Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy

Chapter One: The Divinity of Painting

chapter one The DiviniTy of PainTing Detail of figure 18 one of el greco’s earliest surviving Cretan icons is St. Luke Painting the Virgin and Child (fig. 4). This icon is heavily damaged, as eroded portions of the surface obscure parts of the saint’s body. Both the nature and location of this wear are indexes of heartfelt acts of devotion by the faithful through caressing and kissing this representation of St. Luke. Despite this powerfully direct evidence for the icon’s effectiveness as a devotional image, we can still discern the profile of the haloed saint seated with his left foot resting on the rung of the easel placed before him. With his right hand he applies the finishing touches to a gilded icon of the Hodegetria. It is remarkable that this miniature panel inserted within this portrayal of St. Luke is the only surviving example by El Greco of what was beyond doubt the most commonly depicted subject for icon painters in Crete. A standard type that portrays Mary looking outward and gesturing to her son, this format shows the path of salvation passing through Christ. To underscore Luke’s role in having crafted this image, an open box of pigments rests on the stool between the legs of the easel. Above the saint’s head an angel loosely enshrouded in a green tunic acknowledges his creative achievement by swooping down to crown him with laurel. 16 art and the religious image in el greco’s italy St. Luke’s legendary status as the first portraitist of Mary and her infant son has Byzantine roots.1 Nevertheless, only a handful of Cretan artists from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ever portrayed this subject.2 While El Greco’s composition varies little from other versions, he rather uniquely employed two distinct artistic styles within the same work, thereby exhibiting his aim to master both Eastern and Western pictorial idioms. The small icon of the Hodegetria relies entirely on late-Byzantine pictorial conventions common to works by Cretan iconographers. Having been dubbed by one scholar as “without exaggeration, one of the finest of the era,” its flawless execution attests to El Greco’s skill in Byzantine-style icon painting.3 However, he enlivened other areas of this composition with Western stylistic and iconographic elements. We see this most especially in the more modeled figure of Luke, his agitated drapery, and the convincing naturalism of the angel weightlessly hovering above. The artist also achieved a more refined illusion of three-dimensional space than what one typically finds in works by Cretan painters. By thus illustrating his new representational form against the old Cretan style, El Greco’s icon boldly foreshadows the path his art would ultimately take as he moved beyond the pictorial manner in which he was first trained. We cannot understand fully the stylistic development of El Greco’s art until we appreciate how he conceived of his craft and his role as an artist. The icon of St. Luke and a series of paintings depicting St. Veronica’s veil, a cloth that miraculously recorded an imprint of Christ’s face, reveal self-reflexive qualities that document a distinctly autobiographical conception of the artist’s role as painter and of his esteem for the artistic process of making religious images. By aligning his activities with the legendary role of the Evangelist as the creator of the first portrait of the Madonna and Child, El Greco casts his St. Luke icon as a paradigm for the art of icon painting. Equally, he endowed his Veronica paintings with conspicuous signs of artifice by emphasizing the relic as an object represented within the fictive space of the paintings. In this chapter I examine these works from the vantage of sixteenth-century conceptions of the art of painting as a divine enterprise that openly acknowledge the creative conditions of an image. Scholars tend to portray Italian Renaissance paintings separately from the more archaic religious images that normally attract cult followings . However, artists, critics, and theologians did not easily allow for a distinction between crafting art and making an icon. El Greco’s pictorial practice and the presentation of his paintings as things artfully created valorizes his own artistic hand as a mediator between viewer and prototype, thereby providing a vehicle to devotional engagement made manifest in new conceptions of the artful icon. St. Luke as Artist, the Artist as St. Luke El Greco’s St. Luke Painting the Virgin and Child may...