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Philip II was certainly not capable of raising his funereal piety to the level of the passion which filled the little church in Toledo with faces made livid by the rush of blood to the heart, and with eyes of fever and of wild adoration, and with bony hands all lifted toward heaven. Otherwise, something great could have resulted from his meeting with Greco. When Theotocopuli arrived in Toledo, hardly twenty years had elapsed from the time that Ignatius of Loyola, his thigh broken and rebroken, had dragged himself to the altar of the Virgin to lay his sword upon it. Don John of Austria was nailing the banner of Christ to the topmast of the vessels which he was to lead to Lepanto. Teresa of Avila had just finished burning the last ashes of her flesh. For forty years she had welcomed the flame of the south, the scorching of the rocks, the odor of the orange trees, the cruelty of the soldiers, the sadism of the executioners, and the taste of the Host and of wine in order to torture and purify, in the fire of all her senses turned back toward her inner life, the heart she offered to her divine lover. Within the country, the Holy Office never allowed the fire to die out around any stake. Abroad, the captains, dressed in black, led their lean men, fed on gunpowder, to fight, rosary in hand, against the Reformation. The Duke of Alba deluged Flanders with fire and blood. The flames of torture and of battles attested, over all the earth, the fidelity of Spain to her vow.
Philip II was certainly not capable of raising his funereal piety to the level of the passion which filled the little church in Toledo with faces made livid by the rush of blood to the heart, and with eyes of fever and of wild adoration, and with bony hands all lifted toward heaven. Otherwise, something great could have resulted from his meeting with Greco. When Theotocopuli arrived in Toledo, hardly twenty years had elapsed from the time that Ignatius of Loyola, his thigh broken and rebroken, had dragged himself to the altar of the Virgin to lay his sword upon it. Don John of Austria was nailing the banner of Christ to the topmast of the vessels which he was to lead to Lepanto. Teresa of Avila had just finished burning the last ashes of her flesh. For forty years she had welcomed the flame of the south, the scorching of the rocks, the odor of the orange trees, the cruelty of the soldiers, the sadism of the executioners, and the taste of the Host and of wine in order to torture and purify, in the fire of all her senses turned back toward her inner life, the heart she offered to her divine lover. Within the country, the Holy Office never allowed the fire to die out around any stake. Abroad, the captains, dressed in black, led their lean men, fed on gunpowder, to fight, rosary in hand, against the Reformation. The Duke of Alba deluged Flanders with fire and blood. The flames of torture and of battles attested, over all the earth, the fidelity of Spain to her vow.
The
Cretan, who still saw in the depths of his memory the red and narrow gleam
lighting up the icons in the orthodox chapels and whom Titian and Tintoretto
had initiated into painting in their Venice, where the bed of purple and of
flowers was already prepared for royal deaths, brought into this tragic world
the fervor of ardent natures in which all the new forms of sensuality and of
violence enter in tongues of fire. In reality, this young man of twenty-five
years was old in his civilization, a thing full of neuroses centuries old, and
subjugated by the first shock of the savage aspect of the country in which he
was arriving and by the accentuated character of the people amid whom he was
going to live. Toledo is made of granite. The landscape round about is
terrible, of a deadly aridity, with its low bare hills filled with shadow in
their hollows, with the rumble of its caged torrent, and with its huge trailing
clouds. On sunny days it shines with flame, it is as livid as a cadaver in
winter. Only occasionally and slightly is the greenish uniformity of the stone
touched by the pale silver of the olive trees, by the light note of pink or
blue from a painted wall. But there is no rich land, no leafy foliage: it is a
fleshless skeleton in which nothing living moves, a sinister absolute where the
soul has no other refuge than the wild solitude or cruelty and misery as it
awaits death.
With
this pile of granite, this horror, and this somber flame, Greco painted his
pictures. It is a terrifying and splendid painting, gray and black, lit with
green reflections. In the black clothing there are only two gray notes, the
ruffs and the cuffs from which bony heads and pale hands come forth. Soldiers
or priests—it is the last effort of the Catholic tragedy. Already they wear
mourning. They are burying a warrior in his steel, and now look only to heaven.
Their gray faces have the aridity of the stone. Their protruding bones, their
dried skin, and their eyes, deeply sunken in their hollow orbits, look as if
they were seized and shaped by metal pincers. Everything which defines the
skull and the face is pursued over the hard surfaces, as if the blood no longer
coursed through the already withered skin. One would say that a cord of nerves
went forth from the vital center and was drawing the skin toward it. Only the
eye is burning and fixed, expressing the will to reach the fire of death by
dint of rendering life sterile. One follows the glance inward, it leads to the
implacable heart. The mouths are like slits. The hair is thin through fasting,
asceticism, and the slow asphyxiation rising from braziers burning in closed
rooms. The wind of the desert seems to have passed over the scene.
