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Lot Essay
The intimate size of a cabinet picture, this remarkable panel belies its small scale through the concentration of entwined figures, expressed with the grandeur and brilliant colouring for which El Greco was renowned. Following the sale of 2016, a thick veil of discoloured varnish was removed to reveal the full chromatic range of El Greco’s rich, iridescent palette, making appreciable the full mastery of his technique and the sensitivity of his brushwork (fig. 1). In a stark, tempestuous landscape, with the three crosses of Golgotha silhouetted against the sky, the artist gathers crowds of mourners around the body of Christ as he is solicitously lowered into the tomb, while the Magdalene and Virgin Mary, together with a group of female attendants, grieve. Dating to relatively early in El Greco’s oeuvre, the work shows the profound influence of his Venetian and Roman periods, encapsulated by the inclusion of a portrait of Titian in the centre of the panel – El Greco’s great influence during his seminal visit to Venice in 1568-1570 – in the guise of Joseph of Arimathea.
El Greco has been claimed by art historians as the greatest genius of late Byzantine Crete, an artist steeped in the cultural and philosophic discoveries of Italy, and the father and soul of Spanish art. Indeed, the breadth of the hugely varied cultures to which he was exposed was unusual. Trained as an icon painter in the Venetian colony of Crete, he never entirely abandoned the Byzantine origins to which his simplified forms, flattened picture plane, brilliant colourism and emotional intensity bore witness. In Venice, he responded to the high palette of Titian, the nocturnes of Jacopo Bassano and the rapidly painted expressive drama of Tintoretto, noting in his own copy of Vasari’s Lives that the master’s canvases for the Scuola San Rocco were the greatest in the world, and going on to follow his practice of making models from wax and clay to study complex gestures, poses and compositions (K. Christiansen, ‘El Greco in Italy’, in Chicago, op.cit., p. 18). When he moved to Rome in 1570, his artistic language was profoundly affected by the unavoidable presence of Michelangelo. In Spain, he looked for the patronage of Philip II and, although that proved to be in vain, he remained in the Iberian Peninsula, settling in Toledo. There his work was enthusiastically received, catering to the increasingly fervent interest in religious mysticism that dominated Counter-Reformation Spanish Catholicism.
First published in 1950 in Aznar’s catalogue raisonné of El Greco’s work, this picture remained understudied and rarely seen until it was examined and published by Álvarez Lopera and subsequently exhibited in Toledo in 2014. It belongs to a group of small-scale works, each depicting scenes from the Passion. Perhaps the most notable of these are the Pietà in the Hispanic Society, New York (fig. 2); another in the Johnson Collection, Philadelphia; and two other Entombments, one formerly in the Palacio Real, Madrid (now lost) and another formerly with Giancarlo Baroni (sold Sotheby’s, New York, 20 January 2013, lot 7). A further treatment of the same subject, this time with additions to form an arched top to the panel, was previously in the Anstruther Collection (sold Christie’s, 1965) and then the Marshall Collection, now in a private collection, Spain (sold Bonhams, 28 March 1974). On the basis of ‘an imprecise black and white photograph’, Soehner and Wethey rejected our panel, which upon first-hand inspection was rehabilitated by José Alvarez Lopera (op. cit.), Leo Steinberg and Fernando Marías among others. Indeed, of the variations listed, the present panel is of substantially superior quality, painted with far greater freedom and vigor, and can most likely be regarded as the prototype, distinguished by the finer drawing of the figures, more subtle use of light and shade, and varied use of tone and colour in the garments of the mourners.
While El Greco’s Italian period received comparably little attention in studies on his work, this deepened particularly thanks to Alvarez Lopera (op. cit.). Wethey had dismissed almost the entire group of the painter’s early small-scale paintings as pastiches by another hand, suggesting they might have been by an Italian workshop assistant, which overlooked completely El Greco’s thoughtful interactions and assimilations of what he saw in Italy during the 1570s. Steinberg discussed El Greco’s debt to Michelangelo in a Burlington Shorter Notice (op. cit.), comparing it to the dead Christ in Michelangelo’s celebrated Bandini Madonna (fig. 3, now Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo, Florence), which was in Rome at the time and also known through engravings by Cornelis Cort. Pointing to the rarity of such a direct quotation, Steinberg wrote: ‘Such close replication is not normally found in El Greco…But in the Entombment, the whole of an alien figure, celebrated for unprecedented complexity and unmistakable, has been lifted, tilted and inserted intact. And so accurate is the transposition that one suspects the artist is not merely representing a Christ, but a Christ in quotation marks - “Michelangelo’s Christ.”‘ Indeed, El Greco is famous for his bold declaration that he could successfully repaint the Sistine Chapel, and it is entirely plausible to suggest that he was, as Titian had done before, not just copying Michelangelo but competing with him. His figure of Christ is not merely a repetition of an instantly recognisable figure but an incorporation of it into a far more complex composition, replete with all the expressive power of colour and dramatic landscape, which sculpture could not provide. Steinberg suggests that the prototype was painted in Rome, probably after El Greco saw the Pietà at Francesco Bandini’s villa in Monte Cavallo, and that the other repetitions may have been painted in Spain.
