There was no society where the victim or victor that emerged from the age of exploration remained unchanged. Spain too was transformed. Vast amounts of silver and gold seized from the New World made her the richest nation in Europe. The brutality of the conquests were justified, it was argued, because they spread Christianity. Although the purity of Spain’s Catholic faith was ruthlessly defended by the Inquisition, the exchange of ideas and culture was unstoppable.
However, Spain’s aggressive exporting of her culture and her faith to other parts of the world didn’t render her immune to the inflow of cultural influences from abroad. In Toledo, the spiritual heart of the Spanish church, cultures met and mixed and, in doing so, some of the very greatest European art of all time was created. Take, for example, the work of a visionary, a man whose style and intensity was centuries ahead of its time. Born in Crete as Doménikos Theotokópoulos, he was known in Spain as El Greco, the Greek. El Greco used the artistic traditions of Greek orthodoxy, as well as the strange distortions of Italian mannerism, and his great achievement was combining those influences in a way that expressed the fanatical intensity of the religious culture of sixteenth-century Toledo. In 1596 he began work on a dramatic view of the city. It is starkly lit beneath a stormy sky, a vision of a holy citadel where God’s authority was made manifest to the Spanish church. Rising up from the skyline is the spire of Toledo cathedral. It was for this cathedral that El Greco painted one of his greatest masterpieces.
El Greco’s painting still hangs in the space for which it was created, the cathedral sacristy where the priests put on their robes before performing mass, so it is fitting that El Greco chose as his subject the disrobing of Christ. What we see is the moment Christ’s cloths are ripped from his body before the crucifixion. No other artist more vividly captured Catholic Spain’s intense fascination with the brutal horror of Christ’s sacrifice. While there is no blood in this painting, we are symbolically reminded of the violence that is to be done to the body of Christ through the deep, intense red of the robe. It reminds us that the crucifixion was a blood sacrifice, a strange echo of the human sacrifices that were at the heart of the religion of the people who Spain had conquered, the Aztecs. El Greco made that sacrifice explicit when he painted Christ’s battered, distorted body hanging on the cross, his blood trickling down towards not a view of the Holy Land, but of Toledo, the beating heart of the Spanish empire.
17. In stark colours and with exaggerated proportions, El Greco places Christ, isolated and tormented, against a storm-riven sky. In the background stands Toledo where Greco spent forty years of his life.
18. One of only two surviving landscapes by El Greco, his View of Toledo reorders and reimagines the city as a divine Christian citadel and hints at the fervent religious atmosphere that pervaded the city in the early seventeenth century.
But Spain’s conquests in the New World were not the norm in the sixteenth century. They were, in a sense, the exception. When European explorers reached the shores of more powerful empires like India and China, they found themselves marginal players and in Japan they encountered a feudal society too robust to be conquered.
