Theotocopuli

Last week a picture was exhibited in Boston--"St. Martin and the Beggar" by El Greco. Carlos Meinhard of the Howard Young Galleries brought the picture to Boston; it had come to him from the collection of John Singer Sargent who owned it for 30 years, allowing it to be shown in public only once--at the exhibition of Spanish art in London in 1895. There is talk now that the Boston Museum of Fine Arts will buy it, give it a place beside two other El Grecos that hang there, "St. Dominic" and the Portrait of Fray Feliz Hortenzio Palavincio. These two are fine portraits; St. Martin is better. It is one of the most important works of a man whose intellect has had few equals among the minds of the world. Very little is known about El Greco. Even his name is in doubt; students believe that it was Theotocopuli, but the Spaniards of Toledo, in whose country he passed the richest part of his life, found this name barbarous, and never wrote or spoke of him except as Dominico Greco. Great princes of the 16th Century, whose eyes were unsealed, honored him by this name; the men of nearer times, putting on once more fetters laid off in the Renaissance, wondered only whether Greco was mad or astigmatic, a Cretan voluptuary, or a disciple of the art of Byzantium. So much, at least, is certain: he was born in Crete about the year 1547, he went to Italy to study; and there his work was influenced by Titian and Tintoretto. It is said that he lived in a little room in the palace of the Cardinal Farnese. He went to Spain when the Duke of Toledo asked Italian painters to work on his cathedral, and in Toledo, stony and enchanted on its hill above a desert where goats wandered with magicians, he painted until the end of his life.

It is true that Dominico Theotocopuli was mad. It is true that he was astigmatic, for one must believe that sanity and sight lie in numbers, and certainly he did not see or think as did any other man of his time. He saw the spirit in the body, shapes of the mind in every earthly shape. Only a few saints and mathematicians have understood as he did; they, too, were mad. Heads in which a cone is buried; elongated muscles and loins growing up through the paint in mystery like weeds or flowers; skies that break, trees that kneel, faces and hands and walls that tilt with some interior volition-- these he painted. To describe his paintings in this way is to speak principally of the thought that organized them; of his color critics have said "Tintoretto," of his fluidity "Byzantium." Whatever such words mean, let them stand. They are good tags because they mean little, explain nothing. No one has ever explained Dominico Theotocopuli. Neither arrogant nor humble, he loved arrogance and understood humility. He painted many gentlemen of Spain for their pride, their narrow hands, their pale and pointed faces, their ruffs and their sombre eyes in which still smoldered the last fires of the Inquisition. He liked them because, having banished the spirit, they were very near to life, but he liked better those saints who, having banished the flesh, had embraced life itself. Now, the saints he loved throng the Prado at Madrid and other museums. St. Sebastian, who wears in his great beard the majesty of childhood; St. Jerome, with his riven ribs; grave St. Judas Tadeo, staff in hand; bushy St. Simon with a book; St. Maurice, pure and warlike, standing under the banners among the soldiers of the Theban Legion and, again and again, St. Francis, friend of birds and lepers, upon whose still and mocking face broods the strange gaiety of holiness. St. Martin, among the holy men, rides on a white horse. He is a strange figure, with his sword and black armor in the company of the saints. He was in life a captain. Born of heathen parents, he turned to Christ and became a catechumen. His parents forced him to give up the thought of serving God and made him enlist in the army of France. One day, quartered at Amiens, he met a naked beggar on the road and divided his cloak with him, immediately afterward beholding a vision of Christ who acknowledged from heaven this act of charity to himself "on the part of Martin,* still a catechumen." In the picture the corded body of the beggar tilts at the pale rump of the horse. Martin, wearing a ruff, inclined with pity in the saddle, severs with his sword the dark and heavy cloak. A shrine stands at the right; a black tree whirls on the left; overhead the tortured sky drives on in folds of black and grey. Christ has not yet appeared.

*He re-entered the church ; the people of Tours chose him as their Bishop; he is the patron saint of cordiality, merry meetings and reformed drunkards.