In his later pictures El Greco increased the mannerism of his style; the figures are longer, more angular, the intensity of expression becomes an obsession, a paroxysm: he paints as one for whom the whole world has ceased to exist. Sometimes, as in the “Baptism” at Toledo, these exaggerations seriously spoil the beauty of his work; but the “Asunción” of the church of San Vicente, at Toledo, also belongs to his later style, and is not the least beautiful of his pictures: in no other work of art has the sense of motion been so marvellously expressed--the Virgin, saints, and angels seem actually floating upwards before our eyes. El Greco’s mannerism, _jene unglaubliche Manier_, Herr Carl Justi calls it, is more evident in some of his pictures, in others less; but there is not a sufficiently wide gulf between them to justify the saying that “they are so different that they appear not to be painted by the same hand,”[119] nor to countenance Palomino’s statement that “What he did well no one did better, and what he did badly no one did worse.”
It was not carelessly nor ignorantly that El Greco drew his figures out of proportion, making them preternaturally long and thin. He did so deliberately, just as Bacon said deliberately that “In all beauty there is some strangeness of proportion,” and the effect in El Greco’s pictures often, indeed as a rule, justifies his boldness. We see him
“Pouring his soul ... Reaching, that Heaven might so replenish him, Above and through his art--for it gives way; That arm is wrongly put--and there again-- A fault to pardon in the drawing’s lines, Its body, so to speak! its soul is right.”
Naturally the peculiarity of his style has at once struck all observers. So the French have spoken of his “maladresses enfantines, audaces troublantes,” his “attitudes strapassées,” his “draperies cassées et chiffonnées á plaisir,” his “dessin fantastique.” So Sir Edmund Head wrote of some of El Greco’s pictures as “extravagant in length, of an ashen-grey tone, most singular in so fine a colourist.” If only glanced at once, this is perhaps the impression that the majority of his pictures would leave, and he thus remains a sphinx to many. “He will always remain caviare to the multitude,” wrote Sir J. C. Robinson in 1868; “the uninitiated observer passes over [his pictures] with wonder and bewilderment, the grim angular figures and draperies and the flickering unrest of all the details affecting him as would a harsh tumult of discordant sounds.”