El Greco Sold Us a Stairway to Heaven
Can we benefit from an artist who does not embrace self-examination and change but who knows how to paint it?
By Daniel Gauss
In the early 1600s El Greco accepted a commission to do paintings for a hospital for the poor. One of the works was the Madonna of Charity in which an oversized Madonna opens her cloak to provide shelter for some men wearing ruffs — those fancy, white, frilly, circular collars that indicated wealth and privilege. The artist’s patrons were shocked by this and hired a new artist to paint over the ruffs, to make the men look more destitute. El Greco just did not seem to realize that it was appropriate to paint the Virgin protecting the poor, especially for a charitable hospital, as he seemed to have little use for those types of folks.
El Greco regularly haggled, argued and sued to get the most money he could per project, as he had a luxurious lifestyle to sustain (he sometimes paid musicians to do live performances for him while he dined). His goal seemed to be to establish himself, through art, as a well-heeled member of Spain’s class of the rich, cultured and famous. The commodification of the sacred, as a propagandist for the Counter-Reformation, was his means to this end. He not only sold a conception of grace and redemption he…
