El Greco

Doménikos Theotokópoulos (, ; 1 October 1541 7 April 1614), most widely known as El Greco (; "The Greek"), was a Greek painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. ''El Greco'' was a nickname,) may be from the Venetian language or more likely from the Spanish, though in Spanish his name would be . The Cretan master was generally known in Italy and Spain as , and was called only after his death .
According to a contemporary, El Greco acquired his name not only for his place of origin, but also for the sublimity of his art: "Out of the great esteem he was held in he was called the Greek ()" (comment of Giulio Cesare Mancini about El Greco in his ''Chronicles'', which were written a few years after El Greco's death).}} and the artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters often adding the word (), which means "Cretan" in Ancient Greek.

El Greco was born in the Kingdom of Candia (modern Crete), which was at that time part of the Republic of Venice, Italy, and the center of Post-Byzantine art. He trained and became a master within that tradition before traveling at age 26 to Venice, as other Greek artists had done. In 1570, he moved to Rome, where he opened a workshop and executed a series of works. During his stay in Italy, El Greco enriched his style with elements of Mannerism and of the Venetian Renaissance taken from a number of great artists of the time, notably Tintoretto and Titian. In 1577, he moved to Toledo, Spain, where he lived and worked until his death. In Toledo, El Greco received several major commissions and produced his best-known paintings, such as ''View of Toledo'' and ''Opening of the Fifth Seal''.

El Greco's dramatic and expressionistic style was met with puzzlement by his contemporaries but found appreciation by the 20th century. El Greco is regarded as a precursor of both Expressionism and Cubism, while his personality and works were a source of inspiration for poets and writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Nikos Kazantzakis. El Greco has been characterized by modern scholars as an artist so individual that he belongs to no conventional school. He is best known for tortuously elongated figures and often fantastic or phantasmagorical pigmentation, marrying Byzantine traditions with those of Western painting. Provided by Wikipedia