The baptism of Christ new light on early El Greco

Apollo, August, 2005

Last year's surprising discovery of an unknown painting by El Greco of the Baptism of Christ offers important new clues about the artist's early career in Crete and Italy, for long a subject of passionate controversy. In the first full account of the painting, Robin Cormack and Maria Vassilaki assess its significance and identify the larger work of which it once formed a part.

Two events in London in 2004 were a forceful reminder that the assessment of the work of El Greco, perhaps more than that of any other artist, has been subject to the swings of fashion. Like Botticelli, his reputation was soon eclipsed after his death and his art neglected until the nineteenth century. But his dramatic rehabilitation since then has not always been smooth, and in particular it is the evaluation of his early work that has been a roller-coaster. The consequence of the exhibition from February to May at the National Gallery and the sale of a small panel of the Baptism of Christ (Fig. 2) at Christie's on 8 December is that once more the range of the 'early work' of the artist must be reconsidered.

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'El Greco' at the National Gallery was devoted, according to its curator, David Davies, to establishing 'the full scope and breadth of achievement' of the artist. (1) The Christie's Old Master sale catalogue of 8 December advertised a previously unknown painting, The Baptism of Christ 'by El Greco'. (2) Since scholarship on early El Greco is still overshadowed by the vehemence of the various different approaches to his production taken during the last fifty years of research, it may seem foolhardy today to make a firm attribution to El Greco of a painting that has no signature. But we want to argue that we have now actually reached a time when it is reasonable to track with some confidence the beginnings and development of his career before his decisive move to Spain by 1576, where he lived until his death in 1614. The newly-discovered painting of the Baptism is small and as yet uncleaned, but we want to suggest that, if we work carefully through the intricacies of Greco scholarship, we can come to a decision about its place in his artistic life. It is a powerful image in a fluid and colourful style, and the elements that point to El Greco are the delicacy of the painting of the trees and group of figures and the city in the distance along the River Jordan; the 'mannerist' elegance of the accompanying three angels; and the powerful, close encounter between St John and Christ.

Much of the modern study of El Greco might be described as oscillating between two extremes--either a sharp focus on the attribution of his works, or a discursive handling of the historiography of the artist's personality and image. Key moments for the definition of his oeuvre were the appearance in 1937 of a highly influential study by Rodolfo Pallucchini on the Modena triptych (Fig. 1), whose inclusive attitude had the effect of greatly increasing the publicly accepted works of El Greco, (3) and the exclusive and combative scepticism of the Harvard-trained art historian Harold E. Wethey, who produced a reactive catalogue raisonne with a greatly reduced corpus of materials in 1962. (4)

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As Ellis Waterhouse put it in his obituary of Wethey, published in 1985, this was a 'memorable' catalogue which was the first to sort out the autograph work of El Greco from the very extensive school productions: 'This caused a great deal of commotion in the art world at the time, but his distinctions are now generally considered acceptable'. (5) What Waterhouse did not say in the obituary was that he himself was totally persuaded by Wethey's book that his own previous acceptance of the authenticity of the Modena triptych as a signed early work of El Greco, which had been argued by Pallucchini, was a strategic mistake. He henceforward totally revised his views about the nature of El Greco's early work, although not without saying in 1964 that this was an 'agonising reappraisal'. (6)

Although the dominance of Wethey's magisterial assessment of the canonical production of the artist and his assistants has teased scholarship since 1962, the significant work of the following decades was not so much in attribution as in the reappraisal of all the various interpretations of El Greco--ranging from his supposed Byzantinism to his supposed astigmatism. The latter theory has mostly disappeared into oblivion, while the former has come to be treated with greater care--though two Oxford professors are still prepared to be dismissive of that too, by writing in 2002 that 'Despite claims to the contrary, the only Byzantine element of his famous paintings was his signature in Greek lettering.' (7)

The major contributions to the balanced appraisal of El Greco's art and personality are in wide-ranging and critical discussions by Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Fernando Marias, Jose Lopera and Jonathan Brown. (8) The issues were succinctly set out by Hadjinicolaou in 1990 in an article that forms part of the catalogue of an exhibition at El Greco's birthplace in Crete, Iraklion; the context was the occasion of the 450th anniversary of his birth in 1541. (9) This article identifies and reviews the key debates: the striking discrepancies in style between his early and late works; his name in his own time (born Domenikos Theotokopoulos, known generally in Italy and Spain as Dominico Greco, and called only after his death El Greco); his 'Greekness'; his 'Spanishness'; his 'Byzantinism'; his insanity; his astigmatism; his mysticism; and his modern image. The influence of these recent critical overviews of the personality of the artist was clearly reflected in the contents of the National Gallery catalogue--it conspicuously omitted any dedicated essays directly on these subjects. Instead the issues were subsumed into a historical and contextualised treatment of his main productions.