Art: Live Eyes

One of the last portraits El Greco painted was of a man dead some 70 years. The picture is one of the most striking, and least familiar, in a fine new book of reproductions released last week under the brief title, El Greco (Harry N. Abrams; $10). In the accompanying text, Critic Leo Bronstein explains that El Greco painted his portrait of Spanish Cardinal Tavera from a death mask, kept the whole picture correspondingly austere.

“Everything is reduced to the very idea of economy,” observes Bronstein. “One erect triangle for the architecture of the figure … a beautiful single hand . . . and one truth of the face—the skull. Everything is rigid, motionless, everything, save the living eyes.”

Posthumous portraits are among the toughest commissions artists get. Today they work from photographs of the subject, but posed photos are apt to miss the revealing gesture or the characteristic turn of lip, nostril or eyelid that painters look for. El Greco, with only a rigid mask for a starting point, made a virtue of his difficulty. Cardinal Tavera’s imagined hand, with its long tapering fingers, and his dark, luminous, meditative eyes perhaps have more of the painter himself than of the cardinal about them; they reappear in most of El Greco’s works. But they intensify the portrait’s life-in-death stillness (see cut).

No one knows if the artist ever got around to painting himself. Some say he did, once or twice, and that one of the mourners in his Burial of Count Orgaz represents El Greco. The picture commemorates a legend that St. Stephen and St. Augustine descended from Heaven to help bury the 14th Century noble. Historians have guessed that the little boy standing before St. Stephen is the artist’s son, and that the face peering at the spectator over the saint’s head is El Greco’s own.