Art Eyewitness Book Review: Venice City of Pictures by Martin Gayford

 

Venice, City of Pictures

By Martin Gayford

Thames & Hudson/463 pages/$39.95

Reviewed by Ed Voves

The earliest of the art treasures of Venice is the bronze statue of a winged lion which has served for centuries as the emblem of the maritime city and its bygone republic. Much battered by time, weather and history, the Lion of Venice was created in antiquity, ca. 300 B.C., and brought from Greece or the Middle East by Venetian seafarers. 

Striding atop its column in the Piazzetta San Marco, the Lion of Venice strikes a commanding pose. It would be natural if an author, seeking to relate the fascinating cultural history of Venice, would utilize the leonine symbol of St. Mark to set the theme of his tale.  

Venice, despite the importance of its old, indomitable bronze lion, is not known for its statues. Venice is a "city of pictures" as Martin Gayford affirms. The evidence to prove Gayford's case is his tour de force saga of the lives of Venetian painters and of visiting artists to "La Serenissma", recently published by Thames and Hudson. 

Gayford is a marvelous writer, and, as his insightful conversations on art - and life - with Anthony Gormley and David Hockney prove, a delightful colleague. But in the case of the present book, we should think of Gayford as a worthy successor of the intelligent, urbane diplomats sent abroad by the Republic of Venice during the 1600's and 1700's. 

If you wanted to get to the truth of political matters back then, the "man-in-the-know" was invariably the Venetian ambassador. In terms of art "matters" today, it is Martin Gayford.

In 400-plus pages of scintillating prose (complemented by superlative, full-color illustrations), Gayford tells the story of the "wedding" of Venice with painting - rather than with the sea as celebrated by the annual ceremony officiated by the ruler of Venice, the Doge.

                               Canaletto, The Rialto Bridge from the North, 1725                                   (Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin)

From the Bellini Dynasty of the fifteenth century to Canalleto in the eighteenth and on to the Biennale of today, Venetian art has emphasized painting in oils. This involved Venetian painters in aesthetic competition with other schools of Italian art, chiefly of Florence. Usually, the paragone, as the dispute is formally termed, is represented as disegno vs. colore, drawing vs. painting, Florence vs. Venice. 

This is much too simplistic, of course. The great Venetian masters of the early Renaissance, however, really did embrace painting in oils, much faster than their Florentine rivals.

Geography and topography are destiny - in politics, trade and art. Just as the coastal marshes on which Venice was created impelled Venetians to take to the sea to earn their fortune, so the humid climate of the city and its surrounding region dictated what genres of art would be be suitable in Venice.

A key painting in understanding Venice's early history and art is Domenico Tintoretto's Saint Mark Blessing the Islands of Venice, painted 1587-90. 

St. Mark, one of the disciples of Jesus and author of the first gospel, was reputedly martyred and buried in Egypt. In 828, Mark's "body" was smuggled out of Alexandria and brought to Venice. As Tintoretto's painting shows, Venice was far from a great city at that point. The citizens of Venice are shown living in huts constructed from reeds. These primitive dwellings had been built on the shores of  the Lagoon to which the first Venetians fled to escape Germanic invaders, especially the Lombards, who swarmed over the passes leading through the Alps.

Domenico Tintoretto,

Saint Mark Blessing the Islands of Venice, 1587–90

 (Scuola Grande di San Marco, Venice)

Tintoretto shows St. Mark, accompanied by the Winged Lion, invoking God's grace on the rustic settlements. These, in due course, would rise on the support of hundreds of thousands of tree trunks driven into the marshy soil to form the foundations of a great metropolis. 

St. Mark's blessing could not change the climate. Painting on wet plaster, buon fresco, the chosen art form of ancient and medieval Italy, flourished in Florence and points south. In the moist, salty air of Venice, fresco paintings often would not properly set. Those that did stick to the walls soon faded or flaked. Venetian painting was left hanging, high but not "dry."

Mosaics in the Byzantine tradition featured prominently in the decoration of Venice's medieval churches, including its great cathedral of San Marco. This sacred art would, over the centuries form the setting for countless religious processions, troops of gawking tourists and painters, both native-born and Romantic-era foreigners, drawn by architecture which often seems more celestial than made by the hand of man.

