Original subtitles

El Greco was a 16th-century maverick, a curious figure full of contradictions.

He was a devout and orthodox Catholic, but a radical artist.

He was born a Greek, trained in Italy, but made his name in Spain.

His ecstatic stylized religious images came from a starting imagination rather than from nature.

And it wasn't until the 20th century, but his work was fully understood.

Dominic Osteator Coppallus, who thankfully became known as El Greco, or the Greek, was born in Kandia in Crete in 1541.

Since the 13th century, this island had been part of a vastly wealthy Phoenician empire.

Although the Venetians terrorised and often enslaved the inhabitants of Crete,

they had a hands-off approach to the island's Greek Orthodox churches.

Allowing them to continue to commission their traditional religious icon paintings in a style known as Byzantine Art.

By the time he was 25, El Greco had established himself, decorating churches and painting older pieces.

Crete and artists were naturally exposed to Italian influences.

Buildings on Crete were designed in a Venetian style, and the works of Italian Renaissance artists were popular.

The beginnings of a fusion of styles between Greek and Venetian can be seen in El Greco's first signed work.

A damaged panel painting, in the Church of the Dormition on the island of Ceros, north of Crete, showing the death of the Virgin,

and thought to be painted before 1567.

It's a simple image with only a hint of perspective painted in the manner of Byzantine icons.

Gold on wood with unnaturalistic figures.

But Crete was a small place, and El Greco had big ambitions,

and so he moved to a city built on a much grander synthesis of the Byzantine and the Renaissance Venice.

This is a work that El Greco begins to paint soon after he's arrived in Venice,

and it's here that we see him trying to find his own artistic voice.

It's a small scale work that shows that he's an icon painted by training,

who's trying to expand the scale and the ambition in the way he's working.

And what we notice first of all, is how much he's trying to take on board the lessons of the Italian Renaissance.

Particularly the musculature owes something to both Michelangelo and Alianado, these classical ordered figures.

Likewise, the color scheme here, which is a little bit garrish, a little bit clumsy,

but he's been looking hard at the current stars of the Venetian art world,

people like Titian and Tintoretto.

The biblical saga of Christ cleaning up his father's house,

cleansing the temple, purging it of money lenders, of prostitutes, of market traders selling their various wares,

was not a common theme in Western religious art.

But it seems to have struck a personal chord with Al Greco himself,

who was trying to purge his own artistic style of the Byzantine influences that he'd grown up with

and develop his own Italian way of doing things.

But also, it had a resonance with what was happening more broadly in the Europe

to which Al Greco had just moved.

Artists in Catholic Europe at this time were under pressure from the church.

About 25 years or so before Al Greco was born, people began actively to express their resentment

and protest against the corruption, wealth and power of the Catholic church.

These would be reformers became known as Protestants.

In Al Greco's time though, the Catholic church was trying to win back its popularity.

In a movement that became known as the counter-affirmation,

the Roman church made attempts to resolve its internal problems,

and to reform itself and reaffirm its dominance in importance.

Art was naturally a potent means of reclaiming the Magisterial power of the church,

a visual means of enforcing Catholic values and to inspire the faithful.

Al Greco himself deeply religious became one of the most striking of counter-affirmation painters.

After three years in Venice, Al Greco travelled south to the centre of both Catholic and classical culture, Rome.

Here he found much artistic inspiration, but little commercial success.

Although he painted portraits and religious paintings for a few private clients,

he failed to secure any important commissions or find major patrons to support him.

And so, by 1577, a disillusioned Al Greco was on the move again, this time to Spain.

Spanish art was dominated by two patrons, the court and the church.

Both were effectively controlled by one man, King Philip II, the richest and most powerful ruler in Europe.

The Spanish city in which Al Greco settled and which he made his own over the next three decades was Toledo.

He was 36 when he arrived here, he spoke little or no Castilian, but this city, the centre of the Roman Catholic church in Spain,

was relatively international that when numerous languages spoken here, it was also an intellectual centre, and quickly Al Greco felt at home.

