Episode Details

El Greco painted elongated figures, unnatural colors, and compositions so strange that his contemporaries thought he was going blind. For three centuries after his death, critics dismissed his work as the product of defective eyesight or simple incompetence. Then the twentieth century arrived, and modernists recognized him as a prophet — a painter who had anticipated Expressionism, Cubism, and abstraction three hundred years before they existed.

This episode traces El Greco from his Cretan origins through his failed attempt to succeed in Rome, the Toledo years that produced his greatest work, and the three-century-long critical rehabilitation that turned him from a curiosity into a visionary.

• El Greco's training in Crete and Venice and his failed bid to replace Titian in Rome
• The move to Toledo and the Spanish commissions that defined his mature style
• The elongated figures, the electric colors, and the theories about his supposedly defective vision
• The twentieth-century rediscovery and his recognition as a forerunner of modern art