Dubiously, I asked, “Is this simply your opinion, Doctor, or have you researched it?”
Fovel smiled. “I’ve studied this, Javier, of course. Sadly, these issues are not widely known about, as you might imagine. There aren’t many universities where you can study these things. I remember one particular essay that was quite controversial by Lynda Harris, a professor of art at London University. She proposed the idea that the Adamites who commissioned The Garden of Earthly Delights were descended from Cathar survivors.3 According to her, the art from the time before the Cathar massacre in 1244 provided their one hope for escaping the darkness of the material world they felt trapped in. For them, meditating before the right painting would remind them of that part of reality that couldn’t be touched or measured. And that we all possess a spiritual dimension that we can cultivate in order to attain what the Greeks called Theoretikos: the ability to see the transcendent world.”
“Do you think El Greco believed in this?” I asked him, glancing at the paintings all around us.
“Whether he did or didn’t is itself the subject of some sharp debate among specialists. What seems indisputable is that his work overall radiates the sort of supernatural quality much favored by the Familists. Some of his most important biographers, like Paul Lefort or Manuel Cossío, both quite oblivious to Familist doctrine, have no trouble accepting that El Greco sought a mystical union with God through his art. I myself am convinced that some of these masterpieces of his come directly from visions he had.”
“So you’re saying El Greco was a mystic.”
Fovel smiled ironically. “He’s really the only one who could tell you that, Javier. But it’s only fair to warn you that the true mystic keeps his visions to himself. So if he was, he took care to keep it quiet. However, we do know without doubt that he used the work of other mediums and visionaries to help him create his greatest works.”
“Like who, Doctor?” I asked.
“Would you like a name?” he asked, archly.
“Of course!”
“Very well. How about Alonso de Orozco?”
I shrugged. For a moment I thought Fovel was going to make one of his great leaps, connecting El Greco with St. Teresa of Ávila, for example.
“You don’t know who he was?”
I shook my head regretfully.
“Don’t worry,” he said, glossing over my ignorance, “hardly anyone remembers him nowadays. But believe me, he was one of the most popular religious figures of the sixteenth century. An Augustinian as well. He was so popular that when he died, he was proposed as a possible patron saint of Madrid, to replace St. Isidore.”
“Was he a saint?”
“Beatified,”4 Fovel corrected me. “He was preacher to both Charles V and Philip II, and the confessor and friend of Gaspar de Quiroga, the all-powerful archbishop of Toledo.”
“How did he know El Greco?” I asked.
“Well, he was responsible for commissioning a number of pieces from El Greco for the altarpiece of the Seminary of the Incarnation in Madrid.”
“Where’s that located?”
“It was originally built near the Royal Palace, but the French destroyed it during the Peninsular War, El Greco’s pieces were scattered, and we lost the original plan for their positions on the altar. They built the senate building on the site afterward. But the point is that, when Alonso de Orozco commissioned the altarpiece work from El Greco, he was already well known around Madrid for his ecstasies and supernatural visions.”
“Let me guess—another prophet!”
“Well, more of a theologian, though his life seemed to lend itself to the mystical. According to Orozco, while his mother was pregnant with him, a voice—‘very soft, like a woman’s voice’5—spoke to her in her dreams and told her not only that she would have a boy, but also that she should name him Alonso.
“Years later, when he was already prior of the Augustinian monastery in Seville, a similar thing happened to him. The Virgin appeared to him in the middle of a dream, and gave him an explicit order. ‘Write!’ she said. So of course Orozco obeyed, and wrote dutifully to the end of his days, publishing thirty-five books and establishing friendships with such notable writers of the day as Lope de Vega and Quevedo, thereby creating that narrowest of paths between faith and reason.”
“What do you mean, Doctor?”
“Simply that he was a respected man as well as an intellectual, and word quickly spread that his sermons performed miracles, and could cure illness and even raise the dead. However, as far as we know, there were only two occasions when he showed any gift for clairvoyance. The first was on the night that the invincible Armada was sunk in the English Channel, during which Blessed Alonso passed the time praying and sighing, ‘Oh, Lord! That Channel!’ The second event occurred some time before his death, when he predicted that he would surrender his soul to God on September 19, 1591, at midday, which in fact he did.”
“Knowing that, it doesn’t surprise me that El Greco would want to paint his visions.” I noted.
“Actually, Javier, it was María of Aragon, who was then a lady-in-waiting to Philip II’s last wife, who persuaded El Greco to do the paintings, not Orozco. She was an enthusiastic supporter of Orozco, who died five years before the painter began his work. Orozco and María had founded the seminary together, but the plan for the work was based on his visions.”
“Does that mean that she was the one who directed El Greco?”
“Exactly. Two of the paintings from that lost altarpiece are here in this gallery, The Annunciation and The Crucifixion. Take a good look, Javier. They’re the same size, and there almost certainly were two other smaller panels that went with them—The Adoration of the Shepherds and The Baptism of Christ, which, sadly, are not in the Prado. What all four of these panels have in common is the presence of angels, which is not a small detail, since Orozco believed that priests should try to emulate angels. After all, it was for them that the seminary altarpiece was intended, not for whatever faithful happened to be in attendance. Based on this, neither The Resurrection nor Pentecost were thought to be part of María of Aragon’s altarpiece, since neither contained angels.”
“But that’s what it says on this card,” I said referring to the museum’s description ascribing the two works to the altarpiece.
“It makes no difference what that says,” Fovel retorted. “I happen to agree with the historian Dr. Richard Mann,6 who recently made public his thesis that, hidden behind the seminary paintings is a mystical program designed to work closely with Alonso de Orozco’s visions.
