Transfigurations El Greco at the Met
Jordan, Patrick
ART Patrick Jordan TRANSFIGURATIONS El Greco at the Met There is simply no mistaking an El Greco. But once you identify it, do you really look at it? That is precisely the challenge facing the...
...The opulence, light, and ambiance he encountered in Venice jump from his subsequent paintings, adding new subject matter, the use of perspective, and a dynamism that pulls the viewer into his scenes...
...In 1571, Venice and the Papal States joined a coalition of the willing under the mighty Philip II of Spain, and defeated the Turks at Lepanto...
...One of his beringed hands grips the chair, the other languidly protests the artist's impertinence...
...The portrait of Fray Hortensio Felix Paravic is the obverse...
...Still, his personal fortunes foundered and he was drawn to the court of Philip II in Madrid...
...John (Rev 6:9-11) is here as well...
...Its helpful wall inscriptions prepare you for what it calls "The Art of the Spirit," on view in the next salon...
...It was to be his home for the rest of his career...
...Philip was constructing a massive palace, the Escorial, and needed artisans...
...To the left, John, like a prophet of lamentation, seems to be imploring the God beyond the blood-stained clouds to avert the impending catastrophe...
...He's not looking at you, but you know he sees you...
...Luke painting the Virgin and Child, and Mary at the hour of her death...
...The Roman Church had just completed the Council of Trent (1545-63), and the so-called Catholic Reformation/Counter Reformation was in full sail...
...Next to it, the myth of Lao-coon, acted out before an even wider backdrop of Toledo, entwines Hellenic mythology with the events of El Greco's day...
...The Met has tipped you off on how best to read El Greco: he sometimes repeats but is infinitely variable...
...A young, ascetic poet (who later dedicated a number of sonnets to El Greco), he represents what was best in seventeenth-century Spanish Catholicism: intelligence, purity, and mystical awareness marshaled in service of the good...
...The Met devotes seven well-lit salons to this expatriate Greek's portraits, landscapes, and studies of the mystical life...
...Viewing the three at once is like watching the sequence on a digital camera the settings are similar, the colors repeat but as you zero in, each frame reveals its distinctive secrets...
...Here the infant Jesus is the light at the center, a photon who illuminates not only Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds, but the angelic figures above...
...His cloak shimmers with a frisson of blues...
...Also stunning in this room is a vertical Annunciation, dark but glimmering...
...The two most striking here are of a cardinal inquisitor [see detail, page 16] and of a friar poet...
...In room 4, the artist is shown coming into his own...
...When you enter it, you are dazzled by the size, range of subject matter, and variety of execution presented...
...Picasso remarked that El Greco was a cubist in structure, and here you sense it unmistakably in the massive formations that sweep the planes of Spain...
...His landscape of Toledo is here, the city's white walls rising above a luxuriant panorama of green and anchored beneath brooding, Mahler-like skies...
...If you can't make it to the Met to take in his gaze, track him down at his permanent home, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts...
...Room 6 is a vestibule to the climactic final gallery, a quiet space for distinguished, sober saints...
...Reintroduced to a Western master, you leave this exhibit seeing the world differently...
...And finally, The Adoration of the Shepherds (1610), one of the largest canvasses in the exhibit, is a superb representative of light overcoming darkness...
...The Holy Spirit, a white dove, is placed in the absolute center of the painting and banks like a small jet passing over Mary's head...
...The former is anchored in his armchair in full ecclesiastical regalia and red biretta before a golden tapestry...
...This is no effeminate John but a Rodin-like figure attempting to hold back the destructive tide...
...That is precisely the challenge facing the Metropolitan Museum of Art's ambitious retrospective (more than eighty pieces, including icons, paintings, and two small sculptures) of the work of Domenikos Theotokopou-los (1541-1614), on view in New York through January 11...
...There is a remarkable Crucifixion, done mostly in blacks, grays, and whites, in which Jesus seems to float over two stationary figures (two kneeling donors...
