"The Greek" invades Italy and Spain: the artist Domenikos Theotokopoulos--El Greco--introduced "such an extravagant style that to this day nothing has been seen to equal it, " noted 17th-century writer Jose Martinez. "Attempting to discuss it would confuse the soundest minds".

• Position: Museums Today

THE GREAT 16th-century painter known to posterity as El Greco (1541-1614) was one of the most original artists of his age, celebrated for his highly expressive and visionary religious paintings and psychologically compelling portraits, as well as his rare incursions into landscape, genre, mythology, and sculpture. His late works, in which mystical content, expressive distortions, and monumental scale are taken to ever greater extremes, culminates in the "Adoration of Shepherds" (c. 1613), the spectacular painting created to decorate ins own tomb.

From his beginnings as an icon painter in his native Crete, to his time in Venice and Rome and his study of Italian art, to his definitive move to Toledo, Spain, and his creation of a uniquely personal and deeply spiritual style, his work sometimes has been associated with the great mystics of Counter--Reformation Spain, yet his paintings have had a profound influence on the protagonists of 20th-century modernism, including Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock.

A unique synthesis of late medieval Byzantine traditions and the art of the Italian Renaissance, El Greco's work sought to create an innovative and spiritually more intense relationship between viewer and image. Although he established a large and productive workshop in Toledo, he founded no school, and for almost two centuries following his death, his works were decried for their extravagance--except for his astonishing portraits, which Spanish Baroque artist Diego Velazquez took as his model. A sympathetic interest in his art was the result of the 19th-century Romantic movement's new emphasis on individual expression and Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin saw themselves as his artistic heirs. More recently, his works have inspired the expressive abstractions of generations of 20th-century painters.

"St. Luke Painting the Virgin'" (c. 1565) and "The Dormition of the Virgin" (c. 1567) are among the rare, early works documenting El Greco's training as a painter of religious imagery in his island birthplace. The archaizing abstractions of these images--based on late medieval prototypes--reflect his country's continuing reverence for the traditions of its Greek heritage. The style and sacred function of Byzantine icons, which rejected mimesis in favor of an attempt to mystically embody the living presence of the divine, greatly shaped El Greco's approach to religious art. Throughout his career, he always signed his works with his Greek name...