John Wharlton Bunney, Facade of San Marco, 1876-82

(Collection of the Guild of St George, Museums Sheffield)

Venetian paintings on wood, small in scale, incorporated gold leaf backgrounds, another carryover from Byzantine art. But when news of the oil painting innovations taking place in the Netherlands reached Venice during the last decades of the 1400's, the leading artists in the city, the Bellini brothers, Giovanni and Gentile, quickly embraced the new medium.

For all of the innovative skill of the Bellini brothers, oil painting in Venice really came into its own with the emergence of the long-lived Titian (ca. 1490-1576). Gayford devotes three chapters to Titian. This is only fitting. Titian - Tiziano Vecellio - was the perfect artist for Venice. The ruling class paid well for art, but demanded masterpieces for their money and timely completion as stipulated by contract. Titian delivered on both counts.

"Your Servant from Cadore", as Titian called himself, referring to the small Alpine town of his birth, was a savvy businessman and supreme master of painting in oils. 

Titian's early altarpiece, the Assunta, painted 1516-18, for the church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, established his career as the preeminent painter of Venice. Gayford devotes considerable attention to this masterful work.

Titian, Assunta, c.1516–18 

(The Yorck Project, 2002) 

Gayford's analysis of the Assunta is based on many visits to the church where it still hangs, an astonishing backdrop to the glittering main altar. Gayford's thoughtful analysis enables readers, who have never had an opportunity to view this depiction of the heaven-bound Mary, mother of Jesus, to experience this compelling painting as if they had seen it at first hand.

Brilliantly dissecting the composition of the Assunta, Gayford also conveys the sense of ineffable mystery surrounding the Assumption, the event in Christian history which the painting records. As a result, we are enabled to see Titian's Assunta for what it is: a "moving" picture. It is an absorbing narrative work, truly cinematic in scope and effect, even if the Virgin Mary and the band of Apostles never flex a muscle.

Titian's "your servant from Cadore" statement was partly a pose and a bit of a ploy. He was certainly no sycophant, content with his wages and anonymity, as had been the case with artists during the Middle Ages. Titian was adept at making the ruling elite of Venice feel completely in charge, while he steered his own artistic course. Interestingly, God the Father in the Assunta looks a Venetian doge and later, during the 1540's, Titian painted Doge Andrea Gritti looking like God.

Titian, Portrait of Andrea Gritti, c.1546–50 

(Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)

Titian was wise to flatter Gritti. Doge from 1525-1538, Gritti was ruthless and resolute during years when Venice faced seemingly impossible odds in the endless Italian wars of the 1500s. Gayford mercifully spares his readers details of these interminable conflicts. But he relates, with relish and the elan of a born story-teller, just how "no-nonsense" Venetian leaders could be when they did not get what they paid for.

In 1545, the Florentine-born architect, Jacopo Sansovino, was thrown into prison. His crime?  Part of the roof collapsed of the library he designed to house a collection of rare manuscripts, brought from Constantinople to Venice. An early ice storm struck before the concrete could set and a protective coat of lead laid down. Sansovino was released from jail but he was held personally accountable for the reconstruction costs. The result was a masterpiece, the Biblioteca Marciana, but it it took Sansovino twenty years to pay-off the bill.

The Biblioteca Marciana, with one of the two columns in the 

Piazzetta San Marco on the left. (Photo rudiernst/123rf.com)

Venice survived the perils of the Italian Wars and collapsing library roofs. However, over the course of the long and tormented sixteenth century, a new threat appeared, which no artist or writer in Venice could ignore: the Inquisition.

Venice, though it had many economic ties with Northern Europe, did not renounce Papal authority during the Protestant Reformation. While successful in preserving its political independence, the Venetian Republic reluctantly formed a local branch of the heresy-hunting Inquisition in 1547. Skillfully limiting Papal interference in local affairs, the Venetian Inquisition dealt with Protestants, free-thinkers and other troublemakers on its own initiative. It was nothing to be trifled with.

Religiously inclined painters like Lorenzo Lotto had to worry that their fervent depictions of sacred events accorded with the critical scrutiny of the Venetian Inquisitors. Other artists had to contend with charges of impiety. Paolo Veronese, a master of grandiose spectacle, was summoned to testify for including "buffoons, drunkards, Germans, dwarfs and other such scurrilities" in a painting featuring Jesus and his disciples. 

