El Greco: The Burial of Count Orgaz

(Domenicos Theotokopoulos , underscoring his Greek descent

El Greco appears to have belonged to a Catholic Greek family of officials who worked for the Venetian colonial service his father was a tax-collector , and an elder brother combined this activity with that of trader and privateer . It is not known with whom El Greco trained however , by 1563 El Greco was a master painter (Jones , 2004 . Born in the island of Crete , El Greco from his earliest youth came in contact with the Byzantine school . Without knowledge of the reason for or the

date of his departure from Crete and his arrival in Venice , many researchers tend to think that he chose Venice because of its colony of Greek artists who were following the Byzantine tradition (Kelemen 1961 , Osmond , 2004 ) For many centuries before El Greco 's arrival , Venice had taken her culture largely from Constantinople and the East . The Cathedral of Saint Mark was a fine example of Veneto-Byzantine art and many of the palaces along the Grand Canal showed traces of it in their fazades . That a strong impression was made upon the mind of the young artist by contact in his own land and then in Venice with the rich art of Byzantium is shown by the fact that years later in distant Toledo he reverted to it for inspiration . His sojourn in Venice was not of long duration , he remained there until late 1570 , perhaps studying and working in Titian 's studio or perhaps only visiting it , and Rome became his next goal

El Greco 's early Italian prints show his the tendency to break up symmetry and frontality , the interest in foreshortening , movement and space , the corporeality of the figures despite the linear style , the richness of color and the isolated but precise borrowings from Western art . Despite the apparent hesitancy of his approach to Western stylistic sources , El Greco introduced an extreme use of color , with Titianesque orange tones , and of light - clearly evident in the religious landscape - which combine to produce an effect of ghostly unity . There is a different feeling in other works of the 1560s , for instance the Last Supper , the Flight into Egypt and the Annunciation . These show his desire to master the depiction of the natural and organic movement of the human body and its place in space , and his tendency to employ a more naturalistic lighting . The first signs of El Greco 's conversion into a fundamentally Western painter - as is implied by the multiple short brushstrokes , the definition of volume through light rather than shade the one-point perspective and the Venetian coloring - all appeared before his move to Rome

El Greco reached Rome at the end of 1570 , having visited Verona , Parma and Florence on the way , with an introduction - perhaps through Titian - from the Croatian miniaturist Giulio Clovio to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese , who gave him lodging in his palace in Rome (Emmons Guinard 1956 , 13 . Information on this period is limited , but there is evidence of enmity...