Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy

Chapter Five: The Artist as Antiquarian in Christian Rome

chapter five The ArTisT As AnTiquAriAn in ChrisTiAn rome Detail of figure 63 el GreCo lefT VeniCe in 1570 to go to Rome and study works by Italian artists that he knew only through prints and other copies. Giulio Clovio’s 1570 letter introducing El Greco to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese as a young “disciple” of Titian is one of the few known benchmarks for the artist’s activities in the Eternal City. Clovio asked that the new arrival be granted a room in the Farnese Palace until he was able to plant roots and find suitable housing elsewhere—a courtesy that the cardinal had extended to Titian in the mid-1540s. The surviving documentation for this period of El Greco’s career substantiates only the brevity of his stay at the Farnese Palace. By 1572 he was dismissed for an infraction of an unknown nature. At the risk of overanalyzing a situation without sufficient evidence to do so, we might postulate that El Greco’s artistic proclivities made a poor fit since Cardinal Farnese commissioned little in the early 1570s that was appropriate for an artist of El Greco’s training and experience—very few easel paintings, only a limited number of altarpieces, and, at the time, no major church decorations besides fresco cycles not suitable for El Greco’s expertise.1 As short as El Greco’s stay in the Farnese Palace was, the cultural milieu that he experienced there 126 art and the religious image in el greco’s italy had a formative influence on his practice as a painter. It offered another arena in which he could study the styles of celebrated sixteenth-century artists. His efforts to combine the characteristic qualities of Michelangelo and Titian would presumably have placed El Greco’s works in good company with the large number of Venetian paintings and Roman drawings in the Farnese collection. He also would have enjoyed frequent appearances by Jacopo da Bertoja, Girolamo Muziano, Pirro Ligorio, Federico Zuccaro, and others who worked for the cardinal.2 Indeed, El Greco’s diligent study after the great masters evidently ingratiated him to the members of the Farnese circle, even if his stay did not lead to the prestigious commissions he had hoped to obtain from the cardinal himself. El Greco’s chief supporter was Fulvio Orsini, Cardinal Farnese’s primary art advisor and also his broker, librarian, and resident antiquarian. Above all, Orsini was a noted humanist who himself led an entourage of learned scholars.3 Orsini’s collection included two known paintings “by the hand of a Greek student of Titian” now attributed to El Greco. The first was the View of Mount Sinai panel commonly dated to the artist’s Venetian period, which he probably carried with him to Rome (see fig. 32 in chapter 2).4 Its unusual style and subject probably appealed to humanist scholars who took great interest in Greek culture.5 Orsini also owned paintings that El Greco produced while in Rome. Prominent among them is El Greco’s Portrait of Giulio Clovio, undoubtedly the painter’s most accomplished early portrait (fig. 62).6 This and at least two other paintings from El Greco’s Roman period eventually found their way into the Farnese collection after Orsini’s death, having been mentioned in a 1644 inventory of the family possessions. The Parma Christ Healing the Blind (see fig. 56 in chapter 4) came into the ownership of the Farnese family at an unknown date. Both the 1644 and the 1653 inventories list it as an anonymous work (despite the signature) and mistakenly describe the picture’s support as canvas.7 The inventory also lists a quadretto featuring “a young man blowing on a lit ember to light a candle, by the hand of the Greek.”8 This describes—and attributes—El Greco’s mysterious allegory Boy Blowing an Ember, also known simply as Soplón (see fig. 72). This motley assortment of a portrait, religious narrative, and allegory that El Greco painted within this span of about two years in the early 1570s in Rome represents the most uncharacteristically diverse output for any period of his career. The works also share a distinct and meaningful connection to the place of their making, bearing evidence of what the artistic and cultural environment of El Greco’s adopted city, and that of the Farnese court most especially, contributed to his conception of his role as a maker of religious images. This chapter explores how these...