The name Domḗnikos Theotokópoulos does not sound Spanish and, for most people, rings no bells. Call him by his nickname, though — even though it literally means “The Greek” — and anyone with a passing acquaintance with art history can place him as perhaps the major painter of the Spanish Renaissance: El Greco.
I’m thinking of him as we wrap up celebration of Hispanic Heritage month.
What makes him Spanish? Not birth: he came from the Kingdom of Candia, modern Crete. Not education: he trained first as a post-Byzantine icon painter in Crete, then absorbed the color and light of the Venetian Renaissance, and finally refined his style in Rome. Not subject: his works draw from religion, history, the broader Mediterranean. I remember my first real encounter with his work: my dad took me in our green Oldsmobile station wagon to the white limestone and glass triangle that I. M. Pei designed on the northeast corner of the National Mall. I was 13 years old, it was 1982, and I remember standing before the altar pieces of floating saints, their elongated bodies in such masterpieces as The Holy Family with Saint Anne and the Infant John the Baptist.
And I remember the skies. Angry, turbulent, distinctive.
It’s these skies, that recur in painting after painting, that reveal the deep connection between El Greco and Spain. And that opens a window onto the complex identities at play in an immigrant life.
I couldn’t know it at the time, but these were the skies of Toledo, Spain. El Greco moved there in 1577, and over the course of some 37 years, he claimed the city as his home. The city, in turn, claimed him as one of its greatest sons.
And apparently his new home claimed his imagination. So much so that its skies and landscape pop up in places they aren’t supposed to be, historically and geographically. Framing the holy family in The Holy Family. As backdrop to Saint Martin and the Beggar, when the saint, a 4th century Roman cavalry officer stationed in Gaul, in an act of charity slashes his magnificent green velvet cape in half to clothe a naked and destitute man.
They even enter the mythical realm of the Iliad, in the famous scene when Trojan priest Laocoön warns his countrymen:
“Equō nē crēdite, Teucrī / Quidquid id est, timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentēs”
[Do not trust the Horse, Trojans / Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks, even when bearing gifts.]
Night looms. A hidden army will soon emerge from the belly of the wooden horse and Troy will burn. Except, in El Greco’s version, the city depicted is Toledo.
So why do Toledo’s turbulent skies keep showing up in these paintings that aren’t about Toledo at all?
Let’s call it the artist’s inspiration. At root, inspiration means “to breathe in”; the idea behind it, traditionally, is that some divine force would “breathe” a thought, creative urge, or guidance into a person. But in El Greco’s case, we can go even more literal: with every breath, El Greco took into himself the atmosphere of his chosen home. The resultant, inspired work, that synthesized his formative forces, comprised his unique style.
This idea complicates our view of the immigrant, or really of any person, as one-dimensional. As an educator, I take seriously the value that, as the International Literacy Association puts it, “For literacy teaching and learning to be culturally relevant and responsive, educators must begin by aligning curriculum and instruction with students’ backgrounds, life experiences, and cultures.” But there’s a risk we interpret this in too limiting a way, as if students can only read material corresponding directly to what they’re already familiar with, and as if a curriculum could or should be a one-to-one mirror of who our students are.
But really, core to reading and teaching reading — core to learning — is inviting students to connect to texts of all kinds, remix them, appropriate them, and make them theirs. An immigrant is, by definition, not where they started out — they’re assimilating the new, driven by need to find inspiration as well as need to retain core cultural and personal touchstones. Building the sorts of reimaginings that El Greco did, fusing the old and new, the visible and remembered, is something immigrants and children of immigrants have done and still do in communities all over America. Just as El Greco arrived in Toledo as an outsider with a foreign language, theology, and brushstroke, and died a national treasure, they’ve made the United States home and in so doing have lent their imagination and labor to making the nation something more than it was.
When we celebrate Hispanic Heritage month, we’re not just celebrating the histories and cultures of those U.S. citizens whose ancestors came from the Spanish-speaking world. We’re celebrating the ways they’ve enlarged us through their contributions — the skies they’ve lent us.
As recently as last year, when my dad still lived in Fairfax, Virginia, I’d drive back every other month or so. We’d often find ourselves revisiting the El Greco paintings on a field trip to DC, the same ones we first saw together when I was just a boy. We’d return to the room full of angry skies and Toledo felt something like home for us, too.
Image by Jose D’Alessandro on pexels.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
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