Doménikos Theotokópoulos (El Greco)

El Greco was a Cretan painter who trained in Venice, failed at the Spanish court, and produced in Toledo one of the most singular bodies of work in European art. Born Doménikos Theotokópoulos in Candia, Crete in 1541, then a Venetian possession, he trained as a painter of icons in the Byzantine tradition and was a master by his early twenties. He went to Venice around 1567, absorbing Titian's colour and Tintoretto's compressed, dramatic space, and then to Rome in 1570. There he damaged his prospects permanently by offering to repaint Michelangelo's Last Judgment, saying he could do it decently and well. He arrived in Spain about 1577 hoping for work on the Escorial. Philip II commissioned the Martyrdom of St Maurice, disliked it, and never employed him again — the picture subordinates the martyrdom itself to a group of officers discussing it. He settled in Toledo, an intensely devout city in decline, where his manner found its audience. The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, painted in 1586, divides earth from heaven across a single canvas, the mourners' portrait heads below and elongated dissolving figures above. His late work stretches bodies to impossible proportions, lights them from no identifiable source, and treats drapery as flame. The View of Toledo is among the first pure landscapes in Western art, and the Laocoön and the Opening of the Fifth Seal anticipate expressionism by three centuries. He kept a large library, wrote marginal notes attacking Vasari, and lived expensively enough to be in debt. He was dismissed as eccentric for centuries and rediscovered around 1900. He died in 1614.

• Lived: 1541 CE – 1614 CE
• Nationality: Greek
• Roles: painter