It has been proposed that during his sojourn in Venice in the late 1560s, El Greco had, in fact, spent time in the workshop of Titian. Professor Andrea Donati posits that the inclusion of Titian’s portrait in this panel could be seen as evidence to this much-debated theory, noting that in 1570, El Greco was officially introduced as a student of Titian by Giulio Clovio, himself a painter, to Cardinal Farnese in Rome. A contemporary copy of Vasari’s Lives owned by the jurist and scholar Durante Dorio da Leonessa also records this master-pupil relationship. It has generally been argued that this panel was painted shortly after El Greco’s arrival in Rome, in circa 1571 or 1572, though Aznar, Hadjinacolau and Soehner (op. cit.) have dated the work to later in the painter’s career, placing it after his arrival in Spain in 1577. The seeming homage to Titian in his portrait, combined with its subject matter, has been used to corroborate this later date, placing it after the death of the great Venetian master, during the outbreak of the plague in Venice in the summer of 1576. Professor Donati, however, alternatively argues that the work was painted shortly after El Greco had left Palazzo Farnese and enrolled in Rome’s Compagnia di San Luca, which he joined in October 1572, and would have been working for his living. Small-scale works of similar religious subjects were popular in Rome under Pius V, and would have been saleable to El Greco’s early Italian and Spanish patrons in that city. It is recorded that there were a number of small paintings by El Greco left in his studio at his death, which were intended to be used as modelli for larger works. If this is one such picture, and it does have a Spanish provenance, El Greco would have taken it with him when he left for Spain in 1577. Indeed, as Donati observes, if it was acquired by a Spanish collector, this Entombment would have been among the first - if not the very first - of the artist’s pictures to enter a Spanish collection. Its distinguished nineteenth-century Spanish provenance strengthens this theory, being said to come from the collection at the villa of Carmona of the 12th Marques de las Torres de la Pressa, Miguel Lasso de la Vega y Quintamilla (1830-1900).
El Greco as Modernist
Like a number of Old Master painters we most admire today, notably Caravaggio, Vermeer and Frans Hals, El Greco’s current popularity is a relatively recent phenomenon. Yet it is no mystery why he has been hailed as a precursor of modernism, the forebear of Cezanne, Picasso and even Jackson Pollock. Among the earliest ‘modern’ artists to appreciate El Greco was Eugene Delacroix, who painted a version of a small Pietà (fig. 4), relating to his Pietà in the Hispanic Society, New York. Not knowing anything about El Greco, Van Gogh painted an homage to Delacroix’s homage to the artist (fig. 5). El Greco’s true ‘rediscovery’, however, perhaps begins in 1902 with the monographic exhibition devoted to him at the Prado. This was preceded by the recognition of his genius by Spanish artists Ignacio Zuloaga and Santiago Rusiñol, who championed his work and arranged for the section of a monument in his honour on the promenade in Sitges in 1894. More importantly for the role of El Greco in the development of Modernism was Zuloaga's purchase of The Opening of the Fifth Seal (fig. 6, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), which the young Pablo Picasso saw in Zuloaga's studio in Paris in 1905 and which profoundly influenced the conception of Picasso’s landmark painting the Desmoiselles d’Avignon (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; fig. 7). In fact, Picasso had clearly taken note of his Spanish forebear’s significance much earlier, as is evident from a 1899 drawing by Picasso entitled Yo El Greco. Of this artistic dependence, in 1912, Paul Ferdinand Schmidt commented ‘He [Picasso] was a portraitist of tragic significance and it is no accident that a Greco hangs in the same gallery as they share that Spanish sense of isolation, the gloom, the brooding feeling, and a sense of metaphysical with the perfect beauty of their paintings. Even if their means and goals are infinitely diverse: the Greek Spaniard and the Spanish Frenchman “shake hands across the centuries”‘.
But the intrusion of El Greco onto the consciousness of the European avant-garde was far more complex and begins albeit more randomly in the middle of the nineteenth century. The first significant advocate for the artist was the Romantic critic Théophile Gautier, who declared his admiration in Voyage en Espagne (1843), but also claimed that El Greco had gone mad through excessive artistic sensitivity. Although Gautier appreciated El Greco’s late work, the idea that he went mad, and that this ‘explains’ the increasing eccentricity of his paintings, was widely held. In the eighteenth century, Palomino had written disapprovingly that El Greco ‘tried to change his style with such extravagance that he finally made his painting style worthless and ridiculous’. Even John Charles Robinson, upon giving the National Gallery in London Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple (fig. 8), described it as ‘above the average of this most eccentric master’s work…at the same time, you know the man was as mad as a hatter’. Reactions to the ‘mad’ genius of El Greco have always been mixed. His early Byzantine style has only recently begun to be understood and even his Italian works did not always conform to critics’ notion of El Greco’s genius. Wethey, a significant authority on the artist, described this Entombment using similar language to that of his detractors in the nineteenth century, writing ‘the picture is a caricature of motives drawn from the artist’s work’. This parallels the words of Federico de Madrazo, director of the Prado, who in 1881 complained of having to store the ‘quite absurd caricatures by El Greco. El Greco’s departure from aesthetic norms had the capacity to disturb his own biographer in 1962 as well as a director of the Prado 81 years before.
