Volume 50, Number 17 · November 6, 2003
Singular in Everything
By John Updike
El Greco
catalog of the exhibition edited by David Davies, with essays by Davies and John H. Elliott and contributions by Xavier Bray, Keith Christiansen, Gabriele Finaldi, Marcus Burke, and Lois Oliver
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 7, 2003–January 11, 2004, and at the National Gallery, London, February 11–May 23, 2004
London: National Gallery, 319 pp., $65.00; $40.00 (paper)(distributed by Yale University Press)
The strangeness begins with his name, which was properly Domenikos Theotokopoulos; he always signed his works thus, often in Greek characters, but in Italy he was called Il Greco, and in Spain Domenico Greco or El Griego. The solecism El Greco is what stuck. Born in Crete, trained in Italy, he found recognition and employment only in Toledo, the capital of the Spanish Counter-Reformation, teeming with Neoplatonists and idealistic priests burning to take back Europe from the Protestants or, that hope failing, to make an implacable stand in the Spanish heartland.
Review, 2976 words
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