The Venetians carefully navigated their way through the dangers of the Reformation and ensuing Wars of Religion. But the political and economic power of the Republic was largely eclipsed by the early 1700's due to the shift of commerce to nations with ready access to the Atlantic trade routes. It was then that Venetian art emerged as an international force in its own right. Venice's navy no longer ruled the Mediterranean Sea but a Venetian "state of mind" intrigued and influenced artists from all over Europe and, ultimately, the world.  

Gayford writes of the visit of Johann Wolfgang Goethe to Venice in 1786. The lyrical, almost hypnotic, prose of the following quotation is indicative of Gayford's ability to summon the past to life:

After leaving the Palazzo Pisani Moretta, Goethe had an artistic epiphany. As he 'glided over the lagoons in the brilliant sunshine' he perceived everything in terms of light, shadow, and colour. He noticed gondoliers silhouetted against the blue sky as they rowed with easy strokes across the light-green surface of the water... 'Everything was painted clearly on a clear background. It only needed the sparkle of a white-crested wave to put the dot on the i.' 

Gayford continues his evocative commentary by noting that Goethe could well have been describing a scene painted a century later, by Claude Monet or John Singer Sargent during their sojourns in Venice. 

 

 Claude Monet, Palazzo da Mula, 1908 (National Gallery of Art, Wash., D.C.)

Gayford concludes this passage by noting that Venice "can seem outmoded, quaintly irrelevant to the modern world. Then, suddenly, you realize that it is not."

Art lovers, once they look beyond the rhetoric about the "inevitable" decay of Venice have been coming to the same conclusion as Gayford's for a long time. As a result, Venice, a city supposedly sinking back into the marshes, has played a major role in the rise of modern art. J.M.W. Turner, John Ruskin, Édouard Manet, Walter Sickert, Serge Diaghilev and Peggy Guggenheim have all been touched by "La Serenissma" and they, in turn, have shared their experience of Venice with the world.

The same is true for Martin Gayford. St. Mark's Winged Lion has reached down from his column to touch Gayford on the shoulder. Gayford has responded with a  book about Venice, of such perfection that it only needs the merest flight of fancy to imagine the sound of a gondolier's oar, the sight of the sun glinting on the facade of San Marco and "the sparkle of a white-crested wave" on the waters of the Venetian Lagoon.

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Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved. 

Cover art for Venice: City  of Picture, Courtesy of Thames & Hudson. Illustrations from the book were provided by Thames & Hudson, courtesy of the institutions or web sites, noted below. The image of Titian's Assunta, courtesy of the Yorck Project, 2002.                                                                                      

Introductory Image: Cover art of Venice: City of Pictures (2023), courtesy of Thames & Hudson.

Canaletto (Italian, 1697-1768) The Rialto Bridge from the North, 1725. Oil on canvas, 91.4 × 135.8 (36 × 53 1⁄2). Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin.

Domenico Tintoretto (Italian, 1560-1635) St. Mark Blessing the Islands of Venice, 1587-90. Oil on canvas, 319 × 392 (125 5⁄8 × 154 3⁄8). Scuola Grande di San Marco, Venice

John Sharpton Bunny (British, 1828-1882) Facade of San Marco, 1876-1882. Oil on canvas, 144.7 × 226 (57 × 89). Collection of the Guild of St George, Museums Sheffield.

Titian (Italian,  ca. 1490-1576) Assunta, 1516-1518. Oil on panel: 690 x 360 cm. (270 x 140 in.) Basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice. The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei

Titian (Italian, ca. 1490-1576) Portrait of Andrea Gritti, 1546-1550. Oil on canvas, 133.6 × 103.2 (52 5⁄8 × 40 11/16). Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C

Photo of the  Biblioteca Marciana, with one of the two columns in the Piazzetta San Marco on the left. Photo rudiernst/123rf.com

Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926) Palazzo de Mula, 1908. Oil on canvas, 61.4 × 80.5 (24 3/16 × 31 11/16). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Art Eyewitness Book Review: El Greco by Fernando Marias

El Greco: Life and Work - a New History

by Fernando Marias

Thames & Hudson/349 pages/$100

Reviewed by Ed Voves

In 2014, the Prado Museum mounted an exhibition commemorating the 400th anniversary of the death of one of Spain's greatest artists - or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, of one of the greatest artists to work in Spain. El Greco and Modern Art at the Prado surveyed the career and legacy of the Renaissance-era painter who was "rediscovered" during the first years of the twentieth century, as the revolution of Modernism began to gain momentum.

