Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli

Transcription

Can one know an artist through his library? The study of a painter’s library provides us with crucial clues for a knowledge of his ideas on art and his intentions. Apart from the information on the content of his library supplied by the inventories, we have his own work, his paintings, his designs for altarpieces and up to 500 surviving documents. From among those documents I would principally single out the annotations that he made in the margins of an edition of Vitruvius’s architectural treatise and in the margins of his copy of Vasari’s "Lives". Why did El Greco have a library? When El Greco arrived in Italy it was fully accepted in intellectual artistic circles that painters should receive an education of a type that had only recently become available to them. They should be familiar with the Scriptures, with mythology and with the Greco-Roman classics. El Greco realised that he had to improve his knowledge and embarked on an extremely intensive process of self-education. This consisted of speaking to the appropriate people, seeing the best paintings that were being created in Venice at that time and also embarking on the study of the artistic theory that had been written in Venice since the mid-sixteenth century and which would continue to be produced until the time of his death. Which books did El Greco have in his library? The two inventories that list El Greco’s possessions provide a figure of 130 books. A good collection of books in Greek – which is not surprising given that this was his mother tongue – and above all, books in Italian, the language that he learned during his years of study in Italy and which he considered his cultural language. His books in "Romance", as the inventory describes them, meaning in Spanish, were relatively few in number. We know some of their titles from the second inventory, but we are in the presence here of a painter and an individual who did not consider Spanish to be his first language. Also important is what he didn’t own as well as what he did. For example, he didn’t have any editions of Plato, a philosopher with whom his painting has been closely related. He only had one treatise on painting and no Spanish art treatises. What we do find are works by the "great Greek forefathers" as he put it. We have Homer, Xenophon and Flavius Josephus. Of particular importance, for example, are the works on perspective that he owned. El Greco had up to 4 treatises on perspective and 19 books on architecture. They include the great Renaissance treatises, various editions of Vitruvius and also the key texts by Serlio, Vignola, Palladio and Labacco. El Greco had books on religion but they are not devotional texts: rather they are works relating to his own professional activities. He also had works by the Fathers of the Orthodox Church, who are precisely the writers who drew attention to the issue of the religious image and the implications of depicting sacred subjects. Why are there so many books on architecture? The significant number of books on architecture that El Greco had in his library should be related to what he started to produce shortly after he arrived in Spain. Not just paintings but also the altarpieces that would house them. El Greco was interested in architecture due to its connection with the liberal arts. Architecture was the most scientific discipline and the artistic discipline most closely related to intellectual thought of the day. It is extremely interesting to appreciate how El Greco Greco understood that his paintings, his altarpieces, were intended for large architectural ensembles, which he understood as great theatrical backdrops that envelop the viewer in an experience that I would describe as not so much a religious one – which it is as well – as an artistic one. What do El Greco’s annotations tell us? We are fortunate to possess four books that we definitely know belonged to El Greco. They are all included in the exhibition and it is interesting to note how of these four books, El Greco only annotated the ones directly connected to the arts. They provide the most important document for a knowledge of El Greco’s opinions and ideas. Not just his ideas and opinions but also, I would say, his proud, haughty nature. He did not even hesitate to insult Vasari, whose concept of art is the complete opposite to what El Greco thought. The annotations reveal his concept of painting as a speculative science. What does this mean? Basically, that he understood painting as a tool for exploring the wonders of the real, of what surrounds us and which we often fail to notice precisely because it is so obvious, and also because according to El Greco, painting deals with the impossible: experiences for which we lack palpable proof such as incarnations, annunciations and apparitions of celestial beings about which, as I say, we cannot receive any information through our senses. Painting, however, allows the artist to represent these other worlds that we have not experienced. What does the exhibition contribute? We approach El Greco in a close-at-hand manner as he annotates his books in the privacy of his studio, in the intimacy of the space that he used for reading, expressing his opinions by establishing dialogues with the authors of the books he had in his library. The exhibition offers visitors the chance to hear the painter’s own voice. It allows us to come up close to what El Greco was reading and what he was writing, to the place where he set down his thoughts on paintings and on the visual arts in general. And all this undoubtedly provides the basis for what he was painting. In other words, with this exhibition we have aimed to explain his painting through the fundamental elements that can help us to understand it. It encourages a reflection on some of the standard opinions that have prevailed about the artist: firstly, his Spanish identity, secondly the concept of El Greco as an inspired, visionary painter, and thirdly, that of El Greco as a fundamentally religious painter. I believe that the exhibition helps us to reassess these stereotypes that have been constructed around the figure of El Greco.