An old master who still feels new
This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Velázquez prized his work, but El Greco’s reputation fell quickly after his death in 1614. Another Spanish painter, Antonio Palomino (1655-1726), called The Greek ‘contemptible and ridiculous, as much for the disjointed drawing as for the insipid colors’. In the 1800s, ‘The Burial of the Count of Orgaz’, now regarded as one of his masterpieces, lay rolled up in the basement of a Toledo church.
