El Greco got his painter’s license already back in Crete when he was a young man. Then he travelled to Italy and worked beside masters such as Tintoretto and Titian.
Yet he was a full thirty-six years old by the time he came to Spain and he hadn’t painted any really extraordinary picture.
Actually, there WAS one. This portrait:
Portrait of his friend Giulio Clovio
It was just this man who believed in El Greco and put him in touch with some important people in Spain. Often, when you are good at something, you don’t make a fuss about it, even to yourself. El Greco preferred to do imaginary scenes and twisted his brain to come up with original ideas for them. Portraits he just let come out as they might. But they came out very well.
He painted this one of the beautiful girl he met just after coming to Madrid.
Jerónima de las Cuevas
“Here,” he told her with a kiss. “I thought you’d like this ermine stole.” Jerónima became the mother of his son Jorge Manuel.
El Greco set himself up in Toledo, where he received important commissions for churches and convents. He worked hard on those and meanwhile satisfied his patrons with their portraits. One of his most famous is this unknown Knight with His Hand on His Breast, now in the Prado Museum of Madrid:
This pretty Virgin Mary, now in a palace of Toledo, might as well be a portrait:
In his most ambitious painting, the Burial of the Count of Orgaz, he included twenty of them. Faces like this one of the parish priest:
And that of his little boy, Jorge Manuel :
Cardinal Niño de Guevara sat for him:
There is an exhibition of his works on now, Spring, 2009, in Toledo. To illustrate El Greco’s technique the organizers have put side-by-side a portrait by a competent contemporary painter (Coello) and El Greco’s copy of that portrait.
Why did El Greco copy a portrait? Couldn’t he have made the portrait directly from the sitter? No. The sitter was long dead. El Greco’s commission was to paint the man and he had to see how he looked from another painter’s portrait.
Diego de Covarrubias by Alonso Sánchez Coello, above , and El Greco, below.
Coello’s portrait (top) is good—excellent, in fact, but static, ice-cold. Greco’s rough technique, so apparently imprecise, makes the image more vibrant, the sitter more alive. His tired, old Covarrubias is worried or sentimental. Of course the expression he achieves may not have been characteristic of the dead man.
Here are the two portraits, complete:
..
He was a great portraitist, no question about it. I’m not sure he comes up on top with his copy though. My eyes kept going back to Coello’s version. The broad forehead, arched brows, the questioning eyes suggest a man wit great intellect, with some mystery about him. What character does El Greco’s man have? Hard to tell, he just looks tired and old, much older than the original sitter. The style is very interesting though, the undefined brushwork somehow magically manages to hold everything in place. He’s a master.
Erika: You’re right. If Covarrubias (the sitter) stood out for his wit and intellect then Greco’s portrait is a real failure. I was impressed by the effectiveness of Greco’s fuzzy style and the sentimental look he gave the man.
Swallows, do you know any facts about the sitter, his character?
Erika: His name is Diego de Covarrubias. In Toledo there are portraits by El Greco of both him and his brother Antonio, who was the man El Greco knew. The exhibition catalog calls Antonio a famous Humanist and one of a circle of Toledo intellectuals but of his brother Diego they say nothing. I should have included all of the portrait because he is wearing a cossack, a surplice, and a biretta: he was a priest. Those brothers were the sons of a famous architect, Alonso de Covarrubias. Maybe, given the importance of that family and the times they lived in, Diego’s never having risen above the rank of a simple parish priest means that he was the way Greco imagined him. Still, Sanchez Coello did know him and painted a sharp-minded man.
The Giulio Clovio portrait looks pretty academic, painted during the early period in Spain. But that approaching thunderstorm there out of the window to me already announces the visionary painter of a later stage.
Would El Greco there have been allowed to paint a woman’s portrait without such a “burka headgear”? How nice that most charming lady might have looked open haired. Or, in addition to the Christian; was it also the Islamic Moor influence at work that forbid?
And that juxtaposition of the last two portraits is so fascinating. The liberties he took! The man there got a shave, and kind of a face-lift too; the skin folds between nose and mouth for instance have disappeared.
Those lips! The standard rendering usually draws the upper lip in shade, with the light usually falling on the protruding under lip, as we find in the original: El Greco in his copy lighted up both lips so lively…what a master!
Rich: Can you make out what picture Giovio has in that book. Only after writing this post did it occur to me that he was the famous art collector and writer who wrote the first biography of Michelangelo.
Vasari thought Giovio was not as qualified as he, Vasari, was to write biographies since Giovio was not a practicing artist. So in reaction to Giovio’s work (and reputation) he set to work.
I don’t know about the Muslim influence on women’s dress, Rich. Didn’t women usually and everywhere cover their heads before modern times?
I was going to follow up this post with another on Greco’s technique but decided it was too technical. Now at the current Greco exhibition in Toledo that is one of the most fascinating things. One of his unfinished series of Christ and the twelve Apostles in on display and you can see exactly how he worked, layer by layer. His first biographer (Velazquez’s father-in-law) says he was the kind of painter who kept going over his pictures and making infinite corrections, but what you see in the exhibition and elsewhere contradicts that. That free style of his is very contagious to painters of our time.
If I were to see the Coello portrait by itself, which I do to a certain extent because I see if first as I scroll down the page, I might think it was a very good portrait. But it does pale compared to El Greco.
There is a forcefulness and blush of vigorous health to the former. Even his torso seems more expansive and robust. But there’s also an unnatural finish and gloss to the face in particular. I’d almost think it was based on a photo if I didn’t know better. But the El Greco seems more naturalistic. The skin seems to breathe, to live in a world that includes air, not just the varnished surface of a painting.
I know this is a bit harsh and I don’t mean to criticize the Coello. It is very good. But I do think the El Greco is by far the better portrait.
I must confess also that I have a thorough bias toward art that shows some sense of how it was made. The painterliness of El Greco is very evident. This isn’t inherently good, just inherently good in my world, so I wanted to point out my bias.
This would be a great comparison for a class in art or art history. And it shows what a Brain Twister can accomplish when he gives his brain a rest!
Heck, Ken, don’t you worry about offending old Sánchez Coello. I have to say that Erika made me admit that his was a very good portrait too–maybe a better one: too bad we don’t have another picture of Covarrubias to compare. There is one of his brother but that doesn’t help much. It was the brother who was supposed to be the great Humanist.
I guess all of us in this time have your bias. As I said in my message to Rich, Greco’s technique is the star of the current exhibition in Toledo. Old Covarrubias practically sighs for you as you stand there comparing the portraits; and you realize that it is the seeming sloppiness of Greco’s brush that does the trick, no question about it. Clever, your last sentence.
I just saw the last addition of the two full pictures side by side, and what a difference it makes! The cropped faces just didn’t do justice to El Greco. His version shows Covaburrias in a more personal light compared to Coello’s more “official”, more detached light. Maybe that’s what his brother was after when commissioning a second portrait afther the man’s death? El Greco’s version seems just as good now, but since I didn’t know the man I still prefer the more intelligent face of Coello’s work. If I was staying in front of them, who knows, I might decide the El Greco is the better one.
the painting, Jerónima de las Cuevas, is lovely. plus the lady is so pretty too.