El Greco exhibit in Toledo marks 400th anniversary of death

Over 100 works from 29 countries

(ANSAmed) - MADRID - A vast exhibition in Toledo of El Greco's works on the 400th anniversary of the painter's death will open on Friday and run through June 14. Queen Sofia will be inaugurating the event. "El Griego de Toledo" will be hosted in six exhibition spaces across the city - the Santa Cruz Museum, the Toledo cathedral, the Santo Tomè church, the San Jose chapel and the ancient Santo Domingo convent - and includes over 100 of the artist's works from 29 cities across the globe. Curated by Fernando Marias and coordinated by Casilda Ybarra, the large-scale traveling show starts from Greco's activities prior to arriving in Spain and settling in Toledo after living in Candia, Venice and Rome, with a focus on his training as a master painter in Crete and his progressive appropriation of Italian-Western styles in the shadow of Titian, Tintoretto, Giorgio Giulio, Clovio, Michelangelo, and other Italian artists. The curator noted that the exhibition focused especially on El Greco's work as a portraitist and painter of holy and votive art. On the 4th centenary of the death of Domenicos Theotocopoulos, known to the world as El Greco, the biography "El Greco. Historia de un Pintor Extravagante" (published by Nerea) by Fernando Marias - one of the most highly respected experts on the subjects - disabuses readers of all the commonly held notions on of the Cretan painter.

He was neither Catholic nor a mystic, neither cross-eyed nor a naturalized Spaniard: Marias's biography is a meticulous review of a life of which little was known and works about which so very much has been said. ''We drag the issue into the collective imagination. El Greco has been passed off as a religious man who withdrew from worldly life. A hermetic painter of which little is known, forgotten for three centuries and rediscovered around 1900,'' said the scientific coordinator of the El Greco 2014 Foundation, created for the commemorative year and curator of the large exhibition open from tomorrow at the Santa Cruz Museum.