It was in Germany as much as in France that El Greco’s qualities began to be reappraised. In 1874, the same year as the celebrated exhibition of ‘Impressionists’ at the studio of the photographer Felix Nadar, a German art historian from Bonn named Carl Justi recognized the first paintings by El Greco in Germany, formerly attributed to Bassano. He would go on to publish Domenico Theodocopoli von Kreta in 1897. Justi, among El Greco’s first admirers, was far from a supporter of Modernism and, like many of El Greco’s earliest enthusiasts, appreciated that his early works were influenced by Titian and Tintoretto, but dismissed his later works as the ‘degenerate product of a pathological genius’. Nevertheless, Justi would describe El Greco as ‘in fact a prophet of Modernism’ and wrote about El Greco’s Martyrdom of St Maurice (1580-1582; Madrid, Monasterio de El Escorial) as the ‘outrageous music of the future’ expressed in the ‘crudest contrasts of colour, watery blue and sulphuric yellow, in harsh splashes of sunshine and lightning’. However, it was his countryman Julius Meier-Graefe whose enormously influential Spanische Reise (Spanish Journey) carried the torch for El Greco as a proto-modernist. Comparing him to Cezanne (fig. 9), Meier-Graef wrote ‘I do not know if even today, Greco would have enjoyed the public reputation in the same way as the recently deceased modernist. Before Cezanne he carried the honourable title of a madman, was as secretive as the other and little familiar with the blessings of public validation; altogether he was so remarkably like our contemporary that one is tempted to take back everything that has been said about the idiosyncrasies of our era, and count the most independent minds of our time as the immediate successors to El Greco…they have the same violence of expression and reduced physicality in the details’.
A critical moment for the appreciation of El Greco in this context was the exhibition of the collection of the Hungarian collector Marczell von Nemes at the Alte Pinakotek, Munich in 1911. It included a mixture of eight works by El Greco and contemporary art, and among the many visitors was the young Paul Klee, who wrote: ‘to point out what is most current, I will join the stream of Pinakotek visitors as they line up to view the works of El Greco…I particularly admire the Laocöon [now New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art] and see in it a puzzle of compositional and painterly perfection’. The following year in the Der Blaue Reiter almanac, the Saint John by El Greco (now Boston, Museum of Fine Arts) was illustrated side-by-side with Robert Delaunay’s Eiffel Tower, both from the Koehler collection. This conjunction of El Greco and the early 20th century contemporary art movement was eloquently described by Roger Fry, a modernist critic and former curator at the Metropolitan Museum, who described the reactions of the public to the London National Gallery’s newly acquired Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane as ‘an electric shock…people gather in crowds in front of it, they argue and discuss and lose their tempers…they talk about it as they might talk about some contemporary picture, a thing which they have a right to feel delighted or infuriated by as the case may be – it is not like the most of the old pictures, a thing classified or mummified, set altogether apart from life, an object of vague and listless reverence, but an actual, living thing, expressing something which one has got either to agree or disagree…that the artists are excited – never more so – is no wonder, for here is an old master who is not merely modern but actually appears a good many steps ahead of us, turning back to show us the way’. That way was taken not only by Picasso and Cézanne but also Der Blaue Reiter group, German Expressionists such as Max Beckmann, even Marcel Duchamp and, in series of drawings explicitly acknowledging his debt, by Jackson Pollock (fig. 10) and less directly by Willem de Kooning (fig. 11). Of the latter, Diane Waldman writes: ‘It is however…appropriate to point out de Kooning’s relationship with El Greco and Chaïm Soutine, two other artists who have been characterized as Expressionists…but who do not entirely fit into this tradition...[Their] emphasis upon tactility, motion and light as a dynamic force is evident. El Greco appealed to De Kooning not by virtue of his tortured and twisted figures, but because of his active painting handling and abstract forms’. De Kooning himself said ‘[El Greco] is someone else I’ve always liked. In his paintings material is broken into only a few enormous planes. It’s so much more interesting to look at than all those intricate creases painted so naturalistically by someone like Tintoretto’.
This emotionally charged Entombment, early as it is, exemplifies so many of the qualities that troubled El Greco’s critics and enthralled his admirers. Imagined with little regard for the conventions of spatial perspective and Renaissance idealisation in the drawing of face or body, the artist achieves, on a tiny scale, a vision of remarkable dramatic intensity: the complex knot of protagonists, rendered in vivid strokes of blues, green, carmines, pinks, greys and white. In this scene of restless movement, enlivened with flickering accents of light, the action pushed forcefully to the very front of the picture plane, El Greco, though mindful of his sources, has already established himself as an independent master in every sense.
ADDENDUM: RECENT STUDIES ON EL GRECO’S ENTOMBMENT
The following is entirely informed by K. Christiansen, ‘El Greco's Entombment Painted in Rome’, Nuovi studi: Rivista di arte antica e moderna, XXIII, 2017, pp. 118-122, figs. XVI-XVIII and 181-187.
In his 2017 article, Keith Christiansen considered this Entombment a prime document of the transformation in El Greco’s art following his arrival in Rome, and his ‘most ambitious as well as his finest of these works for private devotion’. Its examination provided evidence that ‘it and other devotional pictures on panel by El Greco were conceived as precious objects to be transported in a leather case rather than framed’, pointing to the simulation of veined ebony on the reverse, which it has in common with other panels on the same scale from this period. The catalyst for the article was the ‘transformative’ effect of its cleaning by Michael Gallagher at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the same year, which ‘revealed beneath the much discolored oil varnish a brilliance of color and delicacy of execution of exceptional beauty’.
