Albert Frederick Calvert

“ And his third stage was a fevered expression of his imaginative vision. We have entered a new world of extraordinary restlessness, the restlessness that must exist when spirit struggles from the bonds of the flesh. Toledo, the ardent arid city, burnt fiercely in El Greco’s blood, and, more and more, he seems to have felt that it was not enough to record facts; to have cared less to give æsthetic pleasure; but that the object of his art should be to clothe abstract ideas with life. It is something of all this that we find in his later pictures. ”

“ During the hundred and ten years that elapsed between the death of Reccared (601) and the rout of the Guadelete (711) , no fewer than fifteen sovereigns sat on the throne of Spain. Toledo was the theatre of their barbaric triumphings, their violent entrances and tragic exits. Now the city would resound with the savage, exultant yells of the townsmen, as they dragged the body of the usurper Witeric up and down the steep, uneven streets—to cast the bleeding, shapeless thing that had so lately been a king, upon a dunghill. ”

“ The rock has grown into Toledo and Toledo into the rock.
In a land where all is old, men marvel at the antiquity of this city. And when it was younger by centuries, the chroniclers, groping amid legends and fables the wildest and most extravagant, strove to penetrate the darkness of the ages and to discern the pale glimmerings of Toledo’s dawn. ”

“ Nations, the very names of which the men of the south had never heard, loomed from out the darkness of the north, and swept like a cloud of locusts over the land. The whole of Spain was desolate. Toledo, ever grim and stubborn, stood prepared to die hard. The tide of Vandal invasion surged in vain round her walls; then spent its fury in the south. The Visigoths established themselves in southern France. Under Walya they had overrun Spain, but had exchanged it, willingly enough, for Aquitania. ”

“ THE CATHEDRAL Transcending in importance all the other monuments of Toledo and, indeed, of Castile, is the Cathedral—one of the noblest specimens of Gothic architecture the world affords. The metropolitan church of Spain, it is sumptuous without gaudiness, austere without gloominess, admirably interpreting the spirit of Spanish Catholicism before it withered under the chilling influence of Philip II. and the Inquisition. The Cathedral of Toledo does not impress the foreigner as typically national. ”

“ El Greco throughout was strong enough to be true to himself and to his imagination. He knew that no system of art is final, that the achievements of artists are, in truth, the stones wherewith the Temple of Art is built. Imagination does not see commonplaces. And we recall the statement of Blake—he, too, a painter of visions of the mind: “He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.” ”

“ The very buildings, placed upon the crags beneath the great hulk of the Alcazar, repeat this impression, they rise in sharp upward and downward lines like an arrangement of swords, and make their appeal by the strange strength of their aspect. The streets are a tortuous net of steep-rising passage-ways. A city strongly itself that has suffered no change, fantastic as a city seen in a dream.{149}
Yes, to those who know Toledo, the impression of the character of the city upon El Greco will bring no surprise. ”

“ He built churches and other buildings—the classic façade of the Ayuntamiento, for instance, was modelled on his design; he carved statues, he painted pictures, there are canvases of his in the museum, in the cathedral, and in many of the churches. And in all this mass of work, it is the living force behind it that is the first impression that you gain; a kind of driving power that fascinates you, just as Toledo fascinates you, by reason of its power. El Greco was a painter able to create—that is the secret of it all. ”

“ A trusty page, spurring night and day, quickly bore the fatal tidings to the father at distant Ceuta, and the missive in which the wronged Florinda implored vengeance on her betrayer.
To the no doubt conscience-stricken Roderic, seated in good old kingly fashion upon his throne, appeared two venerable strangers with a message of mysterious import. When Hercules had founded (as some men say) Toledo, not far from the city, among the mountains, he had reared a tower, of which these uncouth brethren were the guardians, as their ancestors, in an unbroken line, had been before them. ”

“ In the luxurious gardens was the lake or albuhera, in the centre of which rose a pavilion of glass, where Al Ramân-bil-Lah, the last sovereign of Toledo, used to pass the night. “The clever architects”—we quote from the “Monumentos Arquitectónicos”—who made the lake, not only raised the waters from the river in order to fill it, but raised them above the cupola of the pavilion, over and around which they flowed incessantly, forming around it a diaphanous and crystalline mantle. Not a drop could penetrate the structure or touch the persons within. ”

“ It is the solution of the dull that genius is extravagant consciously. El Greco can have had no desire, no power, to repeat the easy, the commonplace. If strange, exaggerated even, his art is without a trace of affectation. When he{161} painted a vision he felt it natural to symbolise his idea in the way that he did. In colour, in form, he painted only what his imagination saw, gaining in colour fresh harmonies for himself, and a new suggestion of movement in his imaginative compositions, to which our imagination must find answer. ”

“ Doña Luz became a mother. Egica’s suspicions had already been enkindled, and fearing his wrath, she placed the new-born infant in a little ark and set it afloat on the bosom of the Tagus. As her maids pushed out the tiny craft from the foot of the steep path that leads down from Toledo, a radiance diffused itself around the sleeping child and for long marked his passage down the broad stream. ”

