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Updated: April 30, 2025
Ricketts says that "his pictures might at times have been painted by torchlight in a cell of the Inquisition." Richard Ford in his handbook of Spain does not mince words: "Greco was very unequal... He was often more lengthy and extravagant than Fuseli, and as leaden as cholera morbus." In Havelock Ellis's suggestive The Soul of Spain there is mention of Greco see chapter Art of Spain.
As in all the towns of the Terra di Lavoro, as this collection of human ant-hills on the eastern side of Naples is sometimes designated, the old command given to the first parents of mankind—“by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread”—is scrupulously observed in Torre del Greco.
But unless that subject has been carried to the high regions of art, and there, in a dry æsthetic atmosphere, sealed up in a purely æsthetic conception it can never be externalized in pure form. That is what the great Primitives did, and what the douanier could not do always. In his pudding there are doughy patches. He is sentimental; and he is not sentimental as Raphael and El Greco are.
Tintoretto is rather injured at the Museo by the number and importance of his pictures left in this monkish twilight; among them is a lovely Esther, and a masterly Presentation of Christ to the People. Plenty of Giordanos and Bassanos and one or two by El Greco, with his weird plague-stricken faces, all chalk and charcoal.
Nothing could be more vivid and various than the twenty-odd heads near the bottom of the picture. Expression, character, race are not pushed beyond normal limits. The Spaniard, truly noble here, is seen at a half-dozen periods of life. El Greco himself is said to be in the group; the portrait certainly tallies with a reputed one of his.
Beruete says that Ribera more than Zurbaran affected Velasquez; "El Greco taught him the use of delicate grays in the colouring of the flesh." His salary at the court was two and sixpence a day in 1628. Even Haydn and Mozart did better as menials. Yet some historians speak of the liberality of Philip IV. An "immortal employee" indeed, as Beruete names his idol.
Correctness is all very well: El Greco made his people eight feet high because he wanted to express something he couldn't get any other way." "Damn El Greco," said Lawson, "what's the good of jawing about a man when we haven't a chance of seeing any of his work?" Clutton shrugged his shoulders, smoked a cigarette in silence, and went away. Philip and Lawson looked at one another.
What would we not give for the reminiscences of someone who had been as intimately acquainted with El Greco as I was with Strickland? But I seek refuge in no such excuses.
The road passes through, or rather over Torre del Greco, a town almost totally destroyed by the eruption in 1794.
He had translated them quite simply, not without skill, and he had found words which at all events suggested the rough-hewn grandeur of the original. The pictures of El Greco explained them, and they explained the pictures. Philip had cultivated a certain disdain for idealism.
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