Greco
Amid several 16th century works of art, the painting "Toledo" by El Greco (the Greek) is exhibited in the H. O. Havemeyer Collection, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. This piece is somewhat of small size and brushed in on a canvas with oil paint. Its small size and unrealistic dimmed colors make it a prominent piece in the divergent brightly decorated gallery. The exhibit is composed mainly of large black and white paintings; almost all of them Spanish of origin and made sometime in the late 16th to early 17th century. El Greco's painting is located in the middle of the corridor surrounded by two other pieces of rather large size. The position of the canvas serves as a focal point for the whole collection, however one might expect it to be placed somewhere else, due to the unpopularity of the piece. Similar to other pieces, at its right, in the wall is the sign that states the artist's life span, 1541-1614; along with the following description :"The painter's given name was Domenikos Theotokopoulos. In Toledo, where he lived for nearly forty years, he was known as "El Greco" (the Greek). This view is the only independent landscape by the artist that survives. He has imaginatively reconfigured the city, showin
The other two, the more detailed fraction of the brook, and the foliage, that takes up the foreground of the canvas. It is not just a 'View of Toledo', although the topographical details are to some extent correct; neither is it 'Toledo at night' or 'Toledo in a storm', other titles which have been attached to the painting: it is simply 'Toledo', but Toledo given a general meaning, a spiritual portrait of the town. The artist is trying to preserve the memory of the once great city during the pinnacle of the Spanish empire. Its long narrow windows with pointed arches span nearly to the top of the tower, while the crockets atop the buttresses, line the soaring spire. In introducing the view into his paintings he acknowledges how much his art owed to the inspiration of the town, until a few years before the great imposing Capital and still the great clerical and artistic center of Spain; the town isolated on the plain of Castile which he had made his new home, so far from the island of his birth. The city walls and barracks seemed to be diffused in the foreground, the small guard towers appear to be placed there without any realistic details. " The cathedral seems to be the focus of the painting as it stands in the middleground and to the right. The city skyline is so abstract its almost symbolic, the buildings themselves however have been done with an enormous amount of detail, giving it a very familiar aspect with strong realistic features. El Greco used his skills to create this foreground landscape that shows little detail and realism but still holds naturalism that he used with the cathedral tower. One being, the dark shades in the background with its almost sinister surroundings; a few gray stone colored blurry buildings and a dark just about dead terrain. Some vegetation covers the mountains and the small bridge in the foreground, tall oak-like tress cover some of the buildings and line a few of the roads leading to what appears to be the center of town. The rest of the painting is a landscape of the outer city limits, with a wasteland section sheltered by the gloom of the background storm and a river that flows all the way through the foreground of the painting. The city was once the cultural and ecclesiastic center of Castile; Years before Madrid became the imperial capital, Toledo had already given Spain its universal meaning by that time. As is one of the earliest independent landscapes in Western art and one of the most dramatic and individual landscapes ever painted. It seems as though El Greco deliberately forces the viewer to concentrate on the landmarks that define the city, the Alcazar palace and the towering cathedral.
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