. Francis wears the woolen gray monk's robe as in all pictures of all painters, down through the centuries. The slender, elongated figure and the fixed gaze, the white brushstrokes of the light-filled cloud, all of this creates an aura as if from another world, a spiritual world.
El Greco was a lay Franciscan himself. The Franciscans had a high level of education and Toledo was considered a center of theology dominated by Franciscans. Greco's paintings of Saint Francis were in great demand. And he earned well with this subject.
El Greco Virgen Maria ca 1590
This version of the Mater Dolorosa can now be found in the Strasbourg Museum. It is a serious, very fine face. The stern look of the big dark eyes is so intense that it seems accusatory. The lips are closed and pressed together. The version that El Greco painted seven years later and that now hangs in the Prado in Madrid is completely different and yet almost identical.
El Greco Virgen Maria 1597
There are seven years between these two images. I would like to know who he was painting. Has the young woman modeled for him twice or has he copied his own picture and then made these small changes: the eyes widened a little, so that you can see not only melancholy and severity, but also a confident glow in them. The mouth a little more relaxed and softer. Perhaps it is really Jeronima de las Cuevas, the woman who was the mother of his son Jorge Manuel Theotokopoulos and about whom nothing else is known. Nothing! There isn't even a Wikipedia entry that I could link to. There was and is much speculation. But no evidence. There is no marriage certificate. But it is proven that she was the mother of his son. Otherwise she appears only once in a kind of testament in which El Greco thought of his son and Jeronima de las Cuevas and described her as a person with a clear conscience in whom he had confidence.
El Greco La Dama con la Flor 1595 - 1600
This is the Lady with a Flower in Her Hair 1595-1600. It is the only portrait of a woman without a religious subject that El Greco has signed. The similarity to the Mater Dolorosa and to some Marys and Magdalenes is unmistakable.
Jeronima de las Cuevas and he are said to have met when she was a model for him at the beginning of his time in Toledo. If they would have married. there would definitely be some kind of document, it would have been recorded. There are many theories that there are no traces of her: she was a prostitute, she was a noblewoman and was not allowed to marry him (but there was no noble family with such a name in Toledo and the surrounding area), she was of Moorish or Jewish descent, she died in childbirth.
One does not know. In any case, El Greco managed to keep his private life very covered and protected throughout his life.
El Greco The Burial of the Count of Orgaz 1587
This is the incredible painting by El Greco The Burial of the Count of Orgaz. Above the heavenly, below the worldly, separated by a row of men's heads. The connection between the two is somewhat cloudy and narrow, almost like a birth canal. Most of these men, the secular ones, were still alive at the time and the picture became a great success, because the population wanted to see their nobles painted. But that was soon over. Because from then on El Greco renounced spatial clarity and perspective accuracy. This made him an unpopular painter over the centuries. He portrayed himself in this picture. He is the sixth from the left in the row of men's faces, I think, who has a raised hand in front of him. The little boy on the left in the lower frame is his son.
El Greco Detail, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz 1587
El Greco 1578 Detail, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz 1578
We know that, because there is a piece of paper seen in his pocket with Greco's signature and the year 1578 written on it in Greek, but the picture was made in 1587. If Jeronima de las Cuevas was the model for the mother Dolorosa, she couldn’t have died at the birth of her son: the two paintings were created in the 1590s.
Many sources describe that El Greco was an exceedingly loving father. Until El Greco's death, son and father lived in the same house, even when Jorge Manuel Theotokopoulos had his own family. He worked in his father's workshop and also created his own altarpieces. Later he turned to architecture and designed the town hall of Toledo with 2 other architects and was the builder in the construction of the local cathedral.
Probably El Greco Portrait of his son Jorge Emanuel 1603
Smiling eyes…
La familia de El Greco. c. 1605
This picture La Familia de El Greco from 1605 has long been puzzled, whether it is from Jorge Manuel Theotokopoulos or from his father. Nowadays it is more attributed to the son. The embroidering woman in the middle could be Jorge Manuel's first wife or his mother. The way in which the face and posture are painted suggests El Greco. It may be that they worked together here too. The son finished some of his father's works. Source: Diario de a Bordo
Maybe El Greco was gay or bisexual. El Greco loved ... He bought a house with three separate apartments in Toledo. He lived there until his death with his son and his friend, confidante, assistant, secretary Francesco Preboste (1554-1607). He had come to Spain from Italy with El Greco as his student. They lived and worked together for over three decades. His name is recorded in many documents and papers. In 1607 his track is lost. Some of El Greco's paintings, such as Laocoon or his Saint Sebastian, exude great homoeroticism.
Source: Homosexualität in Spanien
El Greco The martyrdom of Saint Sebastian ca. 1577
El Greco Laokoon 1610 – 1614
All speculation about a painter who was so extraordinary in his way of painting.
In the next chapter:
The grim cardinal in pink and lace, a monk as a best friend, an angel on the Mount of Olives and Jesus on the cross.