When
the red robe flooded with gold and the golden miter of a bishop spread forth,
on backgrounds uniformly gray and black, the sumptuous memories brought back
from Venice and the Orient, one would say that the painter was playing with his
power of controlling the voices of the world in order to give more accent to
the dull splendor of the gray faces, and to the harmonies of death and dust which
mount like a hymn to the silent joy of offering in sacrifice to the divine
spirit of life all the joys which it spreads before us. Remorse at having been
born pursues the painter until the end, but when he expresses it in his art,
the magnificence which it takes on avenges him for his terrors. Whatever the
elements of the higher equilibrium which a great artist pursues—almost always
unknown to himself—whether the most completely purified mysticism or the most
violent sensualism guides him, he is not a great artist unless he realizes
through them those mysterious symphonies in which both the matter and the soul
of life seem present and mingled forever with all eternity. It is not necessary
that above Greco's groups, spectral angels of superhuman size should arise, or
that, behind his drooping Christ there should be enormous grayish clouds which
isolate Him from the universe; the somber glow is everywhere, in the raised
foreheads, the hollow orbits, the arid earth, and the habits of black velvet.
It is in him, the ardent center of all these things, a profound and living poem
fashioned by the encounter of obedience and liberty, of the broad and
voluptuous world whence he comes with the harshest soil and the most tragic
people of Europe, of the severest spirit of western Catholicism with completely
disordered memories of Eastern orthodoxy.
Never
did the Christian ideal express, with greater anxiety, its impotence to divide
life into two sections. The spirit tries to tear itself away, but in vain. What
is beautiful in the divine forms is always borrowed from the science he
possessed of terrestrial form, and it always returns to them. At the end of his
life he painted like one in a hallucination, in a kind of ecstatic nightmare,
where the preoccupation with expressing the spirit alone pursued him.
Deformation appears in his pictures more and more, lengthening the bodies,
attenuating the fingers, and hollowing the masks. His blues, his winelike reds,
and his greens seem lit by some livid reflection sent to him from the near-by
tomb and the hell caught sight of from eternal bliss. He died before realizing
the form of the dream which haunted him, perhaps because he himself was too
old, and no longer found in his hardened bones and in his irritated and weak
nerves the power he had possessed for seeking, in love of the world's
appearances, the means of comparing and supporting his vision. And yet, what an
effort! When we enter one of those Spanish churches where, on days of service,
the gleam of the tapers and the vapor of the incense make us forget for a
moment the horror or vulgarity of the images of which we catch a glimpse, we
must also carry on with ourselves one of those combats which leave us enervated
and somewhat shaken with that intoxication in which the ecstasy of the paradise
desired effaces the soul and the body of those who try to forget. He alone
could see arms lifted as if to raise the weight of the heavens and to draw
aside its veils. Standing at the foot of the Cross, he alone was able to pierce
the shadow which rises from all sides like an accomplice to hide the murder;
and it is with a terrible glance that he follows the phantom horsemen who enter
a hollow road. He alone has seen among those who will to know no more of the
earth, forms drawn out as if in prayer, aspiring wholly toward something
higher, hands which seem prolonged into supernatural lights, drooping and
emaciated trunks, and also young nude bodies which he cannot tear from the
innocence of life, but around which circles a phosphorescent glow which comes
no one knows whence.
At the
remote origin of that invincible elegance which never left him, however much he
was gripped by the need to express more than he could, one found the Greek, the
Greek of the forgotten ages, the Hellene. The wraith of the gods which still
wandered on the shores of the southern sea had drunk a strong wine from the
golden cup of Venice and had permitted itself to be carried along, still not
entirely consumed even by Greco, to the burning deserts of stone where the
aridity of things offers the mind no other avenue than that of death. It was
that wraith—it could not die, it had survived the twelve centuries of
constraint imposed by the degenerating Orient upon the Byzantine images—over
which one would say that there mounts a long pale flame, like those wandering
fires which dance upon the marshes. It is the witness of the impotence of
genius to detach itself from its roots, and of the majesty which it assumes
when it consents to nourish itself from them. Greco must have fasted and worn
sackcloth. He must have followed, with bare feet, the processions across the
powdered granite with his ankles cut by shackles, bearing a heavy metal cross,
and masked with a monk's hood in order not to have the pride of his
humiliation. He must have passed the burning nights, when passion is compelled
to roll in the torture of voluntary chastity, so that in the morning he might
carry his exasperated strength into the ever-livid faces intent on heaven and
into the garments, always black, which bear witness to our grief at having
lived. No matter. He had a daughter. He loved children and women, and ever the
burning shadow and the bare landscape. His whole will to be superior to life
crossed and recrossed the powerful center of the life which, when one has felt
its burning, sends its lava into death itself and the eternal shadows and the
dust of bones.
Beyond
existence, when our memory is burnt out, there is, to be sure, nothing of us
that remains. However, if somewhere there is a place where shadows wander, if
in some sinister valley there are cadavers which stand upright and living
specters which have not yet lost their form, Domenico Theotocopuli alone, after
Dante, has entered there. One would say that he is exploring a dead planet,
that he is descending into extinct volcanoes where ashes accumulate and a pale
half-veiled moon sheds its light. But all of that has been seen by him. Spain
presents such aspects under the snow, in winter, or in the torrid days when the
sun has calcined the grass, when there is nothing more in space than the
vibration of silence coming from nowhere, to lay its deathlike weight upon the
heart, and when livid mirages and gloomy metallic lakes are formed and effaced
upon the seared horizon.
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