Among the myriad of overt influences that support the idea that it was conceived in Rome, including works El Greco will have seen in the Eternal city, the principal among them are Giulio Clovio’s famous illuminations in the Farnese Hours. El Greco must have had occasion to study them during his stay in Palazzo Farnese from the point of his arrival in Rome in 1570, when he was under the patronage of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. ‘The palette of the picture’, writes Christiansen, ‘dominated by lapis-rich blues set off by raspberry reds and the wash-like treatment of the cloud-scudded sky tinted with violets and salmon, requires only the briefest comment, since anyone who knows Giulio Clovio’s miniatures in the Farnese Hours will instantly recognize the similarities. The figure style too — aside from Giulio’s more rigorous drawing and meticulous finish — is similar in the exaggerated proportions of the figures. A comparison with El Greco’s other, similarly scaled works from the Roman period will reveal that they uniformly aspire to a more sculptural style, more in keeping with Roman practice when compared with the paintings usually dated to his time in Venice. Not surprisingly, it is the Farnese Hours that Giulio proudly holds in the portrait El Greco painted of him — a portrait that belonged to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples).’
Of the small-scale, devotional pictures by El Greco, the two that show the closest stylistic analogies with the Entombment to Christiansen are the Flight into Egypt (fig. 12) and the Annunciation in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, which he notes are usually — and rightly — considered among El Greco’s first Roman paintings: ‘Not only do they employ a palette similar to Giulio’s miniatures but they are painted in a freely brushed, Venetian manner. They should all be dated to the period 1570-72.’ The Entombment, which he considers ‘by far the most ambitious of the three’, is the best manifestation of the sudden transformation of El Greco’s style after his arrival in Rome from Venice. This is best illustrated by comparison with the earlier rendition of the Entombment in the National Gallery-Alexandros Soutzos Museum in Athens (fig. 13) and the small triptych now in the Galleria Estense, Modena. Both were painted in Venice in the years 1568-70. The present Entombment ‘displays an altogether greater artistic ambition and has, as well, a more powerfully devotional affect.’ The composition is now dynamic, the artist introducing references to Raphael in ‘the pose of the male figure shown standing on the tomb [who] gathers up the winding sheet beneath Christ’s legs, [which] is taken from Raphael’s Miraculous Draught of Fishes, as is his companion bent over Christ’s shoulder and head [fig. 14]. The figure in a sophisticated serpentinata pose, with one foot on the edge of the tomb, recalls the Michelangesque ignudi with which Giulio framed his scenes in the Farnese Hours (see, most particularly, the ignudo on the page with the Crucifixion). Most signally, the pose for the figure of Christ is based directly on Michelangelo’s Pietà in Florence, which at the time was to be seen in the garden of Francesco Bandini in Rome and was studied by a number of Roman-based artists… Leo Steinberg interpreted the 90 degree rotation of the figure of Christ [from Michelangelo’s Pieta] as emblematic of El Greco’s entry onto the Roman scene: a challenge to other painters and a demonstration that that the recently arrived Greek could outdo them in their emulation of Michelangelo.’
In this small panel we see, thus, the profound influence on El Greco’s art of each of the four artists, who were included so prominently in the right foreground of his later Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple (Minneapolis Institute of Art; fig. 15, detail): Titian (whose portrait El Greco includes in the present picture behind the figure of Christ, in the guise of Joseph of Arimathea); Raphael; Giulio Clovio; and Michelangelo. This panel perfectly synthesises the influences on which El Greco’s mature style was founded, with the result being ‘a work that is figuratively complex and emotionally high pitched, by comparison with which the earlier Entombment [in Athens] must seem in every way less ambitious and even staid.’
Beyond the revelation of these stylistic influences, the cleaning and further study at the Metropolitan Museum of Art also triggered a new theory on the purpose of the panel. It is painted to its very edges and ‘has not been reduced, and its sides are painted black, as is the reverse, which retains its two, original horizontal battens. On the reverse the black is embellished with ochre streaks, evidently to simulate a veined ebony — an exotic and expensive wood that came from north Africa’ (see illustration). The simulation of ebony is not unique; El Greco used precisely the same technique on a handful of other works, including the Stigmatization of Saint Francis, formerly in the Zuloaga collection, and the Adoration of the Name of Jesus in the London National Gallery and the Pietà in Philadelphia seem originally to have also been treated in this way. The Saint Francis and the Pietà are of the same dimensions as the Entombment and are constructed in the same way, ‘suggesting that El Greco had multiple panels made by the same carpenter with a view to serial production. The intention of the simulated ebony must have been to further enhance the preciousness of each work. Given the fact that the composition is painted to the very edges of the panel, the sides of which are painted black rather than left bare, it is worth considering whether the picture was intended to be framed. Or ought we, instead, to think of it as kept in a tooled leather case: an exquisite, portable devotional object to set up for personal devotions?’. Neither of the two other known versions of the composition are treated in this way and, as Christiansen concludes, ‘the jewel-like Entombment stands apart from the other versions by its exceptional quality.’