Was Doménikos Theotokópoulos (1541-1614), better known as El Greco, really an ancestor of Modern Art?  Picasso is known to have studied El Greco's Vision of St. John, while he worked on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Franz Marc, writing in the Blue Rider Almanac, acknowledged "the case of El Greco, because the glory of this painter is closely tied to the evolution of our new perception on art."

El Greco, The Vision of St. John, 1608-1614

As compelling as these testimonials are, it is open to question whether El Greco's art fitted in with any "perception on art" other than his own.

El Greco is best understood as an "eccentric" painter. This is the view of Fernando Marias, author of what is surely the most definitive biography of El Greco. Marias uses "eccentric" in its sixteenth century connotation.

To be eccentric for the Spaniards of that time was to be different in life habits or  attitudes from the accustomed norms of society. Highly individualistic, perhaps, but not purposefully flamboyant or peculiar.

Gallery view of the 2003 El Greco exhibit, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art 

In reflecting on the use of "eccentric" to categorize El Greco, we ought not to think of him as a Salvador Dali figure, cultivating outlandish personal traits to flaunt in the faces of those who rejected him. Marias maintains that El Greco's eccentricity was "a quality that he deliberately strove for." Yet, this was a feature of his life-long act of self-definition and ambitious personal goals. Marias writes:

Since his arrival in Spain, or perhaps even before, El Greco had developed a new vision of art, one in which the painter ... had the right to give expression to his art with liberty, free from the asphyxiating requirements of iconography or the demands of clients, so often lacking in taste and understanding.

Marias has made a life-long study of El Greco. The present edition of this insightful, lavishly illustrated biography is based on an earlier version, published in 1995. Marias displays a fine command of literary style, as can be seen in the above-quote. But it should be noted that the exhaustive research which Marias has devoted to his task does not always make for easy reading.

El Greco, Portrait of an Old Man (believed to be a self-portrait), 1595–1600

Much of the scanty details of El Greco's life come from the court records of the many, many lawsuits in which he was involved. Most dealt with the payment promised him for works of art created for his clients in Spain. Like Michelangelo, El Greco was forced to devote much time and effort dealing with recalcitrant clients, unsatisfied patrons and demanding creditors. That was a depressing reality of his life and Marias' narrative reflects this.

Fortunately, Marias has been able to use two key sources, not available to earlier scholars. In 1967, El Greco's personal copy of Georgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1568) was located. This was followed in 1981 by the discovery of a copy of De Architectura by Vitruvius which El Greco had also used. Both volumes were heavily annotated by El Greco, providing direct access to his thoughts on art.

Doménikos Theotokópoulos, aka El Greco, was born on the island of Crete in 1641. Crete, or Candia as it was called, was a colony of Venice's maritime empire. Culturally, Crete was a last bastion of the Byzantine Empire. The artists of Crete, closely organized into a medieval guild, painted in the traditional Byzantine style, albeit infused with elements of Western art due to the influence of Venice.

Several of El Greco's early paintings have survived. These testify to the fusion of artistic schools, Byzantine and Venetian, going on in his homeland. However, it is extremely telling to note that hallmarks of his future style in Spain are already present in some of his first efforts. 

El Greco, The Dormition, ca. 1566

In The Dormition of the Virgin, painted around 1566, El Greco showed his debts to late Byzantine iconography. The Dormition or death-bed scene from the life of the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, is more important to the Greek Orthodox rite than to the Latin form of Catholicism practiced by the Venetians. El Greco infuses a Venetian sensibility to the Dormition by the way he shows the spirit of the Virgin Mary ascending to Heaven. Here, also, is a foretaste of his greatest paintings from the years in Spain, notably The Burial of the Count of Orgaz.

In 1567, El Greco traveled to Venice in search of the patronage and professional success unavailable to him in Crete. Fame, of a sort, El Greco gained but alas not the degree of success which Titian and Tintoretto had attained in Venice. El Greco made a close-study of both of these celebrated painters and may have worked for a time in Tintoretto's studio. But he failed in his attempt to gain favor in Venice and later in Rome, where some ill-advised comments on Michelangelo lost him a place in the household of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, the most influential patron of the arts in Italy.

