El Greco

Doménikos Theotokópoulos was born in 1541 in Candia (modern Heraklion), the capital of Venetian-ruled Crete, where he was trained in the post-Byzantine tradition of icon painting. By 1566 he had become a master in the local painters' guild, but soon left for Venice, where his work was shaped by Titian's colorism and Tintoretto's dramatic brushwork. Around 1570 he moved to Rome, lodging in the Palazzo Farnese and painting in a late-Mannerist vein; an ill-received offer to repaint Michelangelo's Last Judgment in a Counter-Reformation spirit effectively ended his Italian prospects.

In 1577 he settled permanently in Toledo, Spain, where he received major ecclesiastical commissions and produced the works on which his reputation rests. His first large Spanish altarpiece, for Santo Domingo el Antiguo (1577–79), included The Assumption of the Virgin and The Resurrection, while The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586–88), painted for the parish church of Santo Tomé in Toledo, remains a landmark of Spanish Renaissance art. Around 1580 he painted The Nobleman with his Hand on his Chest, now in the Museo del Prado, one of the earliest works of his Spanish period and an emblematic portrait of the Castilian hidalgo.

His landscapes, such as View of Toledo (c. 1596–1600), and later devotional panels show an increasingly personal vision of elongated forms, flickering light, and spiritual tension. El Greco died in Toledo in 1614. After a period of posthumous neglect, his work was rediscovered in the nineteenth century and championed by modernists; Picasso, Cézanne, and the Expressionists later claimed him as a precursor.