A touring exhibition attempts to place El Greco squarely in the context of his period. Despite undeniable influences of other artists, however, his work simply transcends time and category.

Adoration of the Shapards, about 1612-14. Oil on canvas, 125 1/2 x 70 7/8 in. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

l Greco's best-known paintings, with their writhing figures, lashing brushstrokes, and lightening-limned forms bursting from darkness, are unlike those of any other artist. Along with van Gogh, El Greco is regarded the epitome of the lone genius, spurning the art of his time to pursue his unique, interior vision. An exhibition currently at the Metropolitan, however, shows that he was not quite the lone wolf we generally take him for, and he came to his signature style slowly, through assimilating and ultimately transcending a variety of aesthetic outlooks and techniques.
        The first major retrospective on the artist in twenty years, El Greco brings together about eighty paintings and spans the entirety of his career. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art through January 11, the show will travel to London's National Gallery, appearing there from February 11 through May 23.
        In a foreword to the exhibition catalogue, Metropolitan director Philippe de Montebello points out that El Greco was rescued from obscurity by the Romantics of the nineteenth century, who sensed in the emotive, mystical artist a kindred spirit. The Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Symbolists, Cubists, and various Modernists through the twentieth century all claimed him as their direct forebear and drew on him for inspiration. This helped to foster the now prevalent appreciation of El Greco as a protomodernist whose art stood outside his time, waiting to be discovered by the modern era. For the most part this exhibition seeks to debunk or, at least, to counterbalance this view. Catalogue essays by historian John Elliott and exhibition curator David Davies explain the artistic and religious milieu in which El Greco worked, and how these impacted his art. Their main point is that El Greco was a man of his time, and his art should be seen as such as well.
        The actual exhibition, as installed with great care at the Metropolitan by the museum's Keith Christiansen, both underscores and undermines this thesis. The paintings are hung in a different order than they are presented in the catalogue. The display, grouped mostly by genre and in generally chronological order, shows an eye for drama.
        It begins with two icons painted by the young El Greco in his native Crete. He was trained in the Greek Orthodox tradition of formulaic icon painting, but these early works show him straining to break out of the Byzantine mold. In the next few rooms one sees work he did when he moved to Venice and then Rome, learning with varying degrees of success Renaissance techniques in portraying perspective, human anatomy, mass, and three-dimensionality. He sought to adopt the Venetian flair for color, Titian's expressive brushwork, and the Mannerists' way of emphasizing imagination over reality. Multiple versions of Christ Healing the Blind and The Purification of the Temple show his progress.
        Impressively framed by successive doorways, the Louvre's large Crucifixion with Two Donors is hung so that one sees it from afar in the first room and the several rooms following. When one finally reaches the room in which it is situated, surrounding paintings announce along with the Crucifixion that here, in works from El Greco's first decades in Spain (where he moved in his mid-thirties), the artist has found himself. This is the El Greco we know: those elongated, sinuous figures draped in stiff robes that fold like crumpled metal; skies with clouds like shredded veils lit from behind and wondrously contorted.
        By this time in the exhibition, one feels rather inundated by a surfeit of penitent saints and other religious figures exuding Counter-Reformation piety from every pore. One almost wants to cry, "Enough, already!" At this point, the exhibition wisely opens to a large room devoted solely to El Greco's portraits, and one is immediately grounded to the earth. Whereas the artist's saints, Virgins, Christs, and other religious figures tend to look rather alike--formulas of the human--his portraits penetratingly reveal individual people. El Greco not only captures the distinct personality of each person; he vividly conveys the inner spirit, the living soul. It is no wonder that artists such as Vel squez admired his portraits, even while they found his religious works bizarre.
        This room--the largest display of El Greco portraits ever assembled--clears the mental pallette. One is anchored, yet open to what may come next. Then one goes through a short tunnel-like room with a few portraitlike depictions of saints and steps into the last, large room, devoted to El Greco's outpourings over the final fifteen years or so of his life. It is as if, with one step, one has been catapulted into another universe. The spiritual power and sheer excess of it overwhelms. Human figures seem not to be made of flesh so much as rippling flame. They dwell in a perpetual night or twilight, lit only by the sudden onslaught of a cold, unearthly light. The paintings become, like icons, doorways onto the spiritual realm, where the viewer is invited to experience the whirlwind of revelation directly. Here it is clear that, although El Greco assimilated much from the art of his day--as previous rooms attested--in the end he transcended it all and forged his own utterly unique vision. He leaps beyond his time into the ages--and into eternity.

