Journey to a painting: 'View of Toledo', El Greco
When El Greco when he arrived in Toledo he had consumed half of his life, and he would already consume the other half there. He was thirty-six years old and clearly determined to make a name for himself in Western art history. Behind him were his cretan beginnings , tied to a Byzantine style that should remain untouched for ever and ever, and where therefore any innovation was unfeasible. Behind Venice , dominated by giants like Titian, Tintoretto or Veronese ; Y Rome , where the shadows of Raphael and Michelangelo they continued to obscure everything that did not spring directly as an extension of them.
El Greco by then was already El Greco , and very sure of the style he must have been when he considered himself qualified to become court painter to Philip II . As a test, he presented to decorate the El Escorial Monastery still under construction a 'Martyrdom of Saint Maurice' so motley, so eccentric and confusing –and, frankly, so absolutely great- that he did not like a hair the severe king of Spain. “The Saints have to be painted in such a way that they do not take away the desire to pray in them” , Father José de Sigüenza would warn about the case in his book "History of the Order of San Geronimo" of 1602, which also stated that Theotokopoulos "It makes few happy, although they say it is very artistic."
To cover the noblest areas of the monastery with frescoes, Felipe II chose the Italians Cambiaso, Tibaldi and Zuccaro -as correct as irrelevant-, so that El Greco threw in the towel and decided to focus on Toledo , religious capital of the country, where he would end up imposing that extravagant style that was not to everyone's liking.
'The Adoration of the Magi' (1565), El Greco's Byzantine stage
Maybe that's why this exists 'View of Toledo' which can be interpreted as a tribute to the city where the Cretan painted his best works , where he did not lack clients, he opened a prosperous workshop, joined his partner, Jeronima of the Caves , and the only known child was born to him, Jorge Manuel Theotocopuli. A tribute to Toledo without Toledo , since the painted city did not have the same configuration as the one built with stone and brick.
El Greco knew that art has its own truth and that if he did his job well, that truth would turn out to be more real than reality itself. That is why he started from the elevated view from the north, but later he rearranged the buildings, advancing to a visible place the Cathedral, and also made the whole emerge from a light that does not exist, a light that the expressionists would have liked to plot and that was present in his most daring paintings of the time, such as the 'Adoration of the Shepherds' (c.1612-1614) or the sublime 'Opening of the Fifth Seal of the Apocalypse' (c.1608-1614).
Unlike in those cases, here there are no human figures; only city, mountain and river . And this is a rarity within a rarity, because at the time and place in which the work was painted, landscape was not an autonomous genre outside of scientific representation. Its role was limited to serving as a setting for characters and actions, to provide some credibility to the scenes represented.
Domenikos Theotokopoulos, El Greco
But, again, representation and verisimilitude seemed to matter to Theotokopoulos just enough to have a pass at that time when decorum was persecuted with great care and one was not paid a saint because the martyrdom had been painted by skinning instead of roasting on the grill as the canons and good logic mandate.
And yet, contrary to what it may seem to many, the sky that appears in this painting is one of the most faithful and lucid representations of a sky that art of all time has given. The skies of El Greco seem to be the exclusive product of mysticism only to those who have not contemplated the authentic variety that the Spanish plateau offers in this area, capable of giving us any Tuesday afternoon a repertoire of colors, shapes and volumes that an aurora borealis from Fairbanks, Alaska, could hardly match . So, with a realistic looking expressionist sky and a believable but totally rigged layout, Toledo has never been more authentic than when El Greco invented it.
'View of Toledo'. Domenikos Theotokopoulos, El Greco (c. 1604-1614)