At the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Entombment was, for the first time, also examined under infrared reflectography, which revealed a lyrical brush drawing for the composition (with infrared reflectography undertaken again in June 2023, available upon request; fig. 16). ‘Although difficult to detect, it seems most likely that El Greco laid in the composition lightly with charcoal and then went over it with the tip of the brush, since the fluidly applied lines delineate the contours of the figures with no notable corrections or changes. The definition of the body of Christ is especially detailed and contrasts with the very loosely indicted features of the basket still life. Apparently using the same liquid medium, he then indicated the modeling with washes, articulating in particular the distribution of light falling across the figures.’ The discovery of this underdrawing adds significantly to the very limited extant, and fully accepted, examples of El Greco as a draughtsman. It is a panel that continues to surprise us and one that will likely continue to further inform El Greco studies for years to come.
El Greco has been claimed by art historians as the greatest genius of late Byzantine Crete, an artist steeped in the cultural and philosophic discoveries of Italy, and the father and soul of Spanish art. Indeed, the breadth of the hugely varied cultures to which he was exposed was unusual. Trained as an icon painter in the Venetian colony of Crete, he never entirely abandoned the Byzantine origins to which his simplified forms, flattened picture plane, brilliant colourism and emotional intensity bore witness. In Venice, he responded to the high palette of Titian, the nocturnes of Jacopo Bassano and the rapidly painted expressive drama of Tintoretto, noting in his own copy of Vasari’s Lives that the master’s canvases for the Scuola San Rocco were the greatest in the world, and going on to follow his practice of making models from wax and clay to study complex gestures, poses and compositions (K. Christiansen, ‘El Greco in Italy’, in Chicago, op.cit., p. 18). When he moved to Rome in 1570, his artistic language was profoundly affected by the unavoidable presence of Michelangelo. In Spain, he looked for the patronage of Philip II and, although that proved to be in vain, he remained in the Iberian Peninsula, settling in Toledo. There his work was enthusiastically received, catering to the increasingly fervent interest in religious mysticism that dominated Counter-Reformation Spanish Catholicism.
First published in 1950 in Aznar’s catalogue raisonné of El Greco’s work, this picture remained understudied and rarely seen until it was examined and published by Álvarez Lopera and subsequently exhibited in Toledo in 2014. It belongs to a group of small-scale works, each depicting scenes from the Passion. Perhaps the most notable of these are the Pietà in the Hispanic Society, New York (fig. 2); another in the Johnson Collection, Philadelphia; and two other Entombments, one formerly in the Palacio Real, Madrid (now lost) and another formerly with Giancarlo Baroni (sold Sotheby’s, New York, 20 January 2013, lot 7). A further treatment of the same subject, this time with additions to form an arched top to the panel, was previously in the Anstruther Collection (sold Christie’s, 1965) and then the Marshall Collection, now in a private collection, Spain (sold Bonhams, 28 March 1974). On the basis of ‘an imprecise black and white photograph’, Soehner and Wethey rejected our panel, which upon first-hand inspection was rehabilitated by José Alvarez Lopera (op. cit.), Leo Steinberg and Fernando Marías among others. Indeed, of the variations listed, the present panel is of substantially superior quality, painted with far greater freedom and vigor, and can most likely be regarded as the prototype, distinguished by the finer drawing of the figures, more subtle use of light and shade, and varied use of tone and colour in the garments of the mourners.
While El Greco’s Italian period received comparably little attention in studies on his work, this deepened particularly thanks to Alvarez Lopera (op. cit.). Wethey had dismissed almost the entire group of the painter’s early small-scale paintings as pastiches by another hand, suggesting they might have been by an Italian workshop assistant, which overlooked completely El Greco’s thoughtful interactions and assimilations of what he saw in Italy during the 1570s. Steinberg discussed El Greco’s debt to Michelangelo in a Burlington Shorter Notice (op. cit.), comparing it to the dead Christ in Michelangelo’s celebrated Bandini Madonna (fig. 3, now Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo, Florence), which was in Rome at the time and also known through engravings by Cornelis Cort. Pointing to the rarity of such a direct quotation, Steinberg wrote: ‘Such close replication is not normally found in El Greco…But in the Entombment, the whole of an alien figure, celebrated for unprecedented complexity and unmistakable, has been lifted, tilted and inserted intact. And so accurate is the transposition that one suspects the artist is not merely representing a Christ, but a Christ in quotation marks - “Michelangelo’s Christ.”‘ Indeed, El Greco is famous for his bold declaration that he could successfully repaint the Sistine Chapel, and it is entirely plausible to suggest that he was, as Titian had done before, not just copying Michelangelo but competing with him. His figure of Christ is not merely a repetition of an instantly recognisable figure but an incorporation of it into a far more complex composition, replete with all the expressive power of colour and dramatic landscape, which sculpture could not provide. Steinberg suggests that the prototype was painted in Rome, probably after El Greco saw the Pietà at Francesco Bandini’s villa in Monte Cavallo, and that the other repetitions may have been painted in Spain.