El Greco, The Modena Triptych, 1568

The decade El Greco spent in Italy, despite all the frustrations he encountered, was crucial in his maturation as an artist, A key work in understanding El Greco's transformation from a painter of Byzantine-style icons to a practitioner of Italianate art is The Modena Triptych, painted soon after he arrived in Italy. Though small in scale, the triptych was illustrated, front and back, with vivid narrative scenes from the New Testament. Several of these episodes would feature in the mighty works of devotional art El Greco later created for the churches in Toledo, Spain.

El Greco's hopes of being appointed court painter for Philip II of Spain were soon dashed after his arrival in 1577. Instead of royal preferment, he had to contract his services for religious paintings and portraits to a wide-ranging network of clients. Many possessed limited financial resources and El Greco had to submit to a rigorous assessment process after each devotional painting was completed. The cash-strapped churches of Toledo constantly sought to have their fees reduces by making carping criticisms of El Greco's "eccentric" works of art.

It would be fruitless to attempt a brief survey of El Greco's career in Spain, which Marias handles so brilliantly. A look at two of his works will suffice: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz and the ensemble of paintings for the Oballe Chapel in Toledo.

El Greco, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586-1588 

El Greco painted The Burial of the Count of Orgaz a decade after he arrived in Spain, for a parish church in Toledo. By virtue of its quality, it deserves to hang in a cathedral. It is a work of stunning dualities: earth and heaven, body and spirit, death and eternal life.

The striking realism of the bottom, earthly, half of the painting sets the stage for the upper, heavenly part. By softening his brush strokes and using cooler shades of color - except for the red dress of the Virgin Mary, who is reaching down to embrace the soul of the deceased count - El Greco created a vision of the celestial realm as imagined by the aristocratic mourners below.

The Burial of the Count of Orgaz is now recognized as one of the greatest treasures of Spanish art. Consequently, it never travels to international exhibitions. However, by an incredible stroke of good luck, I had the chance to visit Spain in 1979 in the company of an art scholar who was determined to see El Greco's masterpiece. The experience of viewing The Burial of the Count of Orgaz remains one of the defining moments of my life.

To fully grasp the magnitude of El Greco's achievement, it is necessary to focus on the late-career ensemble of paintings he created for the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception in Toledo, better known as the Oballe Chapel. It was the last of El Greco's great projects, completed by his son, Jorge Manuel, in 1615. 

Even by the standards of Spain during the early seventeenth century, the building and decoration of the Oballe Chapel proceeded at a glacially-slow pace. Construction began in 1595, funded by the Oballe family, who had made a fortune in the Spanish colony of Peru. El Greco joined the project in 1607 after the original artist, Alessandro Semini, had died. The financial complications of the assessment process were marked by the acrimonious disputes that characterized El Greco's entire career in Toledo. These continued after his death, contributing to the financial ruin and imprisonment of Jorge Manuel.

The Oballe Chapel, however, can only be appreciated by the results, not by the "backstory" of its creation.

Gallery view of the 2003 El Greco exhibit, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art 

El Greco's masterful treatment of the Oballe Chapel artworks can be appreciated by studying their placement in the 2003 Metropolitan Museum exhibition. Soaring in majesty in the center is The Immaculate Conception, with the Virgin Mary rising-up to receive divine grace in the form of the dove of the Holy Spirit. To the left is a powerful portrait of St. Peter and at right, in full church vestments, is St. Idelfonsus, the patron saint of Toledo.

These works were not closely placed, side-by-side, however. The portraits of the saints were positioned on adjoining walls, each at an angle to create a grotto-like effect, centered upon the stunning depiction of the Virgin Mary. 

Positioned above, and completing the ensemble, was one of El Greco's most remarkable paintings, The Visitation. This painting showed the Virgin Mary being greeted by her cousin Elizabeth, a key moment in Christian sacred history. Now in the collection of the Dumbarton Oaks Museum in Washington D.C., El Greco's Visitation is truly an Impressionist work of art.  

El Greco, The Visitation, 1607-13

El Greco's Visitation cannot be fully appreciated by looking at it straight-on, at eve level. Even today, it appears half-formed, almost incomprehensible. But when viewed from below, as El Greco intended, the meaning of The Visitation is readily apparent. The painting guides the viewer's sight line down to the dramatic central image of the young woman, born without sin, who will give birth to Jesus, redeemer of human kind.

