El Greco

El Greco arrived in Spain with a Byzantine training from Crete, a Venetian education under Titian, and a manner nobody there had seen before. Elongated figures, cold acid colour, space that behaves oddly. Philip II rejected the one commission he gave him.

Toledo took him instead. He worked there for nearly forty years, painting altarpieces and portraits for churches and clergy, and the style grew more extreme rather than less as he aged. Figures stretch further, flames of drapery replace anatomy.

The Burial of the Count of Orgaz splits into an earthly lower half of black clad mourners and a heavenly upper half that abandons normal proportion entirely. Nineteenth century critics assumed astigmatism explained the distortion. Twentieth century painters, Cézanne and Picasso among them, understood it as a choice and borrowed from it.