expression. Paint he must, to relieve his own spiritual tension. At that point not astigmatism but trickery enters the work. El Greco was a master draughtsman when he chose to be. He could execute a portrait which was a superb likeness with all the naturalistic quality of a Velázquez when he was moved to do it. But to paint the spiritual combination of intense humility and overwhelming uplift in contact with Divinity was something no painter had ever done. No human being had ever registered such a tremendous emotion before an artist for the benefit of humanity. There were no guides for the creation of something entirely new in art. The wooden saints and Saviors of all art back to the beginning could not help. To a man of the painter's lively imagination and unfettered temsubstiperament, tution was the inevitable answer to his problem. From that necessity grew his violent distortions, impossible posturings and, at violent times, color clashes. Since he could not identify to himself what he felt spirEl Greco. Saint John Baptist. itually when he The familiar distortions and painted, he delibexaggerations are all here, but erately created figastigmatism does not account ures that only at for them. a distance resembled human beings. His wild extravagance was the outcome of his furious struggle to impress humanity into believing something he himself did not comprehend or fully grasp. The result was inevitable. Truth vanished; hyperbole replaced it. Saintliness became a mawkish sentimentality. Grotesquely elongated bodies and tortured postures were the mark of his attempts to dis- El Greco. The Virgin with Santa Inés and Sana Tecla (National Gallery of Art, Washington). The painter's mastery of his palette never was disclosed to greater advantage than here despite the complete lack of expression in the faces and the general artificiality of the highly posed and conscious whole. Portrait of the Roman miniature painter Giulio Clovio (Naples Museum). Painted before he left Rome, this portrait is superbly naturalistic and free from the affectations which later marred most of El Greco's work. Spring 1951 u