“ That is a question hard to answer in much of El Greco’s characteristic work. Perhaps the truth is that we dislike too readily what we do not easily understand. El Greco goes back to first principles and speaks in symbols with which we are not familiar. Those spectres of human kind that surprise us in so many of his pictures in Toledo, in those in the Prado, as well as in these two in the Escorial, do not suggest life as we see it; but they are inspired—they do convey his meaning. This painter’s method is a real enigma; he essayed surprising effects by separating colour into its original values ”

“ TOLEDO UNDER THE MOOR Never again was Toledo to attain to the wealth and splendour it possessed under Wamba and his successors. The invaders, fresh from the conquest of the richest provinces of Africa, were dazzled by the magnificence of the spoils that fell to them in the dark-browed city above the Tagus. The Arabian historians have need of all their powers of hyperbole to over-estimate the richness of the treasure. ”

“ Learning his art in Venice, in his early manner he is a pure Venetian, owing much to the work of the Bassani, and more to the inspiration of Tintoretto, but in Toledo he became Spanish and himself, developing there a manner in which the special temper of the race finds an expression passionate enough, not equalled again, indeed, until the advent of Goya.
There will always be some men imaginative, entirely personal, who, like El Greco, seek to express themselves, and in so doing, quite unwittingly probably, express the life of their age. ”

“ Look at this gallery of living portraits, all the life of Toledo—the life of Spain—is reflected back from those ardent faces. In St. Augustine, splendid in ecclesiastical robes, is the magnificent{169} opulence of the Catholic Church; in the livid face of the dead count, in the cowled monk and two priests is the fervid piety of a people who have felt themselves in mystical communion with God; in the young, warm beauty of St. Stephen and the lovely acolyte is the full joy and rich colour of Spain ”

“ In the Convent of San Juan de los Reyes, now the Museo Provincial, is that ‘Bird’s-Eye View{151} of Toledo,’ the picture in which we have a portrait of George Manuel Theotokopuli, El Greco’s son. At first you will be astonished, it is the strangest landscape in the world. But wait with the picture—always the danger with El Greco is that you will not linger enough. The painter who sees for himself must be studied, not dismissed as he who but sets down the common vision of things. And El Greco does give us the real Toledo in this fantastic landscape. ”

“ It was they who brought to the grim Gothic city the choicest products of the East; they alone who could combat the ravages of disease; they alone who could supply the needy king and nobles with the coin for which in Italy men paid as much as one hundred and twenty per cent. interest. Spain hated the Jew, but could not as yet do without him.
The rule of Alfonso VI.’s successors could not have been excessively harsh, for many Jewish families, hounded out of Southern Spain by an unusual manifestation of Mohammedan bigotry, took refuge within the walls of Toledo. ”

“ Toledo, during the three and a half centuries of Mohammedan dominion, never seems to have lost the outward character of a Christian town. Moorish influence she felt, and it served to soften and chasten her rough features, but Moorish she never became as did Seville and Cordoba. Yet in every corner of the old city the guides are prone to point out the buildings and remains that they fondly believe to be of Arabic workmanship. In reality, very few monuments of the Mohammedan period have survived. ”

“ It is a face of genius, but of a kind restless, unbalanced, decadent perhaps. And we understand the driving energy that burned to fever, so that at times the balance was lost between the painter’s aim and the result, and we realise that the work of such a man must be introspective, experimental, neurotic.
We know nothing almost of El Greco’s life, and if external happenings were all, the most original painter of Spain would remain an unexplained personality. His very name is uncertain, and contemporary writers, disregarding the Theotokopuli, speak of him as Domeniko Greco. ”

“ Thunder rolled, a storm burst over the land, and Roderic and his cavaliers drew not rein till they reached the palace of Toledo. Next day the stout-hearted Goths reascended to{27} the hills. But as they approached, behold a great eagle swooped down from the sky holding in its talons a flaming brand! The tower blazed up like matchwood. Then arose a great wind which carried the ashes to every part of Spain; and every man on whom a portion of the ashes fell was afterwards slain in battle by the Moors. ”

“ TOLEDO THE CAPITAL OF CASTILE The incorporation of the haughty city of the Visigoths with the kingdom of Castile was, when the first wave of enthusiasm had subsided, regarded with coldness and misgiving by its people. The Toledans were as tenacious as ever of their peculiar customs and privileges which they had hoped to maintain intact. Even with the powerful assistance of the Cid, whom he appointed Alcalde, Alfonso found the ordering of the affairs of his new capital a difficult and dangerous task. ”

“ For El Greco held truly that the province of art is to interpret, not to imitate. Every development of his art{168} seems to have come from his own mind, hardly at all from the work of other painters; from the first he was true to his ideals. And always his pictures seem to be more the work of his soul than of his hand; which, in other words, is to say that he was greater as an artist than as a painter.
Domeniko Greco, like so many of the painters of Spain, was great in portraiture ”