Temporalities, Transmaterialities, and Media in the Pictorial Art of El Greco

This book draws on several published articles, conference presentations, and an edited volume in order to develop a new reading of El Greco's pictorial art, one that aims to reframe the assumptions and paradigms that have constrained understandings of this major Early Modern artist. Although El Greco (Heraklion, 1541 – Toledo, 1614) has in recent years garnered an increase in critical attention, approaches to his painting have so far addressed only a mere fraction of the challenges he brought to the perception of sacred art in the late sixteenth century. This book interrogates the broader ways in which El Greco reconfigured Christian art both as artistic agency in early modernity and as a last bastion of engagement with the traditional boundaries of premodern art from Byzantium. This approach not only reevaluates El Greco's stature as a major modernist – who should, I argue, be discussed in association with the Carracci reform of art, Federico Zuccari's ideas about artistic practice at the Roman Academy, and the most accomplished Spanish modernists – but also critically reflects on the processes of reformation, renovation, and transformation that radically changed the institutional boundaries of Western Christianity during his lifetime.

El Greco has been consistently portrayed as a bizarre and extravagant artist, and consequently art historical commentary on his creativity acquired a vehemence commonly reserved for the atypical, uncanny, mystical, and the like. It is my belief, and a premise of this book, that El Greco appears more typical than atypical and that the question of his originality cannot be convincingly argued on atypical grounds alone but must be addressed in the context of an inquiry into the Early Modern age. I argue for a portrayal of El Greco that is singular because of his unique background; by the same token, however, such a portrayal is not so singular as to be cut off from the vital questions that affected cultural production generally in early modernity. The debates concerning the theory of imitation and the competing claims of the fine arts, as well as the period's criticisms and reassessments of sacred art, consistently preoccupied El Greco. From a historically informed interpretative framework, El Greco's re-conceptualizations of the traditional notions of image, icon, and prototype constitute a fervent contribution to a period rife with theological and ideological concerns.