Word: grecos
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...last portraits El Greco painted was of a man dead some 70 years. The picture is one of the most striking, and least familiar, in a fine new book of reproductions released last week under the brief title, El Greco (Harry N. Abrams; $10). In the accompanying text, Critic Leo Bronstein explains that El Greco painted his portrait of Spanish Cardinal Tavera from a death mask, kept the whole picture correspondingly austere...
Posthumous portraits are among the toughest commissions artists get. Today they work from photographs of the subject, but posed photos are apt to miss the revealing gesture or the characteristic turn of lip, nostril or eyelid that painters look for. El Greco, with only a rigid mask for a starting point, made a virtue of his difficulty. Cardinal Tavera's imagined hand, with its long tapering fingers, and his dark, luminous, meditative eyes perhaps have more of the painter himself than of the cardinal about them; they reappear in most of El Greco's works. But they intensify...
...knows if the artist ever got around to painting himself. Some say he did, once or twice, and that one of the mourners in his Burial of Count Orgaz represents El Greco. The picture commemorates a legend that St. Stephen and St. Augustine descended from Heaven to help bury the 14th Century noble. Historians have guessed that the little boy standing before St. Stephen is the artist's son, and that the face peering at the spectator over the saint's head is El Greco...
...journals of an obscure French philosopher of the nineteenth century and used them as a basis for expounding his theories about the sad drift of the world. This takes up about three-fifths of "Themes and Variations"; the rest is a jumble of essays ranging from "Variations on El Greco" to a plea for population control...
...Would [Censor Breen] advocate that portions be cut out from the canvases of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian or El Greco because they depict certain parts of human anatomy...