Scenes from a golden age (cont'd)

Here are two more examples of the cultural action going on in seventeenth-century Spain—and of the radical innovations that this society encouraged, despite its apparent rigidities. They're paintings by El Greco, "The Greek"—his real name was Doménikos Theotokópoulos. El Greco grew up on the island of Crete, worked for a time in Italy, then settled in the small city of Toledo, in central Spain, producing works for the church and nearby aristocrats; he died in 1614. As a favorite of churchmen and aristocrats, he was an artist who enjoyed serious financial support from society's most tradition-minded elements. Those elements are visible in his pictures, which often show religious scenes and aristocratic figures.

(Burial of the Count of Orgaz, ca. 1588; source, Wikimedia Commons)

But the pictures themselves are anything but conservative. Although scholars note continuities with earlier forms, especially with icons of the Greek Orthodox Church, the main impression the pictures convey is of astonishing modernity. El Greco isn't trying for photographic reproduction of reality, but rather to convey his own interpretation of it, in the manner of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists like van Gogh and Picasso. At the very least, he makes the point that the reality we see is unstable and subject to distortion, both from our own specific perceptions and from larger forces, natural and super-natural alike. He also makes the point that the artist is not bound by past conventions, but rather is free to create new visions of the world.

(View of Toledo, ca. 1600, now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York; source, Wikimedia Commons)

And that's the larger point: in early modern Europe, innovation and conservatism often allied, in ways that repeatedly surprise us.