El Greco: Holy Trinity

El Greco arrived in Rome about six years after the death of Michelangelo. There is a curious legend which claims the young Greek was driven from the city some years later because, after studying Michelangelo’s famous frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, he arrogantly volunteered to replace them with something really worth looking at!

          Whatever El Greco’s opinion of Michelangelo (at age seventy, he referred to the Italian as a “good fellow, who didn’t know how to paint”), his own first work in Spain shows marked traces of the earlier master’s influence. Here, for instance, in a Holy Trinity, which he painted for the little church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, the effects of his Italian studies are clearly seen in the picture’s conception and composition.

          Notice, for instance, how everything centers on the powerful figure of the crucified Christ. This trick of focusing the picture on one dominant element is one of the remnants of El Greco’s studies of Michelangelo and the Renaissance – although it is a practice which El Greco eventually tended to abandon.

          Yet El Greco created for himself a style that is wholly distinct to himself with his elongated figures, ever straining upward, his intense and unusual colors, his passionate involvement with his subject, and his ardor and his energy. El Greco is the great fuser and transfuser of various styles, setting the stamp of his angular intensity upon all that he creates.