In sixteenth-century Spain the crisis of religious feeling, the striving for mystic oneness with God, was even more sharply felt than in Italy. The Spanish Reformation and counter-Reformation were far more agonized. In the art of El Greco these passions emerge in a startling way.

Born Domenicos Theotocopoulos on the island of Crete, he was later called El Greco, "the Greek," by the Spaniards. He went to Italy as a young man bringing with him memories of the long austere figures of Eastern Christian or Byzantine art. In Venice he was affected by the compositions of Titian and the elongated twisting forms and broken colors of Tintoretto. In Rome it was the powerfully distorted later sculpture of Michelangelo that impressed him, both for its form and its intensely spiritual qualities. Because there was apparently more work for artists outside of Italy, the painter went to Spain around 1576 and settled in Toledo. Spain was then at the height of the counter-Reformation, with its Inquisition dealing harsh punishment to presumable religious offenders.

El Greco's figures are symbolic distortions and elongations to evoke a great religious and mystical response suitable to that particular moment of Spanish history. The country was dominated by the pious zeal of the mournful Philip II (then busy planning his own tomb, the melancholy Escorial) , and was affected in no small measure by the severity of the Inquisition. The Spain of that day reflected a tortured religiosity far exceeding anything elsewhere in Europe. The painting of El Greco catered to this feeling, either consciously or unconsciously. His work did not particularly please the taste of a monarch satisfied with second-rate Italian painters, but the Church, on the other hand, was his best customer.

The spirit and meaning of El Greco's art may be seen clearly in the well-known St. Martin and the Beggar/ St. Martin sharing the Cloak(below). Here, the elongation and pathos of Tintoretto have been turned to an even more intensive psychological purpose. The forms are lengthened and twisted even further; the heads become tiny entities resting on flame like bodies. Color also is raised to a more expressive level. In order to achieve a spiritual rather than a physical effect, the artist distorts the actual color of the objects and transforms them into mood symbols. Finally, as in most works of El Greco's maturity, there is a strange otherworldly space portrayal. The proportions of the figures in relation to the background are so altered that they seem to loom formidably over it and almost to absorb it with their great size.

These thin-faced, elongated individuals are brought together by the cold yellow-green of the cloak which St. Martin is dividing with the beggar, and by the mutual glances of their melancholy eyes. They belong to no particular time of day or night, they are fleshless symbols of mystical yearnings, thin and emaciated aristocrats out of whom the blood has been drained for the purpose of greater spiritual expression. The less physical and “ordinary" the forms, the more it is possible for painters like El Greco (or modern Expressionists, for that matter) to obtain the desired psychological quality. St. Martin and his horse are so impressively large and looming that they seem to reach up into the very sky itself where grayish clouds part to make way for them. As is often the case in El Greco's art, most of the compositional elements seem to emphasize the upward movement.

If the St. Martin picture is representative of his figure compositions, the View of the City of Toledo (below) is typical of the painter's treatment of nature. El Greco's name is permanently associated with the ancient city of Toledo where his house, the Casa del Greco, still exists as well as works like the famous altarpiece, the Burial of the Count of Orgaz. The View of Toledo is a rather strange interpretation, considering that this city in the very center of Spain would ordinarily be charged with sunlight, every form should be crystal-clear, and crisp. El Greco has characteristically chosen to show the city in an unusual aspect, during or just before a storm, and the ordinary color and space elements are deliberately altered for the artist's purposes. The inhospitable grayish-greens that suffuse the picture are just as "unreal" as the arbitrary rearrangement of buildings and the movement of the space upward instead of back into the picture.

For El Greco, this ancient place, inhabited at different times by Romans, Visigoths, Moors, Jews, and Christians, is not a city of joy and light; it is rather a symbol of doom and dark despair. On the right bank of the river in the lower part of the picture there are tiny worm-like creatures which seem to be human beings. But they are unimportant, it is the general emotional and mystical effect of this land that the painter wishes to convey.

Unquestionably these are all conscious techniques used to attain desired artistic ends, for El Greco was not a mad mystic. Indeed he was a very aggressive and often nonspiritual person who did not hesitate to go to court over payment for a picture. This does not challenge the painter's sincerity, but it does away with explanations of his art that allege madness or bad eyesight. He was as aware of what he was doing as the painters of our own day who have found in him a constant source of inspiration. If El Greco's art appears somewhat strained and mannered, it is because he was a sixteenth-century individual responding to the pressures of his time.