“The view of Toledo was created in the late period of the artist’s work, when his art was increasingly painted in tragic colors. The landscape depicted by the artist is a concrete kind of Spanish city growing out of the impregnable rock washed by the waters of the Tagus River, with the gloomy buildings of the Alcazar Palace, the sky tower of the cathedral – a kind of so concrete that contemporaries recognized their homes.
However, this particular city under a stormy sky, then appearing, flashed with flashes of yellow-white light, then falling into the gray-blue half-darkness, then again arising in the blinding purity of greenery, under the El-Greco brush is transformed into a kind of vision of the image of the world in general, such as he was perceived by the rebellious, the artist’s fantasy in constant creative tension. “The city on the mountain, at the bottom between steep banks, a river with tiny figures of bathing people, partly naked, partly The green slopes.
Beginning below, the city crawls along the winding stripe of civilian houses upwards and the closer to the top, expanding ever more, expanding and striving to the height. At the very top is a narrow pointed cathedral and a high rectangle palace. Note that church buildings are very rare and in addition to the pompous cathedral, there may be 1 or 2 more buildings. A third of the picture occupies the sky. Clouds try to score, to suppress the sun. In some places the light manages to break through; then in the sky white-blue masses or light-brown waterfalls of light are formed, falling downwards, into darkness.
The dark masses of clouds tend to suppress light, but can not eclipse the whole sky, are concentrated by blackness at the tallest buildings – the palace and the cathedral. And they can not do this: they have risen too high above the earth. The sun of the mind of nature, the mysteries of its structure, the laws of state and motion… The aspiration of philosophers, scientists, artists in a slow progress upward, to the knowledge of them, expressed in the expanding construction of the city. The main hope and confidence of El Greco for secular achievements, which do not recognize any restrictions of the Holy Fathers, although religious figures also take part in this. Bright areas of the sky illuminate the earth, and the earth responds with white walls of buildings or greenery of vegetation. But light can not penetrate into the gorge, the failures of human greed, greed, meanness, meanness.
Small people from a dark river can climb a bright strip of urban buildings and continue the spiritual construction of a man or, having penetrated black horizons to the horizon, reinforce the forces of darkness: vile slander and deceit, secret courts of the Inquisition, torture and burning people of reason, strengthen the forces of ignorance, fear. In the asset of the dark forces, the Inquisition, above all, the pursuit of Copernicus for his * On the conversion of the heavenly spheres *, 1543; the persecution of J. Bruno, Galileo. Attempts to take control or destroy any doubt, any attempt at cognition, movement, comprehension of the world and man in addition to the dogmas of the holy fathers.
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