A Painting by El Greco at Mia: Who Was El Greco and Why Do Museums Collect His Paintings?

Mia owns the painting “Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple” (c. 1570-75) by Domenikos Theotokopoulos, known as Greco (the Greek). I first learned about this painter from the professor who taught the art history course that I took in my freshman year in college as a requirement for my pre-landscape architecture major and who talked about him at length. During the thirty years that I have been a Mia member, while viewing that painting I have heard other visitors viewing it express questions and fanciful comments about it that I would like to address in this article.

Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple, c.1570-75 • El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos)

Oil on canvas

The William Hood Dunwoody Fund • 24.1

Some of those visitors are taken aback by Jesus being angered by businessmen providing a service to people who had to purchase animals to make burning sacrifices at the Temple. Others considered an angry Jesus antithetical to the accepting being arrested Jesus in the painting by Anthony Van Dyck in gallery 313. The most interesting comments that I have heard about this painting, however, have been about its aesthetics: the proportions of the body of Jesus (longer than the six-faces long prescribed by classical proportions); the seemingly “floating on air” of some of the figures in the crowd depicted in it; and the exaggeratedly bent bodies, including that of the whip wielding Jesus. Some people suggested that perhaps the artist was suffering from the effects of narcotics when he painted it.

First, I want to address the theme of “Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple,” because according to Jose Gudiol in his Complete Paintings of El Greco, 1541-1614 (New York, 1983), El Greco created five other paintings on the same theme. The version at Mia, made between 1570 and 1575, is the second, and it is “realistic” compared to the last three ones. The theme of these paintings is one of many scenes in the Christian gospels, such as the parable of the wealthy man and the beggar Lazarus, suggested to Catholic artists to depict by the Council of Trent (1545-1563) to inspire in the faithful a rejection of greed and corruption. Many of the articles of that council that sought to rid the Catholic Church of abuses that had provoked the Protestant reformers, prescribed teaching that all Catholics should do good works and imitate the lives of Jesus and the saints. 

A short answer to the questions about the aesthetics of this painting is that they reflect the background of El Greco as a painter of Byzantine style icons in his native Candia, on the island of Crete, where he was born in 1541, as well as his training in Renaissance painting in Venice, where he arrived in 1567, and his having adopted the Manierista style during his stay in Rome from 1570 to 1577. Pal Kelemen, in his book El Greco Revisited. Candia-Venice-Toledo (New York, 1961), analyzes the artistic influences that shaped the development of the style of our painter. One example of the Venetian influence that he mentions is the use of the red and blue tonalities, which we see in this painting in the dress of one of the women in the crowd being driven out. Kelemen emphasizes the importance of the Byzantine painting tradition that El Greco learned in his youth. He was already 26 years old when he moved to Venice in 1567, and learned to paint in the Renaissance style under the influence of Titian (1488-1576), and 29 years old in 1570, when he moved to Rome under the protection of miniature painter Julio Clovio (1498-1578), where he perfected his Renaissance painting technique by looking at and copying works by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) and Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520). The version of “Christ Driving the Money Changes from the Temple” at Mia was painted during his stay in Rome.

According to Richard G. Mann in El Greco and His Patrons (Cambridge, 1986), our painter moved to Toledo, in Spain, because he received a commission from the influential Don Diego de Castilla (1510-1584), Dean of Toledo Cathedral, to design an altarpiece for the church of the convent of Santo Domingo el Antiguo. This commission produced four of his masterpieces: “The Adoration of the Shepherds,” “The Resurrection of Christ,” “The Trinity,” and “The Assumption of the Virgin.” In Toledo he continued painting in the Renaissance style that he had learned in Venice, which include many portraits, and masterpieces such as “El Expolio” (the disrobing of Jesus) at the Cathedral.