It has been proposed that during his sojourn in Venice in the late 1560s, El Greco had, in fact, spent time in the workshop of Titian. Professor Andrea Donati posits that the inclusion of Titian’s portrait in this panel could be seen as evidence to this much-debated theory, noting that in 1570, El Greco was officially introduced as a student of Titian by Giulio Clovio, himself a painter, to Cardinal Farnese in Rome. A contemporary copy of Vasari’s Lives owned by the jurist and scholar Durante Dorio da Leonessa also records this master-pupil relationship. It has generally been argued that this panel was painted shortly after El Greco’s arrival in Rome, in circa 1571 or 1572, though Aznar, Hadjinacolau and Soehner (op. cit.) have dated the work to later in the painter’s career, placing it after his arrival in Spain in 1577. The seeming homage to Titian in his portrait, combined with its subject matter, has been used to corroborate this later date, placing it after the death of the great Venetian master, during the outbreak of the plague in Venice in the summer of 1576. Professor Donati, however, alternatively argues that the work was painted shortly after El Greco had left Palazzo Farnese and enrolled in Rome’s Compagnia di San Luca, which he joined in October 1572, and would have been working for his living. Small-scale works of similar religious subjects were popular in Rome under Pius V, and would have been saleable to El Greco’s early Italian and Spanish patrons in that city. It is recorded that there were a number of small paintings by El Greco left in his studio at his death, which were intended to be used as modelli for larger works. If this is one such picture, and it does have a Spanish provenance, El Greco would have taken it with him when he left for Spain in 1577. Indeed, as Donati observes, if it was acquired by a Spanish collector, this Entombment would have been among the first - if not the very first - of the artist’s pictures to enter a Spanish collection. Its distinguished nineteenth-century Spanish provenance strengthens this theory, being said to come from the collection at the villa of Carmona of the 12th Marques de las Torres de la Pressa, Miguel Lasso de la Vega y Quintamilla (1830-1900).
El Greco as Modernist
Like a number of Old Master painters we most admire today, notably Caravaggio, Vermeer and Frans Hals, El Greco’s current popularity is a relatively recent phenomenon. Yet it is no mystery why he has been hailed as a precursor of modernism, the forebear of Cezanne, Picasso and even Jackson Pollock. Among the earliest ‘modern’ artists to appreciate El Greco was Eugene Delacroix, who painted a version of a small Pietà (fig. 4), relating to his Pietà in the Hispanic Society, New York. Not knowing anything about El Greco, Van Gogh painted an homage to Delacroix’s homage to the artist (fig. 5). El Greco’s true ‘rediscovery’, however, perhaps begins in 1902 with the monographic exhibition devoted to him at the Prado. This was preceded by the recognition of his genius by Spanish artists Ignacio Zuloaga and Santiago Rusiñol, who championed his work and arranged for the section of a monument in his honour on the promenade in Sitges in 1894. More importantly for the role of El Greco in the development of Modernism was Zuloaga's purchase of The Opening of the Fifth Seal (fig. 6, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), which the young Pablo Picasso saw in Zuloaga's studio in Paris in 1905 and which profoundly influenced the conception of Picasso’s landmark painting the Desmoiselles d’Avignon (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; fig. 7). In fact, Picasso had clearly taken note of his Spanish forebear’s significance much earlier, as is evident from a 1899 drawing by Picasso entitled Yo El Greco. Of this artistic dependence, in 1912, Paul Ferdinand Schmidt commented ‘He [Picasso] was a portraitist of tragic significance and it is no accident that a Greco hangs in the same gallery as they share that Spanish sense of isolation, the gloom, the brooding feeling, and a sense of metaphysical with the perfect beauty of their paintings. Even if their means and goals are infinitely diverse: the Greek Spaniard and the Spanish Frenchman “shake hands across the centuries”‘.
But the intrusion of El Greco onto the consciousness of the European avant-garde was far more complex and begins albeit more randomly in the middle of the nineteenth century. The first significant advocate for the artist was the Romantic critic Théophile Gautier, who declared his admiration in Voyage en Espagne (1843), but also claimed that El Greco had gone mad through excessive artistic sensitivity. Although Gautier appreciated El Greco’s late work, the idea that he went mad, and that this ‘explains’ the increasing eccentricity of his paintings, was widely held. In the eighteenth century, Palomino had written disapprovingly that El Greco ‘tried to change his style with such extravagance that he finally made his painting style worthless and ridiculous’. Even John Charles Robinson, upon giving the National Gallery in London Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple (fig. 8), described it as ‘above the average of this most eccentric master’s work…at the same time, you know the man was as mad as a hatter’. Reactions to the ‘mad’ genius of El Greco have always been mixed. His early Byzantine style has only recently begun to be understood and even his Italian works did not always conform to critics’ notion of El Greco’s genius. Wethey, a significant authority on the artist, described this Entombment using similar language to that of his detractors in the nineteenth century, writing ‘the picture is a caricature of motives drawn from the artist’s work’. This parallels the words of Federico de Madrazo, director of the Prado, who in 1881 complained of having to store the ‘quite absurd caricatures by El Greco. El Greco’s departure from aesthetic norms had the capacity to disturb his own biographer in 1962 as well as a director of the Prado 81 years before.
