I don’t think I ever felt as much doubt in my times at the Prado as I did that afternoon. My instinct urged me to remember every detail that I’d learned about the paintings we’d just discussed, but my head felt ready to explode, so the effort was useless.
Dragged along by an increasingly harried Doctor Fovel, in no time at all I found myself whisked from the Bosch gallery to the gallery upstairs that housed the works of El Greco. At first, I wasn’t sure where he was taking me, but when I saw him quicken his pace down the corridor leading to the collection of Doménikos Theotokópoulos’s exaggeratedly elongated figures, a strange unease came over me. If this was where we were headed, the progression of my learning was going to take a profound leap, unless Fovel had uncovered some subtle connection that linked Flemish painters to this exotic Greek who had settled in Toledo and had always been known for following his own path.
Our destination turned out to be not one gallery but three rooms in a row in the Eastern Wing of the museum. As we approached the doors of this sanctuary, just a stone’s throw from Velázquez’s Maids of Honor and The Triumph of Bacchus, I noticed that the Master hesitated, cautiously looking in both directions before entering, without a word.
Fovel stopped in front of El Greco’s brooding Pentecost, and, as if unsure about whether to warn me about what lay ahead, muttered another “Ready?” that just unsettled me more.
I nodded uneasily.
“Javier, I’m afraid that the painting that illustrates what I’m about to tell you is not here, but hangs in the monastery at El Escorial. You really should go and see it.”
“Is it an El Greco?” I asked naïvely, noticing his Resurrection visible at the end of the galleries.
“It is indeed. But it’s not just any El Greco, Javier. It’s a painting that many critics think proves that this genius among geniuses admired and imitated the contemplative paintings of Bosch and Brueghel, like the ones I’ve just shown you.
“But, Doctor, you’ve never paid much attention to the critics,” I pointed out.
“That’s true,” he agreed. “However, the painting I want to talk about is for me primarily proof of something much more important. Something which, if we didn’t have it, would leave us with an incomplete and mistaken understanding of the works that surround us here, and above all, the piece of evidence that shows that Doménikos Theotokópoulos—known in Philip’s court as El Greco—was no less than a distinguished member of the apocalyptic fraternity of the Familia Caritatis. Another artist for whom paintings served principally as repositories of a revolutionary credo that prophesied the arrival of a new humanity and of direct communication with the invisible. Let’s not forget—El Greco was a mystic before he was ever a painter.”
“Which painting do you mean, Doctor?” I asked, my curiosity now stimulated by this revelation.