Portraits of inquisitors, tyrants. El Greco and others

[Евгений]

In the world history of painting art of the artist El Greco holds a special position. Its hard to place in any of the schools of that time, he is survived by his disciples, and his art itself in terms of unusual pictorial forms, not only has gone beyond a national school, but far ahead of his time.

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The Italians and Spaniards called Domenico Teotokopuli Greco, under this name he went into the history of art. Needless nicknamed El Greco came from mixing the two languages, because in Italian it was supposed to sound like Il Greco, and in Spanish - El Griego. Even this fact is indicative of an unusual fate for an artist, a native of Crete, which emerged in Italy and in Spain, who found not only a second home, but the soil most favorable for the development of the brilliant flowering of his talent.

Most of the life of an artist held in Toledo. But before we come to the Iberian Peninsula, he worked for many years in Italy. El Greco's worldview shaped by the country's most developed humanistic culture. Of course, that his attitude to art was more independent than in contemporary Spanish painters. Works by El Greco, written on religious subjects, imbued with philosophical reflections on the fate of people. In the created images he synthesized his ideas about human characters. Sublime spirituality of images, mystical exaltation brings the art of El Greco with Mannerism and expresses the crisis state of the art culture of the late Renaissance.

On the life of El Greco is known very little information about him are scarce and fragmentary. We do not know any of his authentic self-portrait, for all his images, including portrait, presented on the main page, supposedly.

Subsequent generations have betrayed the art Toledo Wizard oblivion until the beginning of XX century. Time is not only erased the name of El Greco's art history for several centuries, but also destroyed a reminder of him in the city where he spent most of the artist's life: the grave with the ashes of El Greco's gone, the palace of the Marquis de Vileny, where he lived, was destroyed. But left the most beautiful - his paintings.
  http://www.elgreco.ru/

One of the best pictures.
1.Portret Inquisitor Nino de Guevara (c. 1600, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art)