Palomino said of El Greco that “he ended by making his painting despicable and ridiculous alike by extravagance of drawing and harshness of colour.” His contemporaries explained the singularity of his work either as due to madness or to craving for effect, _por valentía, para salir del día_, or to a wish to prevent them from being confused with those of Titian!
Not less than his drawing, El Greco’s colouring has been a stumbling-block and an offence. We read of his “teintes presque cadavériques,” “coloris grisâtre, pâle blafard,” “symphonies en bleu mineur;” and Ford characteristically wrote that his pictures were often “as leaden as cholera morbus.” After the rich reds and golds of Italian painting, the subtler tints of El Greco, evolved by him partly under Tintoretto’s influence, partly under the influence of Toledo, could not please his contemporaries, but we feel now that they are no slight ingredient of his charm. In colouring El Greco largely influenced Velázquez, and through Velázquez all subsequent painting. Velázquez learnt from him, in the words of Señor Cossío, “his harmony of silver greys and the use of certain carmines.” But it was not only El Greco’s colouring that affected him. Señor Cossío sees in the construction of “The Surrender of Breda” vague reminiscences of the “San Mauricio,” and one may also see in it reminiscences of the “Expolio.” Palomino, in his Life of Velázquez, says that “in his portraits he imitated Domenico Greco, for he considered that his heads could not be sufficiently praised.” Velázquez rejected El Greco’s mystic intellectuality, but possibly without El Greco’s influence the realism of Velázquez might have been excessively exact and less inspired.
Toledo, in the words of a modern Spanish poet, stands “dark, ruinous, forgotten and alone;” but Domenico[120] Theotocopuli, who lay there unremembered for three centuries, now rises to spread his fame through the world--
“Tout passe. L’art robuste Seul a l’éternité, Le buste Survit à la cité.”
Foreigners from many lands climb up and down the cobbled lanes and passages, in search of hidden churches here and there with pictures by El Greco--Santo Tomé, San José, San Vicente, Santa Leocadia, San Nicolás, and many more: