El Greco revisited

Such details as pollarded willows and poplar trees are accurately noted - somewhere, no doubt, there is a vellum-bound volume of El Greco's landscape studies - and woven into the composition to lend it the illusion of recognisable reality.

Look long and hard at this landscape and then return to the background of the Laocoön; can they be by the same hand, are they creatures of the same education and sensibility?

Now look at the landscape at the base of The Immaculate Conception-No 32): on the left this is evidently by the same hand as The View of Toledo, but even the authors of the exhibition catalogue opine that the inept details on the right may be by El Greco's son, Jorge Manuel; as for the bunch of flowers next to them - was there ever a more maladroit intervention in a masterpiece, one more miscalculated in its disruption of space and upward movement?

Turn next to The Opening of the Fifth Seal (No 40) - if this is indeed the subject - another late and unfinished painting, our perception of it distorted by the loss of perhaps eight inches from the left of the canvas and some six feet from the top, cut from it by a butchering restorer in 1880.

The relationships of the nudes in this to those of Laocoönare immediately evident, so too is the framing of the composition by tall terminal figures on both flanks and the establishment of a shallow stage between them, in this case closed by the green and yellow cloths pulled aside from the nude souls by child angels.

Is it a variant of Time unveiling Truth or a reference to the Last Judgment? Has the red cloth on the ground been cast aside by the giant kneeling figure of St John, or is it there to indicate that a third party of souls have already been judged?

And why is one soul so darkskinned? Can this be a reference to the expulsion from Spain in 1609-10 of the Moriscos, the once Muslim Moors who had long since been converted to be "New Christians", but whose Christianity was doubted by the Catholic clergy at precisely the same time as this picture was being conceived and painted?

Estimates range from 500,000 Morisco expulsions to three million; what is not in doubt is that they were carried out with great cruelty and that Toledo, once a centre of Arab culture (look still at the domestic architecture there) and residually a centre of Mozarab Christian religious practice into the 19th century, was as brutally deprived of its Moriscos as any other city.

Was El Greco, himself an immigrant and originally Greek Orthodox, their sympathiser? Was he, perhaps, as a Cretan, himself dark-skinned? If the widely accepted interpretation of the Laocoönis true - that it represents in allegorical form the persecution of the then Archbishop of Toledo by the Inquisition - then for El Greco to make in an altarpiece a political-cum-religious point about the Moriscos is by no means improbable.

I have written about El Greco's sense of sculptural form and volume without stressing his habitual elongation of the human figure, not merely to an elegant seven feet or so, but to nearly twice man's normal height, small of head but very long of limb and trunk.

Near the Laocoönstand two small sculptures in polychromed wood (No 46) identified as Pandora of the celebrated box of ills and evils, and her husband Epimetheus; naked, normal in proportion, mannered but restrained in pose and attitude, these are, with neither hesitation nor good reason, attributed to El Greco.

He is recorded as having modelled figures in wax, clay and plaster as aids to composition (not quite a commonplace in his day, but almost so), and to have designed figures for carved altarpieces on which professional carvers worked, but these two small carvings seem in aesthetic sensibility and the Pygmalian care with which they are painted as alive, wholly alien to El Greco.

Why should a painter in whose oeuvre the pagan subject is so rare divert from paint and canvas to the scarcely related craft of carving wood, and do so in subjects so peripheral? The writers of the catalogue remark on the figures' nudity as unprecedented and unabashed, yet nudity was one thing of which El Greco, in Spain, the hotbed of proscriptions after the Council of Trent, seems never to have been afraid.

Thirty years earlier, after only a year or two in Spain, he painted a near life-size St Sebastian (No 15), in which a wisp of drapery leaves little to the titillated imagination; the saint is a boy in the painter's studio, one knee on a stool covered with a cloth, the left arm supported by a rope, the right hand probably gripping a loop of it behind his back, the outward lean of the body thrusting down onto the turned-back toes of the boy's right foot.

It is, I am convinced, a painting from life, El Greco standing too close to the easel to see the figure's disproportion on the canvas, painting each part of his model as swiftly and fluently as he could examine it, the paint wonderfully fluid and transparent, the landscape details a last adjustment to camouf lage the apparatus of painting in the studio.

Painting of this kind gave him the skill and courage to paint The Resurrection, as he did two decades later (No 41) - an explosion of nude and nearnude soldiers, the backward fall of one toward the spectator employed as the foundation on which the whole upward thrust of the composition is constructed, a most daring invention in the iconography of the motif; Andy Warhol found it homosexually exciting.

But enough of going backwards, though I could go on - on about the brilliance with which El Greco lit his pictures, often from below, enhancing the flicker of candles on the altar, on about the warmth of sentiment when he painted St Martin with his beggar and St Louis with his page, on and on indeed.

Let me urge you instead to look at the late pictures first and then journey back into the fumbling ineptitude of his beginnings, for in reverse the development of an adventurous great master is made clearer faster than in the conventional art historical plod from El Greco, the young Greek ikon painter, to El Greco, the ecstatic of Toledo. See and understand the great late things, and all the rest fall into place.

This way you will see that not all the paintings in the exhibition are masterpieces, that some, even those bearing his signature, have the character of the umpteenth version of an idea grown stale, and that the enamel-faced portrait of A Lady in a Fur Wrap (No 49) is not by him at all, indeed it is so alien as not even to be Spanish.

El Greco had a considerable number of pupils and studio assistants: one of them, Francesco Prevoste, though more than a decade older, joined his master in Rome in 1574 and stayed with him until his death in 1607; another was his son, Jorge Manuel, who became his business partner in 1603 - a wretched painter who is known to have spoiled a number of paintings left unfinished by his father in 1614.

Workshop participation bedevils connoisseurship in the case of El Greco and a signature does not necessarily mean that a painting is by the master through-andthrough; so too does forgery, rampant since the "rediscovery" of El Greco in the mid-19th century - but that is not a problem with this exhibition.

Kierkegaard, father of existentialism, opined that life must be understood backwards; so too must El Greco.