Painting of the Spanish painter El Greco “The removal of the fifth seal.” The size of the painting is 222 x 193 cm, canvas, oil. In the late period of creativity, the theme of the destruction of the world, the divine retribution, sounds more and more insistently in Greco’s art. It is indicative of his appeal to the scene from the Apocalypse in the canvas “Withdrawing the Fifth Press.”
In the bottomless space there are depicted the writhing souls of the righteous – typical for El Greco strange, incorporeal, faceless creatures, convulsively elongated nude figures which seem to sway the movement of the wind. In the midst of this world of shadows, to the grandiose dimensions, the figure of the kneeling evangelist, who, with his arms raised, passionately appeals to the invisible lamb, grows in the foreground.
Emotional expressiveness of the picture with its sharp distortion of forms and, as it were, phosphorescent paints reaches an exceptional intensity. The same tragic theme of doom and doom sounds in other works of El Greco, seemingly not related to the religious plot. The artist El Greco had no followers.
Quite a different task faced the Spanish painting, in which at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries a mighty wave of realism was rising, and its art was for a long time forgotten. But at the beginning of the 20th century, during the crisis of bourgeois culture, it attracted much attention. The discovery of El Greco has turned into a kind of sensation. Foreign critics saw it as a forerunner of expressionism and other decadent currents of contemporary art. Elements of mysticism and irrationalism and related features of the fine structure of El Greco’s works were considered by them not as specific manifestations of his time, but as supposedly eternal and most valued qualities of art in general.
Of course, such an assessment unjustifiably modernizes the image of the artist, and most importantly, presents in a distorted light what constitutes the fascinating power of his images – the enormous intensity of the tragic human feelings. Concluding a certain stage in the history of Spanish art, El Greco’s work simultaneously represents a kind of watershed between two great artistic epochs, when in the art of many European countries, in the painful and contradictory quest to replace the Renaissance with the past, the first proclamations of a new artistic stage-art 17 century.
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