It is impossible to translate the effect of these animated religious pictures into words. El Greco was not content to embody the old myths in fresh forms, but he gave fresh forms to the ideas that are, as it were, the soul of each myth--that which lives when the form of the stories change. Even in his pictures with few figures, such for instance, as the ‘Mary and Jesus,’ in San Vicente, the ‘St. Francis,’ of which there are four replicas in Toledo, or that earlier picture, a beautiful rendering of a difficult theme, ‘La Veronica,’ one of the series painted for the Santo Domingo el Antigua in 1575-76, we have this exaggeration. Then, sometimes, exaggeration, which in each picture, after all, only emphasises the idea, disappears altogether, and we are given figures of singular beauty, as the ‘San Martin,’ in San José, or the really fine Madonnas--dark, oval-faced angels that surprise us at times with a beauty of type we hardly expect from El Greco. But, as a rule, in the pictures of this period, roughly marked by the painting of that experimental picture the ‘St. Maurice,’ there is this intensity of expression; and especially we find a new, and often strange, use of colour; colour, as well as form, being used as a means of dramatic statement, with a result that to many is exaggeration. For El Greco learnt first, perhaps, from the Venetians, and afterwards certainly in Toledo, many new possibilities of colour--that it has a quality that speaks, and further that the appeal of a picture depends first of all on the tone of its colour. It is for this reason he used colour as a means of emotional appeal; it was another quality by which to convey his idea to the world. For El Greco held truly that the province of art is to interpret, not to imitate. Every development of his art seems to have come from his own mind, hardly at all from the work of other painters; from the first he was true to his ideals. And always his pictures seem to be more the work of his soul than of his hand; which, in other words, is to say that he was greater as an artist than as a painter. Domeniko Greco, like so many of the painters of Spain, was great in portraiture; and some of his portraits, such as those of Antonio Covarrubias and of Juan de Alava, in the Museo de San Juan de Los Reyes, that of Cardinal Tavera, in the Hospital de Afuera, the whole series in the Prado, and many others not possible to name, are as fine portraits as have ever been done in the world. In his earliest portraits even, in that of Julio Clovio, in the Museum of Naples, or that of ‘A Student,’ a portrait, it well may be, of the young painter himself, we have the qualities of his later work; always it is the spirit of his model that he seeks.