We come to the second stage, in which the painter, forgetting tradition, seeks to set down his vision in his own way; it is the period of experiment, as we see it first in the ‘St. Maurice,’[G] painted in 1581, that strange picture, rejected, as we may so well believe, by Philip II., who, misunderstanding, as many have done since, the intensity of feeling that animates the work, attributed its exaggerated expression to madness. Here, and in other pictures of this time, in the seizing ‘Vision of Philip II.’ and in the ‘St. John the Baptist’ in particular, we have splendid examples of imaginative work. Maybe the details are impossible, perhaps absurd--many have found them so--but for others the inspiration of the painter triumphs, and the longer they gaze at these visions the more they are impelled. For, be it remembered, the idea should be the starting-point in all imaginative pictures, and should control both the design and its treatment, and these Greco’s are splendid in this respect. Whether the imagination is exaggerated and perverted in wilful experiment, whether from an uncertain technical equipment, or whether it is, as we would think, the natural and true expression of intense dramatic vision, it is not easy to say. Who shall decide whether to call these mad pictures or visions that breathe the sublime? That is a question hard to answer in much of El Greco’s characteristic work. Perhaps the truth is that we dislike too readily what we do not easily understand. El Greco goes back to first principles and speaks in symbols with which we are not familiar. Those spectres of human kind that surprise us in so many of his pictures in Toledo, in those in the Prado, as well as in these two in the Escorial, do not suggest life as we see it; but they are inspired--they do convey his meaning. This painter’s method is a real enigma; he essayed surprising effects by separating colour into its original values; he used light as a means of emotional appeal, giving us sometimes most delicate harmonies, sometimes discordant contrasts. Domeniko Greco had to teach his world to see what he saw, and in this way he came, it may seem to some, to over-emphasise what to him was truth.