Byzantine Beginnings

Those late visionary works to some degree recall, in terms of purpose and a few pictorial techniques, El Greco's beginnings as an artist. Born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in 1541, he became a master icon painter in his native Crete, which was then a possession of the Venetian Republic. (The name we know him by, Italian for "the Greek," was a nickname he probably acquired during his years in Italy.) The Dormition of the Virgin, painted sometime before 1567, is one of his post-Byzantine-style icons. It was identified as one of his works only in 1983, when his signature was discovered. Looking at it, one can only be amazed that El Greco became the artist he ultimately did. At first glance, this looks for all the world like a tradition-bound, archaically styled icon. Yet closer inspection shows the young artist trying to incorporate elements he found in Italian visual sources, probably prints. Whereas Christ is traditionally portrayed in Orthodox dormition scenes standing upright, frontally, behind the recumbent Virgin, El Greco has him lean tenderly over his dying mother, receiving her soul in the form of a swaddled babe. Above him, the Holy Spirit descends as a radiant dove (not part of the established iconography for the dormition of the Virgin), and it is the only thing portrayed in naturalistic foreshortening. Apostles assembled around the Virgin are unusually animated and emotional. The artist has painted the scene with swift, painterly strokes that, while just conforming to the post-Byzantine style, impart immediacy and heartfelt intensity.
        Although for the next decade El Greco sought to leave behind his Orthodox pictorial heritage, it remained an inescapable and valuable foundation. It bore fruit again particularly in his late religious works, when naturalism was largely forsaken.
        El Greco moved to Venice in 1567 and quickly became a disciple of Titian, whose late, loosely brushed style left an indelible impression. He also avidly studied the work of Tintoretto, Veronese, and Jacopo Bassano. In 1570 he moved to Rome, where Michelangelo--who had died six years before--was still the major art force. From the

The Annunciation, mid 1570s. Oil on canvas, 46 x 38 5/8 in. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

Venetians (and, if the recent restoration of the Sistine Chapel revealed the truth, perhaps from Michelangelo as well) El Greco learned the use of vivid, clear color. His contact with Mannerist painters broadened his Neoplatonic convictions that art should be more the product of the imagination than the replication of the world of appearances.
        An Annunciation painted in the mid 1570s before El Greco's departure to Spain shows the artist doing his best to paint in the Italian High Renaissance manner. One looks at this painting and gapes, "This is an El Greco?" The figures are stocky and rounded, perhaps inspired by Michelangelo's. The colors are clear, bold, and bright, and the design is unusually straightforward for El Greco. There is no attempt to probe the inner psychology of the Virgin as she hears the extraordinary announcement--she just gazes at the archangel, who looks rather disengaged from his task. They are simply figures depicted in appropriate poses. The artist is having trouble painting the draping of clothing in the Western manner and in foreshortening the Virgin's turned head. The base of her robe, ostensibly resting on the floor, appears to float unaccountably above it.
        El Greco reputedly disparaged Michelangelo as a painter; according to some accounts, he even proposed to repaint the Sistine Chapel himself. These assertions might be apocryphal--indeed, Michelangelo's influence is discernable in El Greco's art for years to come--yet certainly he was highly ambitious and argumentative and had an exalted opinion of his own talents. Looking at this Annunciation, however, which Davies calls "perhaps his most fully resolved picture in the Italian manner," it is not hard to see why, in a city teeming with artists, El Greco failed to win a major church commission.
        His portraits were another matter. Giulio Clovio (about 1571-72), depicting the artist's friend and protector in Rome, and a Portrait of a Man from about 1576 show a mastery not evident in the Annunciation and El Greco's other religious pictures of the time. When he had a real person to work from, he created a coherent and perceptive image. In fact, during his stay in Rome, he was most noted as a portraitist.
        But the ambitious painter wanted bigger fish to fry. In 1576, El Greco left for Spain, seeking to become the court painter of Phillip II, who needed artists for his new palace-cum-monastic retreat, the Escorial. Phillip did not take him on, however: the king wanted paintings that conveyed Counter-Reformation orthodoxy in plain terms, not an artist's inventive fantasy. The painting El Greco apparently submitted as his bid for patronage, The Adoration of the Name of Jesus, failed to win the king's favor on the grounds of its lack of decorum and narrative clarity. (And here, the king had a point.)
        In the meantime, El Greco had won an important commission to decorate three altars in a church in Toledo. He wound up staying in Toledo for the rest of his life--nearly forty years. The city was no longer the political capital of Spain, but as the country's ecclesiastical center it was the vortex of the Spanish Counter-Reformation. A cosmopolitan city, it had foreign communities (including a Greek one) and a university that provided the well-read El Greco with an intellectual circle of friends and patrons. With little in the way of artistic competition, El Greco was able to follow his own muse.
        And he flourished. Within five years of his departure from Rome, his works achieved a high level of sophistication, and the "El Greco look" jelled. This is especially evident in The Crucifixion with Two Donors, from about 1580. In this large canvas the Savior hangs on the cross, his marble-pure body a graceful curve unmarred by any spear hole. He looks heavenward without apparent physical pain, and seems to be praying for the two donors portrayed below--and by extension, all of mankind. Perhaps this is not Jesus at his temporal crucifixion, but, as the Church father Origen described, Christ who hangs on the cross until the last sinner is saved. Behind him in the sky, powerfully rendered in almost abstract terms, a battle between darkness and light threatens to rend the cosmos. Only the beauteous crucified Lord gives hope for cosmic healing. As Davies points out several times in the catalogue, El Greco was not concerned with who Christ is so much as what he is.
        Two portraits from the first decade of the seventeenth century show El Greco entering his final, most fluent style. The celebrated A Cardinal from 1600-01 is a landmark in the history of European art. It is considered so because the artist here redefined portraiture, going beyond mere description to make a probing psychological exploration of the sitter.

