“Of course it does! And more people meditated on this painting than any other. I haven’t told you about one of Orozco’s habitual exercises, which was to spend hours contemplating an old crucifix very much like this one, which eventually went with him to his grave. It was on display for years on the high altar in the Church of San Felipe Neri, in Madrid. One day, while he was in one of his long meditations, the eyes on the crucifix opened and looked at him in a way that he never forgot. Many more visions followed that one, and they inspired him to create a Passion story even more real and more detailed than those of the Evangelists.”
“That sounds pretty daring. If Orozco was really a good church man, it seems strange that he would let himself get carried away by his visions to the extent of commissioning these paintings . . .”
“Let me remind you that he wasn’t the one who commissioned the paintings, but rather his mentor, María of Aragon, and her principal obsession was to make sure that his tomb, which lay beneath the seminary’s high altar, be adorned in a manner befitting his station and promoting his ultimate beatification.”
“It still seems risky to diverge from the Gospels during the time of the Inquisition.”
“They were subtle deviations, Javier, which not too many people noticed,” Fovel clarified. “Let’s submit the painting to two tests. The first has to do with how Jesus’s feet were nailed to the cross. All of El Greco’s paintings show the left foot nailed over the right foot—except for this one. And that’s actually how it appears in most depictions of the crucifixion by other artists. But in his writings, Orozco tells us that the Romans instead placed his right foot over his left, which according to him caused greater pain. He also went on to include another detail. When the Romans suspended Jesus on the cross, they made sure to stretch his body as much as possible to prevent his being able to arch his back and take in air, again in this way magnifying his agony and distress. Look at the powerful torrent of blood and water pouring out of the wound in his side. Orozco also wrote extensively on this. He believed that just one drop of that liquid would be enough to redeem us of our sins, which is why we see an angel collecting it, representing the good priest, remember? El Greco studied all these details meticulously and incorporated them into his painting.”
This far into our discussion, I had just one question left to put to Fovel. I was clear about what connected Doménikos Theotokópoulos to Montano’s sect, and his predilection for mystical questions explained his willingness to paint Orozco’s visions. While they were more orthodox and less prophetic that those of Savonarola, they, too, were the result of revelations. The same invisible source, in fact, that fed Hendrik Niclaes, Joachim of Fiore, and Amadeo of Portugal. But what I wanted to know was, why did El Greco paint these scenes the way he did? What drove him to give his figures that extraordinary texture, so exaggerated and so . . . impressionistic?
Fovel’s response to my question threatened to be one of his strangest yet. He steered clear of modern theories that suggested that El Greco might have suffered some kind of visual impairment, or episodes of madness; and he dismissed as stupid the ideas of Ricardo Jorge, who in 1912 called this room in the Prado a “rogue’s gallery,” with “nothing left out: horrific faces, imbecilic figures, the headless and the swollen-headed.”9
Then he proceeded to tell me about an old friend of his, the historian Elías Tormo y Monzo, who, years before, had come across a possible answer to my question.
“You may not like this,” Fovel warned, “but it’s the essential key to everything I’ve been showing you. In a series of conferences in the Madrid Athenaeum, Tormo y Monzo said the following:
I would go as far as to place El Greco in the company of the very few painters who have created beings quite different from the humans that we are . . . The product of El Greco’s palette are not men like us, nor titans like the Sybils and Prophets of the Sistine Chapel, nor sorcerers in a world of seduction, as painted by Correggio. They are animated by the potent breath of life, not to say life itself; I would say even that they are alive.10
This left me so bewildered that I didn’t dare reply. For the second time in our acquaintance, Fovel was referring to the inhabitants of paintings as living beings. Did he really believe that?
I did not have the courage then to ask him about the famous El Greco masterpiece entitled The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, which hangs in the Church of Santo Tomé in Toledo. We would most likely have talked about whether the twenty-one figures who present themselves to the deceased represented the major arcana cards of the Tarot, and he would surely have pointed out which of them was El Greco’s mentor, Benito Arias Montano. We might even have debated whether or not the painting embodied some kind of desire for reincarnation, as some critics have recently suggested.11 Or if the two keys in St. Peter’s hands were to open the doors of the material and spiritual worlds, those eternal opposites of the Cathars. But there just wasn’t time between my reticence and his sudden and familiar urge to disappear, which he did, unexpectedly, saying something that left me wondering.
“I should go, Javier. My time is drawing to a close. Good-bye.”