Conference UNIVERSITY EXTENSION AULES "EL GRECO"

Up to the age of 26 he lived in Crete, where he was an appreciated master of icons of the Cretan school, first in Venice, assuming the style of Ticià and Tintoretto, and then in Rome, studying the mannerism of Michelangelo. In 1577 he settled in Toledo (Spain), where he lived and worked the rest of his life.

Its pictorial formation was complex, obtained in three very different cultural focal points: its first Byzantine formation was the cause of important aspects of its work that bloomed in their maturity; The second one was obtained in Venice by the painters of the high Renaissance, especially Titià, learning oil painting and its range of colors -that was always considered part of the Venetian school-; Finally, his stay in Rome allowed him to know Michelangelo's work and Mannerism, which became his lifelike style, interpreted autonomously.

His work consists of large canvases for altarpieces of churches, numerous devotional paintings for religious institutions - in which his workshop often participated - and a group of portraits considered the highest level. In his first Spanish masterpieces the influence of his Italian masters is appraised. However, he soon evolved into a personal work characterized by his Mannerist figures extraordinarily elongated with his own illumination, thin, ghostly, very expressive, in indefinite environments and a range of colors looking for contrasts. This style was identified with the spirit of the Counter-Reformation and it went far beyond in its last years.

He is currently considered one of the greatest artists of western civilization. This high consideration is recent and has been forming in the last hundred years, changing the appreciation of his painting formed in the two centuries and a half after his death, in which he became an eccentric painter and marginal in the history of art.