Tim Hilton
Agony & Ecstasy
El Greco: Life and Work – A New History
By Fernando Marías
Thames & Hudson 352pp £60 order from our bookshop
What manner of man was Doménikos Theotokópoulos, born in Crete in 1541, the dramatic, difficult and not quite loveable painter we know as El Greco? First, he was a great voyager, both geographically and culturally. From his native Crete (then a part of the Venetian empire) Doménikos went to Venice in 1567, to Rome in 1570, and then to Toledo in 1577, where he flourished until his death in 1614. Secondly, we know how he grew from his apprenticeship in the traditions of Byzantine art to have a role in the elevated painting of the Italian High Renaissance. He competed with great masters, including Titian and Tintoretto, before, in the second half of his life, he became a strangely individual artist connected – not always comfortably – with the court of Spain.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3