El Greco

He signed his paintings in Greek letters, Doménikos Theotokópoulos, all his life, even after Spain nicknamed him El Greco, the Greek. He was born on Crete in 1541 and trained in the flat, gold Byzantine manner of icon painting, then sailed to Venice and Rome to learn the oil technique of the Italian Renaissance. Around 1577 he settled in Toledo, the old religious capital of Spain, and never left.

He arrived hoping for royal work. King Philip II gave him one commission for the palace-monastery of El Escorial, a martyrdom scene finished around 1582, and disliked it enough to hang it out of the way and hire someone else. That closed the court to him. It also freed him, and Toledo's churches and priests kept him busy for the rest of his life with the burning, stretched, candle-lit saints that suited a city at the heart of the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church's push back against Protestantism.

For roughly 300 years after his death in 1614 he was treated as an eccentric, his elongated figures dismissed as a defect of eyesight or taste. Then painters at the start of the 20th century, Cézanne and the young Picasso among them, found in those distortions something deliberate and modern. Picasso studied El Greco's work closely in the years he was inventing Cubism.