SegPlay^® PC Pattern Set Contents

El Greco - European Mannerist

El Greco was considered the architect of the Spanish Renaissance, blending his Greek heritage with his Italian homeland, and Spanish emigration. The SegPlayPC™ pattern set for El Greco contains 25 patterns created from his most well known paintings filled with elongated figures and iconic symbols. There are many portraits of Popes, Cardinals, a Friar, Antonio Covarrubias, Julije Klovic, an unknown Lady, and a self portrait. Also included are his numerous religious interpretations (The Spoliation, The Holy Family, Annunciation, Via Crucis, Saint John the Evangelist, Apostles Peter and Paul, and the Repentant Peter), and a landscape (View of Toledo).

Of few artists can it be said with more meaning that he was ahead of his time than El Greco (1541 - 1614). The Greek artist, who completed his most important commissions in the Spanish city of Toledo, employed elements of Mannerism, of the Venetian Renaissance and of a unique form of color and caricature that laid a foundation that was later built on by the Expressionists and Cubists.

El Greco, whose name means "The Greek" was born Domenicos Theotokopoulos in 1541 on the island of Crete, then a part of the Republic of Venice. His family was relatively prosperous; nothing is known about his mother but his father was a merchant and tax collector. The Cretan town of Candia, present-day Heraklion, where El Greco may have been born, was then a center of post-Byzantine art with over 200 working painters and an Italian-style painters’ guild. After training as an icon painter of the Cretan school, El Greco had become a member of the guild by the time he was 22.

Around 1567, El Greco moved to Venice, where he might have worked in the studio of Titian, and from there to Rome, where he mixed with the city’s elite. It was in Italy that El Greco first developed his unique style. His figures were presented unusually elongated, often wearing surprising attitudes that gave familiar religious scenes a new interpretation. As well as by Titian, he was influenced by Raphael and Michelangelo who he nonetheless described as "a good man, but he did not know how to paint."

In 1577, El Greco moved to Madrid and then to Toledo. It was a good time for an artist with a name for religious imagery to arrive in what was then the religious capital of Spain. The monastery-palace of El Escorial was under construction but with Titian dead, and Tintoretto, Veronese and Anthonis Mor all refusing to travel to Spain, Phillip II was struggling to find high-calibre artists to paint its walls. Hoping to make an impression, El Greco painted two commissions for the king: Allegory of the Holy League and Martyrdom of St. Maurice. Phillip, known as a fussy client, placed them in the chapter-house rather than the chapel and commissioned nothing more from El Greco.

Remaining in Toledo, El Greco painted The Burial of the Count of Orgaz in 1586, now his best known work. Despite Phillip’s displeasure, the years 1597-1607 were the artist’s busiest and he completed a series of paintings and altar-pieces. His last major commission came in 1608 and he died in 1614.

El Greco stood out from his contemporaries through his use of proportion and perspective, once suggesting that an altarpiece be extended by half a meter to take a lengthened figure into account. But he considered color more important even than form, repainting, retouching and almost remixing the colors on the canvas itself. Today, his influence can be see in works by Picasso, Cezanne and Manet.

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