El Greco : “View of Toledo” (c. 1598-1599)

When Julius Meier-Graefe rediscovered El Greco in the early 20th century, he observed that the artist had more in common with Renoir and Cézanne than his own master, Titian. His works are an improbable island of proto-modernism situated within, and largely ignoring, the prevailing currents of Renaissance art. Characterized by the use of bold, dissonant colors, otherworldly lighting and elongated figures that move in paroxysms of religious ecstasy, his works dramatize rather than describe, subordinating nature to the requirements of expression. Much like the religious icons that he painted as a young artist, El Greco viewed himself, in the words of art historian James Romaine, as “a vessel through which the spirit might move, his art drawing us into the light of Christ.”

Centuries ahead of his time, El Greco was widely disdained by the generations immediately following his death. Spanish commentators variously described him as “contemptible,” “ridiculous,” “strange,” “queer,” “eccentric,” and “odd,” and yet he would go on to become a major influence upon the likes of Paul Cézanne, Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, Franz Marc and Jackson Pollock. As late as 1920, the artist and critic Roger Fry described him as “an old master who is not merely modern, but actually appears a good many steps ahead of us, turning back to show us the way.”

In View of Toledo he conceived one of the most famous skies in Western Art, evocative of the cosmic struggle between light and darkness. “Although its subject is secular,” writes Romaine, “View of Toledo has an undeniably spiritual, even apocalyptic, dimension. The work has an air of expectation, that something has begun to unfold, the main act is about to reveal itself, and the whole earth is being transformed into a temple, the new Jerusalem.”