El Greco was born in 1541 in Candia, Crete and spent much of his life traveling between Venice, Rome, and Spain. El Greco was soon to settle in Toledo. When he settled in Spain, the christian doctrines made a crucial impact on his approach to painting. The church restrained many different types of paintings. Landscapes were one of the types of paintings banned. El Greco broke these rules with amazing paintings such as The View of Toledo. When he came to Spain, He signed his name in Greek characters, using the

His first important commission in Spain was to paint the reredos of the Church of Santo Domingo of Diego at Toledo. He may have been drawn to Spain in connexion with the work in the Escorial, but he made Toledo his home. The house where he lived is now a museum of his works, saved to Spain by one of her nobles.

One of his other paintings, The Madonna and Child with St. Martina and St. Agnes sweeps up from our natural animal level, there at the bottom with St. Martina's pensive lion and St. Agnes's lamb, balancing with unnatural poise on the branch of her arm. Martina's palm of martyrdom acts like a signal, as do the long, impossibly slender fingers of Agnes. When I saw this painting, I was drawn irresistibly up, past the flutter of cherubic wing, kept to the illustrative center by those strangely papery clouds. Up, up, rising through the curve of the women’s cloak, we are drawn to the heart of the work, the chi

Some topics in this essay:
El Greco, Inquisition Toledo, St Agnes's, El Greco's, Toledo Spain, Florence Siena, Escorial Toledo, el greco, St Agnes, Goya Velasquez, Candia Crete, types paintings, spanish painters,