Patrick Comerford
While I was in Iraklion recently, I went to see two statues or sculptures of Doménikos Theotokópoulos or ‘El Greco’ (1541-1614) as well as the city centre park to which he gives his name and the church that once housed the school where he trained as a painter.
El Greco is closely identified with the Spanish Renaissance. Yet, as his popular nickname indicates, he was Greek by birth and he normally signed his works with his full birth name in Greek letters, Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος (Doménikos Theotokópoulos).
Theotokópoulos was born in Venetian Crete in 1541 into a prosperous urban family that had probably been driven out of Chania in western Crete to Iraklion after an uprising against the Venetians in 1526-1528. His father, Geórgios Theotokópoulos (died 1556), was a merchant and tax collector.
Most authorities say El Greco was born in Iraklion, although many people in Crete continue to claim he was born in the village of Fodele, west of Iraklion. He received his initial training as an icon-writer at the Cretan School in Saint Catherine’s in Iraklion, and in addition, he probably studied the Greek classics.
To Greeks, El Greco remains the quintessential Greek artist. In Greece, he is loved not just by experts and art lovers but also by ordinary people.
The Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, who was born in Iraklion, felt a great spiritual affinity for El Greco. He called his autobiography Report to Greco, and wrote a tribute to the artist. El Greco has also inspired Greek poets, including Odysseas Elytis.
Led by the Greek composer Vangelis (Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou), Greeks were passionate and spontaneous in a campaign that raised $1.2 million to buy El Greco’s Saint Peter for the National Art Gallery in Athens 30 years ago in 1995. Vangelis, best known in the English-speaking world for his score for the film Chariots of Fire, has worked on three projects about El Greco.
As part of the fundraising campaign, his album Φόρος Τιμής Στον Γκρέκο (Foros Timis Ston Greco, Tribute to El Greco) was released in 1995, when I attended the concert by the composer in Athens. Vangellis expanded this work with three more tracks on El Greco in 1998, and in 2007, he composed the soundtrack for the film El Greco (2007), filmed in Crete.
Theotokopoulos Park in the centre of Iraklion is also known as El Greco Park. The marble bust of El Greco in the park was created in 1949 by the sculptor Nikos Sofialakis (1914-2002) from Rethymnon, best known for his characteristic style of Classical Realism.
When he was working in Athens, Sofialakis met the great Cretan writer Nikos Kazantzakis, who visited his workshop twice in 1945 and would inspire many of his works.
His growing popularity led to Municipality of Iraklion commissioning ‘El Greco’, his marble bust of Domenikos Theotokopoulos, which was unveiled on 6 July 1949. The statue stands tall in the lively, bustling square, and El Greco’s face has a serene expression. The work has been cleaned again in recent months, but sadly was daubed in graffiti almost immediately after its restoration.
There is a second, modern sculpture of El Greco in Iraklion, a contribution by Angelo Picaporte to the Seventh International Sculpture Symposium in Venerato. The symposium began at Paliani Monastery in 2006 and has been supported by the Municipality of Heraklion, but has also received sponsorship from local businesses, while the visiting sculptors have been wined and dined by the villagers of Venerato, 20 km south on Iraklion.
Angelo Picaporte’s statue of El Greco stands on the Sampionara Bastion, one of the seven surviving bastions in the Venetian fortifications that surrounded Iraklion. It looks down on the old KTEL bus station and out to the Venetian part and the modern harbour.
Over lunch in Panormos the next day, I had a lengthy discussion with a friend about whether El Greco was a Catholic or Orthodox. Some Catholic sources have claimed El Greco from birth, and he may have been named Domenikos (Dominic) after the Dominicans who had a large church, Saint Peter’s, by the harbour in Iraklion.
However, many modern Greek scholars, including Nikolaos Panayotakis, Pandelis Prevelakis and Maria Constantoudaki, agree the Theotokópoulos ‘family was almost certainly Greek Orthodox.’ One of his uncles was an Orthodox priest, and his name is not mentioned in the Roman Catholic baptismal archives in Crete.
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