Toledo was an ambitious city, it described itself as imperial, based on the fact that Philip II's court had been here for a couple of years,

and the city still harbored hopes that it might lure the court away from Madrid.

So when Al Greco arrived, the city was in the middle of an ambitious programme of urban regeneration.

Streets were being widened, old buildings were being pulled down, new palatsoes were being built, and a new city hall, all around the city's most enduring monument, the vast Roman Catholic Cathedral.

Significantly, it was from the cathedral that Al Greco gained one of his first commissions in Toledo.

It was for this epic painting, the disrobing of Christ, which was commissioned to be hung in the Vestry, where the priest changed into their robes.

This is Al Greco's first great masterpiece.

I think it's the painting where he truly finds his artistic voice, and it shows Christ being stripped of his garments before he's nailed to the cross-inclusive fiction,

and if you look in the foreground of the painting, perhaps the most savage and the most moving image is the man gouging away at the wood of the cross to prepare the holes through which the nails will be driven having pierced Christ hand and feet.

Now the subject itself is there in the gospels, particularly the gospels of Luke and John, but it doesn't really appear in Western art.

It's a subject that has precedents in Byzantine art though, so it's El Greco's origins being moved right center stage when he's here in Spain.

The details of the painting are extraordinary, but also quite odd.

The figure next to him to the left, wears armor, and has been identified by scholars as being both King Herod and Pontius Pilers at one and the same time.

Behind Christ, two figures seem to be clawing at his robe, and likewise the green figure to his right is pulling at his,

and it hints that they're going to be casting lots for it soon after Christ has been nailed up on the cross.

So what El Greco is doing is compressing different moments in the crucifixion saga and from Christ's life into one particular painting that conveys a sense of narrative, but also of dynamism.

Color two is incredibly strong. This use of yellow contrasting throughout the picture with this dominant vibrant red that is both symbolic of Christ's sacrifice to come.

The blood that will be shed, but it also is the center, the heart of the picture, and it emerges out as the rest of the painting receives, and that gives the painting an extraordinary visual tension.

And what we ultimately experience when we look at this work is a sense of a picture trying to burst out.

These forms are incredibly claustrophobic. In the foreground it's the only bit of space, the stones and pebbles and earth around Christ's feet.

And all these aspects merge together in the painting and contribute to its underlying power, which is to convey a sense of impending doom, the doom of crucifixion.

However, this painting was to cause a dramatic fallout between El Greco and the church.

In 1579, on completion of the disrobing of Christ, El Greco strongly disagreed with the cathedral over the price of the picture.

In 16th century Spain, patrons and artists used a special system to value religious works, which involve the artist and patron, each nominating a praises to determine the value of a completed painting.

If both parties couldn't reach an agreed figure, an arbitrator would make the final decision.

This system meant that artists gamble their time energy and materials on a project without knowing how much they'd be paid.

El Greco was proud of his art and felt strongly that it should be well rewarded. He'd come from Italy and expected to be treated like a Renaissance artist, not a medieval artisan.

He often contested appraisers decisions, occasionally resorting to court proceedings, which cost him more time and money.

El Greco's appraisers had valued the disrobing of Christ at 900 duckits, the cathedral's appraisers at 228 duckits.

A two and a half year legal battle ensued, with the artist eventually receiving only 317 duckits.

More significantly, El Greco had sad his relationship with his first major patron.

Luckily enough though, he'd come to the attention of the other important patron in a land, King Philip II.

Philip's role in the history of Spanish art can't be underestimated.

His ambitious role-building program in Madrid created demand for new artworks to decorate the palaces, as a result, artists flock to the city.

Philip inherited a vast art collection when he became King. Then through his travels, he began to amass more international works, in particular those by Titian and other Venetian masters.

It was this body of work that was to have such a great effect on the Spanish artists who were fortunate enough to gain access to the royal collections.

Many of these works were housed at Ellis Scoreal, the vast monastery complex north of Madrid built as a monument to Philip's father, Charles the Holy Roman Emperor.

