Date: 15-05-2005
Owning Institution: The Prado
Publication:       Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:     Renaissance    

In the Christian calendar today is Pentecost Sunday, so this week’s picture is Pentecost by Domenikos Theotokopoulos, better known as El Greco. The Cretan-born artist, who spent the years of his maturity in Toledo, in Spain, created the work in about 1600. Most El Greco scholars believe that it was created as part of a multi-panelled altarpiece commissioned for the Colegio de Dona Maria de Aragon, an Augustinian seminary in Madrid for the training of priests. That splendid altarpiece, for which El Greco had received the unprecedented sum of almost 6,000 ducats, was dismantled in 1810, during the French occupation, when Joseph-Louis Bonaparte suppressed the Spanish religious orders. Nowadays, Pentecost is to be seen in the Prado Museum, in Madrid. It is one of the masterpieces of the artist’s late and so-called “mystical” style – a style memorably dismissed by the eighteenth-century Spanish art theorist, Palomino, as “the Greek’s extravagant manner.”

The Christian feast of the Pentecost has been observed with special veneration from at least as early as the fourth century. Its symbolic significance is immense, since it is believed to mark the miraculous inauguration of the Church – the moment when the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles, transforming them from the humble followers of Jesus into dynamic, preaching missionaries, the spiritual leaders of a new and still embryonic Christian community. For this reason, El Greco’s depiction of the subject would have been regarded as eminently suitable matter for contemplation by the budding priests and missionaries of an Augustinian seminary in Madrid. The Counter-Reformation Catholic church gave great prominence to Pentecost, because its themes  chimed so closely with its own most cherished values – emphasising the antiquity of the organised church and the importance of a special, priestly class of individuals charged with the missionary expansion of the Christian religion, to all corners of the earth, based on the word of God.

The New Testament text which El Greco took as his starting point is Acts of the Apostles 2: 1-4: “While the day of the Pentecost was running its course they were all together in one place, when suddenly there came from the sky a noise like that of a strong driving wind, which filled the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues like flames of fire, dispersed among them and resting on each one. And they were all filled with the holy spirit and began to talk in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them power of utterance.” With St Peter leading the way, the Apostles went forth into the polyglot city of Jerusalem and began to preach – “and at this sound the crowd gathered, all bewildered because each one heard his own language spoken.”

The fathers of the early church found in this story – as they did in so many passages in the New Testament – a salvific reversal of an earlier, Old Testament story, namely that of the Tower of Babel. When Babel collapsed, humanity was divided into a multitude of races speaking a multitude of differnet languages. The pentecostal gift of tongues, allowing the Apostles to preach God’s word to all men, held out the promise of a reunification of man, through conversion and baptism, within a single blessed Christian community.

El Greco squeezes the miracle into a tall, thin composition which emphasises the miraculous descent of the Holy Spirit, represented by the dove within a sunburst at the top of the picture. From it come emanations in the form of “tongues like flames of fire” that alight on the heads of the Apostles. Painting is by necessity a silent medium, but El Greco manages none the less to convey the “strong driving wind” of the biblical text in the windblown, brightly polychromatic draperies of his reeling and ecstatic figures. The artist places the Virgin, together with another of the “three Maries” (perhaps Mary the mother of James, or Mary Magdalen) at the centre of his composition. Many Counter-Reformation thinkers favoured a rather more inclusive reading of the Pentecost story than that favoured during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, when it was believed that the Holy Spirit had descended only to the immediate, male disciples of Jesus. This was based on a passage in the preceding narrative in Acts 1: 13-14, where it is stated that the Apostles “were constantly at prayer together, and with them a group of women, including Mary, the mother of Jesus.” The artist may have been encouraged to include these holy women in his depiction of Pentecost by the powerful influence of Dona Maria de Cordoba y Aragon, a famously pious Spanish noblewomen who poured much of her considerable fortune into Madrid’s Augustinian seminary – and who, in effect, paid for El Greco’s altarpiece.

The artist’s depiction of Pentecost also appears to have been strongly influenced by the mystical visions and meditations of Alonzo de Orozco, “the Blessed”, the original founder of the seminary for which the picture was intended. Orozco, who died less than decade before El Greco created the work, was a charismatic and mystically inclined thinker whose Confesiones – named in imitation of St Augustine’s famous record of his life – was one of the most influential and widely read religious texts produced in Counter-Reformation Spain. He experienced frequent visions of angels and even, in one passage of his book, gave thanks to God for saving him one night when he dreamed he had fallen from a precipice – a passage that shows he made no distinction between the world of dreams and the world of physical experience. In the words of the historian Richard Mann, “Alonso lived in a spiritual world in which the barriers between the earthly and the divine were broken down.”

El Greco paints that same spiritual world and in the Pentecost he finds what is perhaps, its most succinct expression. Visited by the miraculous flames of the holy Spirit, the Apostles themselves seem to turn flame-like, their bodies flickering and twisting and aspiring heavenwards. Turning to face the viewer, El Greco includes himself in the scene, as the second apostle from the right in the top row of faces. He seeks not to dpeict the miracle but somehow to incarnate it, through art. Shapes shimmer and dissolve, colours crackle like sacred lightning. Painting itself turns immaterial, not so much pigment on canvas as spirit made visible.