In 1905, Pablo Picasso visited the studio of Spanish painter Ignacio Zuloaga. He was so intrigued by what he saw there that he returned time and again over the next two years until he finally produced the piece that his trips had inspired.
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was the first Picasso that radically departed from a traditional style and set the stage for the creation of the Cubist movement.
But it wasn’t the Spanish artist’s work that had caught the budding Cubist’s eye. Zuloaga liked to surround himself with the art of his idols, and the white walls of his studio were covered “with canvases which he prizes above all else in the world, all saving his wife, his daughter Lucia and son Antonio,” according to a 1917 article in the Fine Arts Journal.
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There was a Goya and a Zurbarán and a Carreño. But most importantly, there were paintings by El Greco, whom Zuloaga considered “the God of painting.” And one among them stood out: The Vision of Saint John.
This painting as it currently stands—and as Picasso would have seen it—is just over seven-by-six feet and depicts St. John throwing his hands up in ecstasy as he watches a scene from the Book of Revelations play out: the opening of the Fifth Seal to free the martyrs and clothe them in white robes.
The painting was completed at the very end of El Greco’s life and embodies the modern style he became known for—a dark atmosphere; elongated, almost anguished, figures; and a play on space and proportion. But the canvas that currently exists doesn’t give the full picture of the masterpiece El Greco created.
Twenty-five years before Picasso set foot in Zuloaga’s studio, an art restorer working at the Prado hacked off nearly half of the painting’s height and as much as eight inches from the left side of the canvas.
While surely well intended, this tragedy of restoration has led to a deep loss. The Vision of Saint John is still spectacular and the fragment that exists today has a profound immediacy to it as St. John’s outstretched arms nearly brush the confines of the frame. But it’s hard to look at this piece without wondering: what are we not seeing?
Born Domenikos Theotokopoulos around 1541 in the capital city of Crete, which was then under the rule of Venice, El Greco spent the first half of his career wandering from art capital to art capital, learning his craft, developing his own style, and trying to find a community in which he fit.
He traveled from Crete to Venice to Rome to Madrid before he finally rolled into Toledo in 1577 and decided to stick around. Domenikos first picked up the nickname “Il Greco”—the Greek—in Italy (though he would sign his paintings with his full Greek name for the rest of his life), but it was in Spain, as El Greco, that he established his reputation and built his career.
Toledo was a rather conservative town and it is somewhat paradoxical that El Greco flourished there, as Jason Farago points out in a 2014 piece in The Guardian. While the devout artist found plenty of work painting religious scenes, his aesthetic blossomed in Toledo into a distinctive, influential style that was far from traditional.
“The potency of these paintings is amazing,” the painter Lisa Yuskavage told The New York Times in 2003. “They are awkward in a really interesting way. He's so clear, yet it’s up to us to figure out whether something was intentional or a mistake.”
It was the tortured intensity of his religious scenes that led to a common storyline in the centuries following his death portraying El Greco as something of a madman. But that was far from the case.
“He was no mystic, no madman and definitely no hermit,” Farago writes. “On the contrary, he ran a well-staffed studio…He had a huge ego: in Rome, he proposed painting over the Sistine Chapel ceiling. And he was constantly in debt thanks to his lavish home and a taste for luxury that led him to swan around Toledo in regal velvets.”
In November 1608, El Greco’s longtime patron Pedro Salazar de Mendoza commissioned him to create a series of three altarpieces for the church of the Hospital of Saint John the Baptist in the northern reaches of Toledo, which Mendoza had recently taken over as administrator.
The painter conceived of three scenes: the Baptism of Christ was intended to adorn the high altar, the Annunciation was to be on the left side, and The Vision of Saint John (often also referred to as the Opening of the Fifth Seal) was destined for the altarpiece on the right. It was the perfect thematic series for its intended home.
“The saving of souls, as well as care for the sick, the dispossessed, and the dying, was central to the mission of the hospital, where patients were required to confess before seeing a doctor and were expected to receive Holy Communion at least once a week,” Walter Liedtke wrote in the Metropolitan Museum Journal in 2015.
The hospital series would see El Greco through the end of his own days. In April 1614, the painter died and is believed to have left only The Vision complete. (His son would finish the other two works.) It was a fitting piece on which to end an extraordinary life and legacy. As Liedtke wrote, “In conception and execution, this painting is one of El Greco’s most extraordinary works and a quintessential example of his late expressionist style.”
Today, El Greco is considered one of the premier artists of his time. He developed a wholly original style that would go on to influence countless artists and art movements. Cezanne, Picasso, and Pollock, Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism all owe a debt to the 17th-century Greek original.
But in the years following his death, El Greco fell into obscurity—maybe his masterpieces were just a little too weird for a new generation to process. In those years, The Vision of Saint John began to change hands, even landing for a time in the possession of the Prime Minister of Spain.
As the years ticked toward the end of the 19th century, and as the dawn of the modern movement began to take hold, El Greco’s reputation began to rise. As this was happening, Zuloaga bought the Vision for a mere 1,000 pesetas sometime between 1890 and 1905. He cherished the work of one of his greatest art idols, but he wasn’t early enough to save it from the knife.
It is unknown the exact reasons that the restoration “expert” decided to crop the El Greco in 1880. Perhaps there was damage to the canvas or he deemed the top portion of the painting not fully complete. Whatever the reason now lost to time, one man decided the piece needed an improvement and—snip—he excised a large portion of the masterpiece and tossed it in the trash.
Without any evidence as to what was lost, there has been some disagreement as to the contents of the discarded half of the canvas. Some think it depicted Divine Love, others that it could have been an altar in the sky bedecked by clouds and angels.
Whatever it is that Saint John is reaching towards with such ecstatic torment we will never know. While countless disasters—clumsy museum patrons, natural disaster, the terrible whims of tyrants—have spelled doom for masterpieces over the years, it is heartbreaking that the misguided intentions of an art professional are the cause of The Vision’s second-act anguish.
But this loss, while tragic, has in no way stymied the impact or importance of El Greco’s The Vision of Saint John. Just ask Picasso.