But El Greco was a perceptive interpreter of the ideas of his patrons. Although he received important commissions from Madrid and other Castilian cities, he lived in Toledo from 1577 until the end of his life in 1614. During the last quarter of the 16^th century, Toledo was a Catholic intellectual center, home to many religious scholars, theologians and mystical poets. Richard G. Mann suggests that in Toledo, El Greco discovered that to visualize the commissions he received for paintings the visual elements of the Byzantine style that he had learned in his youth were more appropriate than the “realistic” Renaissance imagery that he had learned in Venice and Rome. Painters and art connoisseurs who visited Toledo toward the end of the 16^th century praised his portraits and his works at the Cathedral which he painted in the 1570s and the 1580s. But they were not appreciative of what he painted later, because the paintings that he began in the 1590s, such as the altarpiece of the chapel of the Hospital of Saint John the Baptist Outside the Walls—one of them a phantasmagorical depiction of a vision in the Book of Revelation known as “The Opening of the Fifth Seal” now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City--featured a clashing color palette, slanted perspectives, and the elongated contorted figures that were remarked upon by some of my fellow visitors looking at the painting by El Greco at Mia. Those visitors in Toledo in the late 1590s and early 1600s who did not like the latter work by El Greco called them extravagant, and some of them suggested that our artist was a very good artist who had become insane (desequilibrado).

But, until the end of his life, El Greco received commissions. He had a busy studio with several painters working for him, including his son Jorge Manuel and Luis Tristan (1586-1624), creator of the “Caravaggesque” “Holy Family” in Mia’s gallery 341, who did not follow the style of his master. When El Greco died, he was eulogized by Toledo intellectuals such as the poet Fray Felix Paravicino, who wrote on that occasion:

Crete gave him life and brushes

Toledo a better homeland where he

Achieved with death immortality

In 1808 Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain and forced the king of Spain to abdicate to his brother Joseph Bonaparte, who immediately confiscated Church property and requisitioned art work in monasteries, convents, and churches for a museum displaying art from all the lands conquered by Napoleon that was to be called the Bonaparte Museum, what is today the Louvre Museum in Paris. Many paintings by El Greco were requisitioned, and when the French were forced out of Spain in 1813 many French army officers, such as Marshall Soult, left Spain leading carts full of Spanish art works. Some of those art works ended up being displayed at the Gallerie Espagnole at the Louvre Museum.

Eric Storm’s The Discovery of El Greco: The Nationalization of Modern Art, 1860-1914 (Chicago, 2016) is a fascinating book about the “discovery” of El Greco by French Impressionists, and later, by German Expressionists. He tells how in 1819 King Ferdinand VII of Spain (r. 1813-1833) decided to open the public royal art collections to the people and exhibited them in what today is known as the Prado Museum. When French artists, such as Edouard Manet, who liked the paintings by El Greco at the Louvre, travelled to Madrid they could see masterpieces by him in the “Italian galleries” of that museum. French artists and art critics wrote articles about their “discovery” of El Greco that expanded interest in El Greco in Great Britain and Hungary, where art collectors purchased paintings by El Greco.

In Germany interest in El Greco began in 1874, when some of his paintings were acquired by German collectors for the first time, but he did not come into the focus of German art historiography until 1910, after Julius Meier Graefe, who had visited Spain, published his travel memoirs under the title Spanische Reise. The influence of El Greco reached Berlin and Vienna, where expressionist painters painted works inspired by the peculiar style of El Greco. According to Storm, at that time German art writer Wilhelm Hausenstein (1882-1957) claimed that El Greo had become an Expressionist at the end of his life. Foreign interest in El Greco brought about a reevaluation of his work in Spain by artists such as Santiago Rosiñol and Ignacio Suloaga, and writers such as Pío Baroja and Miguel de Unamuno, as well as by government officers, who eventually came to see the Greek immigrant as a superb interpreter of the Spanish nation.

The developments mentioned above brought about the incorporation of Domenikos Theotokopulos, known as El Greco (the Greek) in texts of world art history, and the desire by world museums to collect his paintings.