It was in Germany as much as in France that El Greco’s qualities began to be reappraised. In 1874, the same year as the celebrated exhibition of ‘Impressionists’ at the studio of the photographer Felix Nadar, a German art historian from Bonn named Carl Justi recognized the first paintings by El Greco in Germany, formerly attributed to Bassano. He would go on to publish Domenico Theodocopoli von Kreta in 1897. Justi, among El Greco’s first admirers, was far from a supporter of Modernism and, like many of El Greco’s earliest enthusiasts, appreciated that his early works were influenced by Titian and Tintoretto, but dismissed his later works as the ‘degenerate product of a pathological genius’. Nevertheless, Justi would describe El Greco as ‘in fact a prophet of Modernism’ and wrote about El Greco’s Martyrdom of St Maurice (1580-1582; Madrid, Monasterio de El Escorial) as the ‘outrageous music of the future’ expressed in the ‘crudest contrasts of colour, watery blue and sulphuric yellow, in harsh splashes of sunshine and lightning’. However, it was his countryman Julius Meier-Graefe whose enormously influential Spanische Reise (Spanish Journey) carried the torch for El Greco as a proto-modernist. Comparing him to Cezanne (fig. 9), Meier-Graef wrote ‘I do not know if even today, Greco would have enjoyed the public reputation in the same way as the recently deceased modernist. Before Cezanne he carried the honourable title of a madman, was as secretive as the other and little familiar with the blessings of public validation; altogether he was so remarkably like our contemporary that one is tempted to take back everything that has been said about the idiosyncrasies of our era, and count the most independent minds of our time as the immediate successors to El Greco…they have the same violence of expression and reduced physicality in the details’.
A critical moment for the appreciation of El Greco in this context was the exhibition of the collection of the Hungarian collector Marczell von Nemes at the Alte Pinakotek, Munich in 1911. It included a mixture of eight works by El Greco and contemporary art, and among the many visitors was the young Paul Klee, who wrote: ‘to point out what is most current, I will join the stream of Pinakotek visitors as they line up to view the works of El Greco…I particularly admire the Laocöon [now New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art] and see in it a puzzle of compositional and painterly perfection’. The following year in the Der Blaue Reiter almanac, the Saint John by El Greco (now Boston, Museum of Fine Arts) was illustrated side-by-side with Robert Delaunay’s Eiffel Tower, both from the Koehler collection. This conjunction of El Greco and the early 20th century contemporary art movement was eloquently described by Roger Fry, a modernist critic and former curator at the Metropolitan Museum, who described the reactions of the public to the London National Gallery’s newly acquired Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane as ‘an electric shock…people gather in crowds in front of it, they argue and discuss and lose their tempers…they talk about it as they might talk about some contemporary picture, a thing which they have a right to feel delighted or infuriated by as the case may be – it is not like the most of the old pictures, a thing classified or mummified, set altogether apart from life, an object of vague and listless reverence, but an actual, living thing, expressing something which one has got either to agree or disagree…that the artists are excited – never more so – is no wonder, for here is an old master who is not merely modern but actually appears a good many steps ahead of us, turning back to show us the way’. That way was taken not only by Picasso and Cézanne but also Der Blaue Reiter group, German Expressionists such as Max Beckmann, even Marcel Duchamp and, in series of drawings explicitly acknowledging his debt, by Jackson Pollock (fig. 10) and less directly by Willem de Kooning (fig. 11). Of the latter, Diane Waldman writes: ‘It is however…appropriate to point out de Kooning’s relationship with El Greco and Chaïm Soutine, two other artists who have been characterized as Expressionists…but who do not entirely fit into this tradition...[Their] emphasis upon tactility, motion and light as a dynamic force is evident. El Greco appealed to De Kooning not by virtue of his tortured and twisted figures, but because of his active painting handling and abstract forms’. De Kooning himself said ‘[El Greco] is someone else I’ve always liked. In his paintings material is broken into only a few enormous planes. It’s so much more interesting to look at than all those intricate creases painted so naturalistically by someone like Tintoretto’.
This emotionally charged Entombment, early as it is, exemplifies so many of the qualities that troubled El Greco’s critics and enthralled his admirers. Imagined with little regard for the conventions of spatial perspective and Renaissance idealisation in the drawing of face or body, the artist achieves, on a tiny scale, a vision of remarkable dramatic intensity: the complex knot of protagonists, rendered in vivid strokes of blues, green, carmines, pinks, greys and white. In this scene of restless movement, enlivened with flickering accents of light, the action pushed forcefully to the very front of the picture plane, El Greco, though mindful of his sources, has already established himself as an independent master in every sense.
ADDENDUM: RECENT STUDIES ON EL GRECO’S ENTOMBMENT
The following is entirely informed by K. Christiansen, ‘El Greco's Entombment Painted in Rome’, Nuovi studi: Rivista di arte antica e moderna, XXIII, 2017, pp. 118-122, figs. XVI-XVIII and 181-187.
In his 2017 article, Keith Christiansen considered this Entombment a prime document of the transformation in El Greco’s art following his arrival in Rome, and his ‘most ambitious as well as his finest of these works for private devotion’. Its examination provided evidence that ‘it and other devotional pictures on panel by El Greco were conceived as precious objects to be transported in a leather case rather than framed’, pointing to the simulation of veined ebony on the reverse, which it has in common with other panels on the same scale from this period. The catalyst for the article was the ‘transformative’ effect of its cleaning by Michael Gallagher at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the same year, which ‘revealed beneath the much discolored oil varnish a brilliance of color and delicacy of execution of exceptional beauty’.