...The El Greco show moves to London's National Gallery from February 11 through May 23,2004.] Patrick Jordan is Commonweal's managing editor...
...Martin met Christ in the man, and it changed his life...
...In the exhibit's second room, side by side, the Met presents two depictions of Jesus healing a blind man in a courtyard, and one of Jesus driving moneychangers from the Temple...
...You might call room 4 the cloud room...
...In a vertical representation of St...
...The exhibit opens with two of his earliest works, classic Byzantine-style icons depicting St...
...Born in Crete when it was a Venetian protectorate, he began as an icon painter...
...It falls stiffly but is softened by the artist's use of iridescent tones...
...The scene's rendering of compassion is nearly overwhelming...
...At age twenty-six, Domenikos left his native island and Orthodox roots for Venice...
...They convey the artist's serious, lifelong attraction to religious subjects, and hint at his later, trademark elongated figures (a feature that came to the fore in his forties...
...All its paintings whether depicting saints, the Holy Family, the Annunciation, or the Resurrection are set outside, with the sky in constant play...
...El Greco was and remained an outsider...
...El Greco made his pitch with The Adoration of the Name of Jesus, displayed in room 3. A somewhat formulaic tableau depicting Philip II kneeling before the heavenly court in the guise of the Spanish imperium, it landed El Greco only one other royal commission...
...Both Martin and the beggar convey a human nobility that raises the mind and the eye to things above...
...El Greco's portraits have been hailed as forerunners of those of Rembrandt and Velazquez...
...Martin of Tours, for example, the officer divides his cloak for a beggar outside the walls of Toledo...
...The latter is a divine pieta in which God the Father lifts the body of his dead Son beneath the light cast by the Spirit...
...Here, dad in black armor and astride a white stallion, Martin covers the dark-skinned beggar with his ample green robe...
...He's the sort of comptroller general you wish had been on the board of Enron...
...One thinks of El Greco's stunning rendition of Pentecost in the Prado (not on view here), where the flames over Mary and the Apostles flash as if shot from a cannon...
...but you're glad he's not your confessor...
...El Greco designed this work for his own grave, and tradition has it that the old man paying homage in the foreground is the artist himself...
...From Venice, the young artist moved down through Italy to Rome, where (1570-76) he was introduced to the powerful Farnese family, the intrigues of the papal court, and the architecture of the city...
...The great republic was in its political and artistic heyday...
...This is El Greco at his apex, his visual language so astute, free, and accomplished that he will stand forever as a brilliant, one-of-a-kind outsider...
...The dove bursts from and imparts a flame, and beneath Mary's feet a small bush turns to fire, an iconic reference to the New Covenant...
...His mirthless eyes scan through rimmed glasses to another part of the room...
...There is much more to tell of this exhibit: El Greco's influence on Picasso and Jackson Pollock, and even why his religious imitators produced so much second-rate art...
...Missing are two important works, his masterpiece The Burial of Count Orgaz in the church of Santo Tome in Toledo, and The Trinity in the Prado...
...The massive, apocalyptic The Opening of the Fifth Seal [see cover detail], based on the vision of St...
...He remained there for three years, and came under the influence of Titian and Tintoretto...
...It will have the veils dropping from many eyes...
...The clouds behind the crucified are racing as if to announce a cataclysm but in the midst Christ seems fully at peace...
...It is a quality often conveyed in El Greco's figures at the Met, even the more angular, dark, ethereal ones...
...They also introduce us to his signature in Greek, which he employed throughout his career...
...The following year, the outsider migrated to Toledo, a university town and the nation's ecclesiastical seat, the "holy Toledo" of numerous churches and potential contracts...
...These early treasures are beautifully displayed and set the tone for all that follows...
...This hierarch is the very summation of a lord high inquisitor...
...The next room displays a series of portraits some busts, some full length...
...It was a heady time to be in Rome, and El Greco came under the influence not only of Michelangelo but of the elegant new Mannerism that followed and issued a generation later into the Baroque...
Vol. 130 • December 2003 • No. 21
