El Greco's achievement of his personal maniera

English: Domenicos Theotocopoulos, generally known as El Greco, was born in Crete in 1541. Before he left his native island he was a competent, late Byzantine painter. In his late twenties, he went to Venice, where he learnt the craft of Western painting, most probably in Titian's workshop. He left Venice in 1570 and became an independent painter in Rome before departing for Spain in 1576, where he may have sought the patronage of Phi lip II, from whom he initially received commissions. After a brief stay in Madrid, he took up residence in Toledo where he practised as a religious painter in the service of the post- Tridentine Roman Catholic Church, and produced his most distinctive paintings in a manner that is unique in the Renaissance tradition. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how El Greco achieved his personal manner of expression or maniera and, more specifically, what this very distinct, personal manner of expression or ultima maniera entailed. Part I (Chapter 1) is an overview of the life of the artist and the contexts in which he acquired his knowledge of ltalian Renaissance artistic practice and his painterly skills. Part II deals with the general ideas and ideals that informed Italian Renaissance art (Chapter 2), and then goes on to focus on those aspects which specifically informed El Greco's apprenticeship in the Western painterly tradition (Chapter 3), as well as his own ideas on the art of painting. To arrive at an evaluation of the development of his personal manner of expression, the Part III is devoted to the analysis of selected paintings executed in Venice and Rome in which the characteristics of his later manner of expression are already in evidence (Chapter 4). A further chapter (5) is devoted to two important works painted during his early years in Toledo in which his manner of expression, although reminiscent of the forms favoured by Italian Mannerist painters, is already uniquely transformed into a personal vision. The main focus of the dissertation is chapter 6 of Part IV which contains an analysis of the angelic figures which are so predominant in El Greco's oeuvre. The selected paintings are dealt with under nine sub-headings in which the actions of the depicted angels are broadly categorised. The analyses focus on the distinctive forms of the angelic figures, their interaction with other figures and the meanings that the compositions acquire through the way in which they are represented. In this regard, some of El Greco's most renowned paintings, such as the Burial of the Count of Orgaz and two versions of the Baptism of Christ, are reinterpreted and re-evaluated. While he does not deviate radically from traditional iconography in the representation of most of his themes, El Greco's most innovative contribution to sixteenth-century painting is the expansion and transformation of the formal qualities he derived from Mannerism. With increasing skill he infused angelic and many human figures with movement by turning them into open-ended, elongated spiral forms, and creating the verticality characteristic of his compositions. This manner of representation acquires a symbolic meaning in which religious and artistic concerns are unified. As such, El Greco's angelic figures exemplify a key element of his manner of expression and artistic vision. They become metafigures, as stated in the concluding chapter which summarizes the characteristics of his ultima maniera.