Among the myriad of overt influences that support the idea that it was conceived in Rome, including works El Greco will have seen in the Eternal city, the principal among them are Giulio Clovio’s famous illuminations in the Farnese Hours. El Greco must have had occasion to study them during his stay in Palazzo Farnese from the point of his arrival in Rome in 1570, when he was under the patronage of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. ‘The palette of the picture’, writes Christiansen, ‘dominated by lapis-rich blues set off by raspberry reds and the wash-like treatment of the cloud-scudded sky tinted with violets and salmon, requires only the briefest comment, since anyone who knows Giulio Clovio’s miniatures in the Farnese Hours will instantly recognize the similarities. The figure style too — aside from Giulio’s more rigorous drawing and meticulous finish — is similar in the exaggerated proportions of the figures. A comparison with El Greco’s other, similarly scaled works from the Roman period will reveal that they uniformly aspire to a more sculptural style, more in keeping with Roman practice when compared with the paintings usually dated to his time in Venice. Not surprisingly, it is the Farnese Hours that Giulio proudly holds in the portrait El Greco painted of him — a portrait that belonged to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples).’
Of the small-scale, devotional pictures by El Greco, the two that show the closest stylistic analogies with the Entombment to Christiansen are the Flight into Egypt (fig. 12) and the Annunciation in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, which he notes are usually — and rightly — considered among El Greco’s first Roman paintings: ‘Not only do they employ a palette similar to Giulio’s miniatures but they are painted in a freely brushed, Venetian manner. They should all be dated to the period 1570-72.’ The Entombment, which he considers ‘by far the most ambitious of the three’, is the best manifestation of the sudden transformation of El Greco’s style after his arrival in Rome from Venice. This is best illustrated by comparison with the earlier rendition of the Entombment in the National Gallery-Alexandros Soutzos Museum in Athens (fig. 13) and the small triptych now in the Galleria Estense, Modena. Both were painted in Venice in the years 1568-70. The present Entombment ‘displays an altogether greater artistic ambition and has, as well, a more powerfully devotional affect.’ The composition is now dynamic, the artist introducing references to Raphael in ‘the pose of the male figure shown standing on the tomb [who] gathers up the winding sheet beneath Christ’s legs, [which] is taken from Raphael’s Miraculous Draught of Fishes, as is his companion bent over Christ’s shoulder and head [fig. 14]. The figure in a sophisticated serpentinata pose, with one foot on the edge of the tomb, recalls the Michelangesque ignudi with which Giulio framed his scenes in the Farnese Hours (see, most particularly, the ignudo on the page with the Crucifixion). Most signally, the pose for the figure of Christ is based directly on Michelangelo’s Pietà in Florence, which at the time was to be seen in the garden of Francesco Bandini in Rome and was studied by a number of Roman-based artists… Leo Steinberg interpreted the 90 degree rotation of the figure of Christ [from Michelangelo’s Pieta] as emblematic of El Greco’s entry onto the Roman scene: a challenge to other painters and a demonstration that that the recently arrived Greek could outdo them in their emulation of Michelangelo.’
In this small panel we see, thus, the profound influence on El Greco’s art of each of the four artists, who were included so prominently in the right foreground of his later Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple (Minneapolis Institute of Art; fig. 15, detail): Titian (whose portrait El Greco includes in the present picture behind the figure of Christ, in the guise of Joseph of Arimathea); Raphael; Giulio Clovio; and Michelangelo. This panel perfectly synthesises the influences on which El Greco’s mature style was founded, with the result being ‘a work that is figuratively complex and emotionally high pitched, by comparison with which the earlier Entombment [in Athens] must seem in every way less ambitious and even staid.’
Beyond the revelation of these stylistic influences, the cleaning and further study at the Metropolitan Museum of Art also triggered a new theory on the purpose of the panel. It is painted to its very edges and ‘has not been reduced, and its sides are painted black, as is the reverse, which retains its two, original horizontal battens. On the reverse the black is embellished with ochre streaks, evidently to simulate a veined ebony — an exotic and expensive wood that came from north Africa’ (see illustration). The simulation of ebony is not unique; El Greco used precisely the same technique on a handful of other works, including the Stigmatization of Saint Francis, formerly in the Zuloaga collection, and the Adoration of the Name of Jesus in the London National Gallery and the Pietà in Philadelphia seem originally to have also been treated in this way. The Saint Francis and the Pietà are of the same dimensions as the Entombment and are constructed in the same way, ‘suggesting that El Greco had multiple panels made by the same carpenter with a view to serial production. The intention of the simulated ebony must have been to further enhance the preciousness of each work. Given the fact that the composition is painted to the very edges of the panel, the sides of which are painted black rather than left bare, it is worth considering whether the picture was intended to be framed. Or ought we, instead, to think of it as kept in a tooled leather case: an exquisite, portable devotional object to set up for personal devotions?’. Neither of the two other known versions of the composition are treated in this way and, as Christiansen concludes, ‘the jewel-like Entombment stands apart from the other versions by its exceptional quality.’
At the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Entombment was, for the first time, also examined under infrared reflectography, which revealed a lyrical brush drawing for the composition (with infrared reflectography undertaken again in June 2023, available upon request; fig. 16). ‘Although difficult to detect, it seems most likely that El Greco laid in the composition lightly with charcoal and then went over it with the tip of the brush, since the fluidly applied lines delineate the contours of the figures with no notable corrections or changes. The definition of the body of Christ is especially detailed and contrasts with the very loosely indicted features of the basket still life. Apparently using the same liquid medium, he then indicated the modeling with washes, articulating in particular the distribution of light falling across the figures.’ The discovery of this underdrawing adds significantly to the very limited extant, and fully accepted, examples of El Greco as a draughtsman. It is a panel that continues to surprise us and one that will likely continue to further inform El Greco studies for years to come.