More art was needed for the extensive decoration of the Scoreal, and many Spanish artists were desperate for their work to be included.

And this was El Greco's spectacular attempt to get his work in the ground collection at the Scoreal.

It was commissioned by Philip II as an altar piece and it depicts the martyrdom of St. Morris.

Now St. Morris was an early third century Roman legion leader who was also a Christian, who refused to pay homage to the pagan gods and instead was marted.

And what we see in the foreground is that Morris himself dressed in blue in armor, discussing with his fellow soldiers what could be battle, but in fact it is own fate.

And St. Morris also appears here on the left hand side. Firstly, as a man who's looking down on a scene as it unfolds, secondly as a man's strip naked with his hands clasped together in prayer, and thirdly as a man beheaded.

The way the painting is produced shows how much El Greco's looked at Venetian art.

There's a very great event series of Venetian devices where heads are shown at different angles, particularly in this main group, to bring the painting to life, to give it a sense of dynamism.

But the colour, particularly this icy blue and yellow, is El Greco's. There's no precedence for this in art history.

But there's another twist of this painting that gives it its real edge.

In between the main figures, the main Christian Roman generals are contemporary generals.

What El Greco is doing here is making a very clever, concise, contemporary point about the fight against heresy, and linking the 16th-century struggle with the struggle of the early Christian martyrs.

But in a way he was being too clever, because in counter-reformation Spain, anything that transcended Christian orthodoxy was viewed with suspicion.

And Philip II had real problems with his picture, because time was conflated, but mainly because martyrdom itself is marginalized.

And in the main part of the painting, it was seen to discuss, or debate, on the merits of martyrdom, rather than to celebrate it.

And for that reason, Philip II rejected this as an altar piece. He still kept it in his own collection, but for the next two years, there was a debate with El Greco about money.

El Greco started to haggle, and that was not a very clever thing to do, given the power of the monarchy, and the importance of its patronage.

Within the space of three years, El Greco had offended and excluded himself from the two main sources of institutional patronage in Spain, Toledo Cathedral, and the King.

His ambitions of grandeur and becoming a court pain to were over, and he had to accept the life of a contract artist.

At the age of 42, El Greco had to turn to small churches and chapels to find work.

Here in Toledo, at the Church of Santome, El Greco's own parish church, he was commissioned to paint this picture, called the burial of Count August.

Count August was a 14th-century nobleman, who gave money to this church, and who at his funeral,

it was rumored to be the subject of a miracle. The Saints, Stephen Augustine, came down from heaven to bear his soul upwards.

And that's the picture, that's the saga that El Greco brings to life here.

We see the Heavenly Multitudes, Christ in Throne in Splenda, there's the Virgin Mary, some Peter holding the keys, some John the Baptist in the foreground,

with this billowing cloud that's almost like some kind of birth canal.

There's an angel clutching a phantom, it's shadowy figure, then in fact, is the soul of Count August.

Downwards in the bottom half of the picture, it's full of great detail.

The Count himself is in the middle, being clutched by Santa Guston, one of the church's founding fathers,

and St Stephen the first martyr who was stoned to death, all guys he's wearing the armor though of a 16th-century nobleman.

And all the dignitaries in the background are recognizable from Toledo, including El Greco himself,

who's just behind the head of St Stephen.

And to the left of the dramatic scene is a small boy looking out at us, inviting us to look into the scene.

Now this is George Manuel, this is El Greco's eight-year-old son.

And if you look in his pocket there's a handkerchief spilling over, there's his signature,

but it also bears the date of the son's birth.

And so the picture is as much a celebration of the son as it is of a commemoration of this great event.

But the son is also pointing, and this is important because not only is he visually drawing our attention to what's happening,

but he's giving us a lesson, he's saying there's something to be learned from this painting.

What is that to be learned? Well, that if you do good works, if you give money to the church, if you live a good life,

then in the end your award will be in heaven.

Now this is a standard Christian message, but in the late 16th century it has the real power of counter-reformation propaganda,

because the Protestants had said that in order to get to heaven it was based on faith alone,

and that your salvation had nothing to do with the good works you did during your life, or the money that you gave to the church.

