Toledo, the Story of an Old Spanish CapitalLynch, Hannah
History
Toledo, the Story of an Old Spanish Capital
Lynch, Hannah
Toledo (Spain) -- Description and travel; Toledo (Spain) -- History
Three other great pictures, however, remain. In the little chapel of San
José, opposite the Exchange of Carlos III., a painted insignificant
edifice that has fallen into deserved decay, there are five or six
Grecos, two of which arrest immediate attention. On the left is the
singularly beautiful figure of St Martin, a portrait of the painter's
son, a delicate high-bred and dreamy young knight in armour,
inappropriately cutting his mantle in two with Toledan steel to bestow
half on the beggar standing beside his white horse. No Roman soldier
this conception of Martin of Tours, making a gift of half of his single
cloak, but a charming youth who is playing at charity as he rides out
beyond the town, while above the river, in some Gothic-Arabian palace,
he has his choice of variously-hued satin cloaks as well as damascene
armour, and as he cuts his mantle, he has the dainty and sentimental air
of one who muses tristefully on the absent or perfidious beloved, and
hugs despair as the more graceful part of passion, the while anxiously
asking himself if he shall meet her glance as he rides past her lattice.
Except the lovely girl's head of the _Expolio_, also said to be a family
portrait, and if so proving, along with the St Martin, that El Greco was
the father of beautiful children, El Greco has done no more witching and
romantic work than this boyish figure of St Martin. The colouring is
extraordinarily cold, and grey of an exquisite tone, with shadows of a
dull silvered blue. It suggests the pale borderland where dream and
reality meet and merge. When El Greco first came to Spain, he was fresh
from the warm voluptuous school of Venice. Nothing proves more than the
rapid alteration of his style, the invading influence of atmosphere. The
austere and hieratic capital of Spain developed a racial coldness, till
his art became like the city that remained its temple, something aloof
from and above the gusts of temperament, an art unmoved by passion or
the senses, too violent to be called serene, too reflective and
intellectual to touch the heart. One would look in vain for the
exquisite sweetness of Andrea del Sarto, for a particle of the delight
and radiance the Italians had the secret of gathering into their
canvases, for any of the superlative charm of da Vinci or the surpassing
tenderness of Raphael. El Greco has much of the modern hardness, much of
its quick impressionability, much of its accentuated indifference to
mere loveliness, much of its cold force and deliberate self-cultivation.
Instead of learning from error, he cultivated error as part of his
individuality, a thing that was right in him since it defined his
peculiar perception of things. Even in this fine picture, the horse is
out of drawing, since it is a settled thing that no large work of his
can utterly satisfy, can come to us without some distinguished blemish
and oddness by which we recognise our Greco all in greeting him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account