We know nothing almost of El Greco’s life, and if external happenings were all, the most original painter of Spain would remain an unexplained personality. His very name is uncertain, and contemporary writers, disregarding the Theotokopuli, speak of him as Domeniko Greco. We do not know the year in which he was born, for the information given by Palomino in “El Museo” must certainly be questioned, no register of his birth as yet having been found among the Cretan archives, or in the parochial books of the Greek colony in Venice, the city in which it seems certain that he lived--a pupil, we may well think, of Tintoretto, rather than of Titian; and this in spite of the letter of his friend and compatriot the miniature-painter, Clovio,[B] in which Clovio speaks of the young Greek painter’s skill, tells of his coming to Rome, and, after commending him to the patronage of the Cardinal Nepote Farnese, refers to his having learnt his art from the greatest Venetian. But the testimony of his work gives more truth than this statement; his early pictures, their authorship so long unknown, again and again have been attributed to Tintoretto, to Bassano, to Veronese even, never to Titian. That El Greco was a Cretan we know by his signature, always in Greek, on many pictures, Λομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος Κρήσεποίει--the ‘San Maurice,’ in the Escorial, is one. And again, when called, in 1582, by the Tribunal of the Inquisition to act as interpreter in the case of a Cretan accused of being a Morisco, he describes himself as “Domeniko Theotokopuli, native of Candia, painter, resident in Toledo,” as we learn from a document discovered by Señor Cossio, to whose research, and to that of Señor Foradada and of Señor de Beruete, we owe the few discovered facts of El Greco’s life. We know that Domeniko Greco came to Toledo some time before 1577, and in that year he was at work in the convent of Santo Domingo el Antigua, where the Church was built and its statues carved by him, and where he painted the screens of the fine retablo; that further, he would seem never to have left Toledo; that he married there, and had a son, George Manuel, who was architect and sculptor to the cathedral from 1628 to his death in 1631, and also a daughter, whose portrait figures in several pictures--in ‘Christ Despoiled of his Vestments,’ in the cathedral, for one; that he died in Toledo, and was buried in Santo Domingo el Antigua on April 7, 1614[C]--and that is about all. We have record of much work--Toledo still has more than fifty Grecos--and there were pictures painted for the small town of Illescas, and also for Madrid. We read of two lawsuits, one undertaken to compel the Cathedral Chapter to pay in full for the ‘Expolio,’[D] the second to vindicate the painter’s right to sell his pictures without paying the tax levied upon merchandise. These lawsuits, his pictures, with their dates and signatures, certain contracts and receipts, are the few facts to be reported.