A Cardinal (probably Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara), 1600-01. Oil on canvas, 67 3/8 in. x 42 1/2 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Since 1902, the subject has generally been identified as Cardinal Don Fernando Ni–o de Guevara, the inquisitor general and archbishop of Seville, though this is not certain. The fact that this may be the head honcho of the merciless Spanish Inquisition has inevitably influenced what people read into the picture. In the catalogue entry for this painting, Christiansen describes the cardinal as "perched like some magnificent bird of prey" and notes, "He examines the viewer with an air of implacable, even cruel detachment."
        Another outstanding portrait is Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino, from about 1609. Paravicino was a brilliant Trinitarian friar who at the age of twenty-one had become a professor of rhetoric and was a prolific poet and a renowned orator. He became a friend of El Greco's during the painter's last years and dedicated four sonnets to his memory. Here the 68-year-old painter uses free, quick, almost impressionist brushwork to create an image of the young friar that breathes with life. El Greco has a way of making even the quality of his brushstrokes communicate the character of the person he portrays. In An Elderly Gentleman from the late 1580s or 1590s, most of the brushwork is downward and soft, giving (along with the somber hues) the sense of a gentle and in some ways depressive man. The darting brushwork in Fray Hortensio, on the other hand, conveys a fleet mind and a passionate, artistic temperament. In a painting that is almost monochromatic, El Greco manages to transmit not only the subtle intelligence of his subject but his charisma as a speaker and a strong underlying sensuality. This comes across not only through the informal pose of the sitter and the caressive, diagonal brush strokes that form his garment, but the curious, bloodlike slashes of red that indicate the meeting of his lips. In person, this canvas strikes the viewer to the core: It could have been painted just yesterday, and one feels he is in the living presence of the friar.
        In the last room of the exhibition, as previously related, one steps into the singular universe of El Greco's late works. Here the brooding, spectral View of Toledo looks tame in comparison to the other canvases.
        The Annunciation (from about 1597--1600) is one of the more frenzied works. Here is El Greco to the nth degree. How different this is from the attempted Renaissance-Italian style of the earlier Annunciation. Here the painter has leapt the bounds of Mannerism and given his own definition to the term Baroque. All materializes from darkness by virtue of a bleached, stark light. The archangel Gabriel appears in an acid green robe, adoring the attentive Virgin with his arms crossed. Between them a rosebush, symbol of her enduring purity, has buds of flame, echoing God's appearance to Moses in the burning bush. At the top of the painting, an orchestra of angels makes heavenly clamor. Below them, the flaming dove descends to Mary through a corridor of pearl-like baby's heads emerging from the silvery clouds. In the catalogue these are identified as cherubim, but it is hard not to think of them as inchoate souls of the yet-to-be-born, awaiting their turn at incarnation. El Greco's picture, says Christiansen, "is thus far more than a narrative: It is a meditation on the Incarnation of Christ."
        In some ways, all of El Greco's late works are meditations on the mystery of incarnation--on how the material world comes into being--and on how the artist's act of painting parallels this. An artist draws pigment across a canvas and an image takes form; yet it is but an illusion, only an echo of the thing portrayed. In just such a way, El Greco's canvases suggest, the physical world may be the imperfect resonation of something beyond earthly vibration, partaking of eternity. Certainly he was well-read in Neoplatonic sources, which posed that a realm of ideal forms is known to the immortal soul before and after life but only dimly apprehended during its earthly sojourn. And some Neoplatonists, forsaking Plato, argued that true artists intuitively tuned in to these ideal forms when creating their art, and that the artist's function is to awaken us to the reality of that world.
        The Metropolitan show thus reveals a more complex, multifaceted El Greco than has been widely appreciated. It traces him going from the Greek Orthodox tradition of painting to various permutations of pictorial development in the Roman Catholic world, to developing a style that meshed these traditions even while going quite beyond them. In all his paintings, whether they were on religious or mythological subjects or were portraits of real people, the mature El Greco sought to penetrate the veil of the material to elicit spiritual essence. In doing so, he became an artist not only of his own time, but of all times.
        For more information on the exhibition El Greco, go to www.metmuseum.org and www.ationalgallery.org.uk