And El Greco, very cleverly, amalgamates all these ideas into a picture that becomes more powerful because of the way he's composed it.

The top half of the painting is ethereal, it's an ecstatic heavenly vision.

The bottom half of the painting is much more graphically real.

Look at the details, particularly the robes of the priest with his back to us, but also there's another twist.

The two saints, Augustine and Stephen, are luring the body of counter-orgas into his tomb.

In the church here at Santame, underneath where I'm standing, is the actual tomb of counter-orgas.

So imagine yourself as a 16th century visitor here.

You can recognize the figures, they're slightly larger than life, but of your scale.

You're looking at a miracle, but a miracle brought to life in painting, and that's what El Greco is doing.

Following the success of this painting, El Greco experienced an increase in the number of commissions from to laden parish churches.

His brilliant, but increasing the individual style, glorified and dramatized the Catholic faith.

His paintings rapidly became important tools for arousing and inspiring devotion.

The lack of competition, the wrath of commissions from chapels and churches,

and increasingly for portraits from the wealthy citizens of Toledo, meant that he'd carved a niche for himself.

And El Greco was able to develop his work without the criticism, his individual style might have brought him in Rome.

Toledo obviously suited El Greco.

Around 1600, he paid homage to his adopted home,

in an uncommissioned portrait of the city itself.

View of Toledo is a rare example of an El Greco landscape.

It's as much about the workings of his imagination as it is a view of the city,

and he's rearranged some of Toledo's main landmarks.

But more significantly, about 10 years later, a landscape did appear as the backdrop

to the only surviving mythological work he ever painted.

Here's Toledo again, a similar sort of day with his odd light.

But what's happening in the foreground is the main purpose of this picture.

And what we see is the saga of Laudeca-owned.

He was a priest who defended the gods.

And as a consequence, he was told that he had to tone for his sins,

and make a sacrifice to beside him, the god of the sea.

At the same time, the Greeks sent their famous wooden horse as a gift

to Troy.

And Laudeca-owned says, no, don't accept it, beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

He's then castigated again,

and whilst he's sacrificing a bull to Poseidon God of the Sea,

two sea serpents rear up out of the ocean

and get him and his two sons.

And that's exactly the moment that El Greco chooses to paint.

But there is a certain moral ambiguity,

because Laudeca-owned seems to have a punishment far in excess of what he's done.

He may have been Laudeca-owned, he may have violated the temple,

but at the same time he told the truth,

and his warnings weren't heated, and the city was lost.

But in the main, this is a picture that strikes you because of the extraordinary way

in which it's been painted.

This is a great example of mannerist art.

Manorism is a style that's developing in Europe at the time,

where traditional subject masses, from the Bible or from mythology,

are taken by various artists,

and painted in a unique or original style.

The artist's claiming the subject for themselves,

exactly what El Greco does here,

and he paints with a furious loose expressive brush,

and it's this approach, this almost expressionistic approach,

that has such a huge impact when El Greco is rediscovered as an artist

at the end of the 19th century.

It's this painting and the very late work that makes El Greco

the great artist he's now considered to be today.

Although he never stopped working,

El Greco standard of living fluctuated greatly.

Some contemporary documents report him living like a prince,

while others show he was unable to pay his debts, which pursued him to the grave.

This, his last work, was created for his own tomb.

The adoration of the shepherds depicts a darkened scene,

where Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds are irradiated

by an intense mystical light emanating from the tiny body of Christ.

This painting is a final affirmation of El Greco's belief

that the most powerful art is the result of the human imagination

as opposed to the slavish imitation of nature.

El Greco died in 1614,

and his reputation sank into obscurity,

a quirky figure out on the margins of European art history.

But in the 19th century,

the mystical and visionary nature of his painting

struck a chord with artists who became known as the avant-garde,

who proclaimed him as a forerunner of modernism.

A painter who's spectacular imagination

helped to create one of the more idiosyncratic styles in Western art.