“Take another close look at The Annunciation. You see how El Greco has removed any physical reference to the room in which we see Mary? Alonso de Orozco wrote a fair amount about this event, and is quite clear that at the moment when the Archangel Gabriel planted the divine seed in Mary, all the furniture in the room faded away, and at that instant, Gabriel crossed his arms over his chest, enchanted by Mary’s meekness. That is what we’re being shown here!”
I turned to look at the painting. I had to take a few steps back in order to get the full splendor of the work, and even at that distance, it was unsettling to see such a young-looking Mary delivered to the will of her visitor. There was something hallucinatory about the scene. The colors, the tall columns of cherubim up against a leaden sky, even the way Gabriel’s form was twisted—all gave a strong feeling of the unreal, almost as if they were melting before our eyes.
Fovel then began complaining about the Prado’s decision to rename this painting from the original The Incarnation to The Annunciation, claiming, “they’re not the same!” He explained the subtle differences between the two. In The Incarnation, Mary is already pregnant with the Son of God, while in The Annunciation, she is being told that she is going to be pregnant. Thus The Annunciation would have come before The Incarnation. He said that Orozco was always more interested in the notion of incarnation, feeling that it served better in the meditation upon two critical aspects of priestly li
fe: the vow of chastity and transubstantiation, which is the literal conversion of the Host into the body and blood of Christ during Mass, in the same way that the Word takes form in the Virgin’s womb.
El Greco, The Incarnation (ca. 1597–1600). The Prado Museum, Madrid.
Fovel went on. “It would have been more usual for El Greco to have painted this Incarnation—because after all that is what this painting is about—showing Gabriel’s arm extended toward Mary, as in so many other representations of this moment. Moreover, that is how he appears in an Annunciation of El Greco’s which is in another gallery here.7 But Orozco was clear in his writings that this pose of pulling back in surprise corresponds to the moment when Mary becomes a mother. And Doménikos captures it exactly.”
My mind started to whirl. How many Annunciations had I seen where the angel had his arms crossed? There was one almost directly beneath our feet, on the floor below, perhaps the most famous one in the museum—Fra Angelico’s Annunciation. If the Master was right, Alonso de Orozco would certainly have changed the title to The Incarnation, since both the Virgin and the Angel in the painting have their arms crossed over their chests.
“Excuse me for being devil’s advocate for a second,” I said, “but is that all? Is that the entire basis for the link? The whole Orozco–El Greco connection is built on crossed arms?”
“Not at all!” cried Fovel, in protest. “There’s another very Orozco-esque detail that shines a light on the question of what the source was for these images. Look between Mary and Gabriel. You see what that is? It’s the burning bush that spoke to Moses during the Exodus8 and which reappeared in Mary’s room at the moment of the Incarnation, according to Orozco. Nowhere else in the whole history of art is the bush depicted next to Mary. It’s very affecting to see it here.”
“What about The Crucifixion?” I asked him, turning to look at the powerful nocturnal depiction of the execution of our Lord. “Does this one also bear the mark of one of Orozco’s visions?”
El Greco, The Crucifixion (ca. 1597–1600). The Prado Museum, Madrid.
“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.”
What could he have meant by that?
16
* * *
CHECKMATE TO THE MASTER
I returned to the Chaminade Residence Hall at around nine-thirty that night, feeling more preoccupied than usual. Toni’s lively eyes caught mine as soon as she saw me passing in front of the window of her receptionist’s booth. She called out to me and stopped me in my tracks.
“What the heck have you got yourself mixed up in, Javi? I’ve been trying to find you all day!” she complained, waving a small wad of paper at me. “Everyone’s looking for you! This one guy has called five times! He’s been leaving messages since three!”
She handed me what turned out to be a bunch of phone message sheets. “He says it’s very urgent,” she insisted. “And that you should call as soon as you
can. So do it, okay?”
“Okay, okay,” I said, taking the notes reluctantly.
“And don’t be so hard on Marina, okay, Javi?”
Seeing Toni’s huge smile as she said this made me blush.
“What? D-did she call?”
“Twice,” she nodded. “But you should still call that guy first. It sounds more important.”
At first, I couldn’t figure out who it was who had called. There was an unfamiliar name and number, written out repeatedly in the unmistakable scrawls of both Toni and the receptionist from the previous shift.
“Toni, who’s Juan Luis Castresana?”
“Oh, right . . .” Toni lifted her gaze from the small black-and-white TV she had in her cubicle, which had the news on. “He said something about El Escorial. That you would know who he was.”
“El Escorial?” Immediately I had it. Padre Juan Luis! Of course! The librarian!
Without even thanking Toni, I raced to the pay phone in the corner and dialed the number she’d written down. I pushed my last coin into the slot and waited. It picked up after one ring, and a flat voice informed me that I had reached the student residence at the Augustinian fathers of San Lorenzo de El Escorial. I gave her Juan Luis’s name.
“Father Castresana? One moment please, I’ll put you through.” And so, after a few more clicks and pauses, his unmistakable voice thundered in my ear.
“Javier! Thank God you called.”
“Hello, Father. Has something happened?” I asked him as tactfully as I could. His voice sounded agitated. “Are you all right? I just got your messages.”
“Fine, fine . . .” he replied somewhat irritably. “It’s not easy to get hold of you.”
“I’ve been out all day.” I told him. “I just got back now from the Prado. I’m sorry I didn’t get your messages earlier—”
The Master of the Prado Page 21
