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Referring to the influence of El Greco upon the greater painter, he wrote: "While Greco certainly adopted a Spanish gravity of colouring, neither that nor his modelling was ever subtle or thoroughly natural... Velasquez ripened with age and practice; Greco was rather inclined to get rotten with facility." Mr.
Beruete is real, so Cossio, the author of the El Greco biography; so the realistic novelist Blanco Ibañez; but the best, after those of his, Sorolla's, wife and children, is that of Frantzen, a photographer, in the act of squeezing the bulb. It is a frank characterisation.
As he passed, he greeted the great masters mentally; on one side the holy figures of El Greco, with their greenish or bluish spirituality, slender and undulating; beyond, the wrinkled, black heads of Ribera, with ferocious expressions of torture and pain marvelous artists, whom Renovales admired, while determined not to imitate them.
Zuloaga, the Spaniard, has several; Degas, two; the critic Duret, two; John S. Sargent, one a St. Martin. Durand-Ruel once owned the Annunciation, but sold it to Mrs. H.O. Havemeyer, and the Duveens in London possess a Disrobing of Christ. At the National Gallery there are two. Gautier wrote that El Greco surpassed Monk Lewis and Mrs.
Sibley's face had always something of that immobility and gravity which Crozier's face had part of the time-paler, less intelligent, with dark lines and secret shadows absent from Crozier's face; but still with some of the El Greco characteristics which marked so powerfully that of the man who passed as J. G. Kerry. "Ah, Sibley," he said, "glad to see you! Anything I can do for you?"
I thought the young artists of Rome childish because they played practical jokes and yelled at night in the streets, returning from the Caffe Greco or the cellar in the Via Palombella; but am I not as childish to the full I, melancholy wretch, whom they called Hamlet and the Knight of the Doleful Countenance? Nov. 5th. I can't free myself from the thought of this Medea da Carpi.
Greco composed his palette with white vermilion, lake, yellow ochre, ivory black. Señor Beruete says that "he generally laid on an impasto for his flesh, put on in little touches, and then added a few definite strokes with the brush which, though accentuated, are very delicate... The gradations of the values is in itself instructive."
Vitale found an equivalent for his disquieting ecstasies in severely stylistic portraits wrought in an intractable medium. Giotto expressed himself through a series of pictured legends. El Greco seems to have achieved his stupendous designs by labouring to make significant the fustian of theatrical piety. There is apparently nothing that an artist cannot vivify.
"No you see, he went for morality: I don't care a damn for morality: teaching doesn't come in, ethics and all that, but passion and emotion. The greatest portrait painters have painted both, man and the intention of his soul; Rembrandt and El Greco; it's only the second-raters who've only painted man.
There could, I think, be no sorer error. We need the unbalanced talents, the poètes damnés of every craft. They strew the passions that enrich a lordlier art than their own. They fight valiantly, a little at the expense of their fame, against the only unpardonable sins, stupidity and indifference. Greco should always be an honoured name in this ill-destined company."
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