El greco death

He trained and became a master within that tradition before traveling at age 26 to Venice , as other Greek artists had done. In , he moved to Rome, where he opened a workshop and executed a series of works. During his stay in Italy, El Greco enriched his style with elements of Mannerism and of the Venetian Renaissance taken from a number of great artists of the time, notably Tintoretto.

In , he moved to Toledo, Spain , where he lived and worked until his death. El Greco's dramatic and expressionistic style was met with puzzlement by his contemporaries but found appreciation by the 20th century.

What was el greco known for

El Greco is regarded as a precursor of both Expressionism and Cubism , while his personality and works were a source of inspiration for poets and writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Nikos Kazantzakis. El Greco has been characterized by modern scholars as an artist so individual that he belongs to no conventional school. He is best known for tortuously elongated figures and often fantastic or phantasmagorical pigmentation , marrying Byzantine traditions with those of Western painting.

Born in , in either the village of Fodele or Candia the Venetian name of Chandax, present day Heraklion on Crete , El Greco was descended from a prosperous urban family, which had probably been driven out of Chania to Candia after an uprising against the Catholic Venetians between and Almost nothing is known about his mother or his first wife, except that they were also Greek.

Interesting facts about el greco

His second wife was a Spaniard. El Greco received his initial training as an icon painter of the Cretan school, a leading center of post- Byzantine art. In addition to painting, he probably studied the classics of ancient Greece , and perhaps the Latin classics also; he left a "working library" of volumes at his death, including the Bible in Greek and an annotated Vasari book.

Candia was a center for artistic activity where Eastern and Western cultures co-existed harmoniously, where around two hundred painters were active during the 16th century, and had organized a painters' guild, based on the Italian model. In , at the age of twenty-two, El Greco was described in a document as a "master" "maestro Domenigo" , meaning he was already a master of the guild and presumably operating his own workshop.