El Greco

El Greco, born Domínikos Theotokópoulos, is a Mannerist painter of Greek origin, major figure of the Spanish Renaissance whose visionary work transcends the artistic conventions of his time. Born in Venetian Crete and trained in the Byzantine tradition, he develops in Toledo an absolutely unique style characterized by elongated and distorted figures, acid and vibrant colors, and an ecstatic spirituality that defies all categorization. His dizzying religious compositions - notably The Burial of the Count of Orgaz and View of Toledo - manifest a dramatic tension and mystical expressiveness that prefigure modern art by several centuries. Misunderstood in his lifetime and rediscovered by the twentieth-century avant-gardes, he embodies the solitary genius whose hallucinatory vision and audacious technique revolutionized the representation of the sacred and influenced generations of artists, from Velázquez to Picasso. His electric palette of cobalt blues, acid greens and sulfurous yellows, combined with his expressive anatomical distortions, makes him the unexpected precursor of expressionism and cubism.