There is something at once unsettling and gratifying in the phenomenon of a great artist resisting the categories of art history and of art historians. His art, refusing to accommodate itself to established historiographic structures or to fulfill standard critical expectations, insists on defining its own terms of evaluation. The artist in this case is El Greco (1541-1614), and his art is fully and magnificently presented in “El Greco of Toledo,” an exhibition organized by the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art—in conjunction with the Prado, the National Gallery of Art, and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts—and currently on tour in this country.¹

El Greco’s resistance to the controlling formulas of art historiography seems particularly heroic and just, for perhaps no painter of the Western tradition has been so manipulated and co-opted by his modern admirers. Born and trained as an artist on Crete, a Greek island long part of the Venetian dominion, Domenikos Theotokopoulos extended his artistic education in Venice and Rome before moving, by 1577, to Spain. There, he made his home in Toledo, which, although no longer the royal capital, was the most powerful archdiocese in Spain at the time and a major intellectual center. His unusual itinerary seems somehow to confirm the uniqueness of his highly personal style, of which his disturbingly elongated figures are the most obvious expression. Together, biography and style have provided the material for partisan, contradictory interpretations of the painter: as an essentially late Byzantine or quintessentially Hispanic painter, as