To a believing-Christian in Toledo in the early 1600's, the experience of visiting the Oballe Chapel would have been spiritually overwhelming. Even today, with the component paintings separated, El Greco's visual plan is a revolutionary synthesis of concept and articulation. Fernando Marias writes:

El Greco also demonstrated the sculptural possibilities of living, moving, paint, and showed how daring his compositions could be. He rejected static contemplation of a dynamic work of art and demanded that the painting be seen in motion, as if it were a real and living being.

Whether one looks at a El Greco masterpiece with the eye of art or the eye of faith, Marias' statement above is undeniably valid. "Real and living being" is in every brushstroke of El Greco's works. 

El Greco, The Immaculate Conception, 1607-13

The fluttering wings of angels, the look of spiritual rapture on the Virgin Mary's face, even the numinous quality of the Toledo landscape over which these sacred beings soar on their way to heaven, have a vitality that carries us, the viewers, to the celestial realm that is their destination.

Marias concludes his final reflections on El Greco with a cautionary check on speculations about what beliefs, creeds and convictions motivated his artistic expressions. The comments which El Greco made in his copy of Vasari's Lives testify to his intelligence and ambition. Yet the truth remains that the inner El Greco remains an enigma. His paintings are not, Marias asserts, "reducible to his own personality and personal beliefs."

El Greco began his career painting Byzantine icons. While he rebelled against the stylistic formality of the maniera greca, he continued to do what the Icon painters of Byzantium had always done: create a visible space for belief, an interface for humans to commune with the Divine.

El Greco, Portrait of a Doctor (Rodrigo de la Fuente), details, 1588 

Wherever he went - Venice, Rome, Toledo - El Greco never stopped being Doménikos Theotokópoulos.

***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved                                                                                           
Introductory Image:
Cover art for El Greco: Life and Work - a New History by Fernando Marias, courtesy of  Thames & Hudson Publishers

Doménikos Theotokópoulos, El Greco (1541-1614) The Vision of St. John, 1608-1614.  Oil on canvas: 87 1/2 x 76 in. (222.3 x 193 cm); with added strips 88 1/2 x 78 1/2 in. (224.8 x 199.4 cm). Metropoltan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1956. # 56.48

Gallery view of the 2003 El Greco exhibit, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art 

Doménikos Theotokópoulos, El Greco (1541-1614) Portrait of an Old Man, Ca. 1595–1600. Oil on canvas:  20 3/4 x 18 3/8 in. (52.7 x 46.7 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art,  Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1924.  # 24.197.1 © The Metropolitan Museum of Art 

Doménikos Theotokópoulos, El Greco (1541-1614) The Dormition of the Virgin, ca. 1566. Tempera and gold on panel: 61.4 cm × 45 cm (24.2 in × 18 in). Holy Cathedral of the Dormition of the Virgin, Ermoupolis, Syros, Greece.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormition_of_the_Virgin__(El_Greco)/media/File:Dormition_El_Greco

Doménikos Theotokópoulos, El Greco (1541-1614) The Modena Triptych, 1568. Tempera on panel: Height: 37 cm (14.5 in); Width: 23.8 cm (9.3 in) (central panel). Galleria Estense  Modena, Italy. # 8095. 
https://www.gallerie-estensi.beniculturali.it/opere/altarolo-portatile

Doménikos Theotokópoulos, El Greco (1541-1614) The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586-1588.  Oil on canvas: 480 cm × 360 cm (190 in × 140 in). Church of Santo Tomé, Toledo, Spain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burial_of_the_Count_of_Orgaz#/media/File:El_Greco_-_The_Burial_of_the_Count_of_Orgaz.JPG

Gallery view of the 2003 El Greco exhibit, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art 

Doménikos Theotokópoulos, El Greco (1541-1614) The Visitation, 1607-13. Oil on canvas: 96.5 cm. x  71.4 (38 in. x  28.1 ) Dumbarton Oaks Museum, Washington D.C. # HC.P.1936.18.(O)

Doménikos Theotokópoulos, El Greco (1541-1614) The Immaculate Conception, 1607-13. Oil on canvas: 348 cm × 174.5 cm (137 in × 68.7 in).  Museo de Santa Cruz, Toledo, Spain  # DO1277
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immaculate_Conception_(El_Greco,_Toledo)#/media/File:Inmaculada_Oballe_El_Greco.jpg

Doménikos Theotokópoulos, El Greco (1541-1614) Portrait of a Doctor (Rodrigo de la Fuente), details, 1588.  Oil on canvas:  96 cm. x 82.3 cm. Museo del Prado, # P000807