Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy is the first book-length examination of the early career of one of the early modern period’s most notoriously misunderstood figures. Born around 1541, Domenikos Theotokopoulos began his career as an icon painter on the island of Crete. He is best known, under the name “El Greco,” for the works he created while in Spain, paintings that have provoked both rapt admiration and scornful disapproval since his death in 1614. But the nearly ten years he spent in Venice and Rome, from 1567 to 1576, have remained underexplored until now. Andrew Casper’s examination of this period allows us to gain a proper understanding of El Greco’s entire career and reveals much about the tumultuous environment for religious painting after the Council of Trent. Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy is a new book in the Art History Publication Initiative (AHPI), a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Thanks to the AHPI grant, this book will be available in popular e-book formats.

Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy is the first book-length examination of the early career of one of the early modern period’s most notoriously misunderstood figures. Born around 1541, Domenikos Theotokopoulos began his career as an icon painter on the island of Crete. He is best known, under the name “El Greco,” for the works he created while in Spain, paintings that have provoked both rapt admiration and scornful disapproval since his death in 1614. But the nearly ten years he spent in Venice and Rome, from 1567 to 1576, have remained underexplored until now. Andrew Casper’s examination of this period allows us to gain a proper understanding of El Greco’s entire career and reveals much about the tumultuous environment for religious painting after the Council of Trent. Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy is a new book in the Art History Publication Initiative (AHPI), a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Thanks to the AHPI grant, this book will be available in popular e-book formats.

The Pictorial Art of El Greco: Transmaterialities, Temporalities, and Media investigates El Greco's pictorial art as foundational to the globalising trends manifested in the visual culture of early modernity. It also exposes the figurative, semantic, and allegorical senses that El Greco created to challenge an Italian Renaissance-centered discourse. Even though he was guided by the unprecedented burgeoning of devotional art in the post-Tridentine decades and by the expressive possibilities of earlier religious artifacts, especially those inherited from the apostolic past, the author demonstrates that El Greco forged his own independent trajectory. While his paintings have been studied in relation to the Italian and Spanish school traditions, his pictorial art in a global Mediterranean context continues to receive scant attention. Taking a global perspective as its focus, the book sheds new light on El Greco's highly original contribution to early Mediterranean and multi-institutional configurations of the Christian faith in Byzantium, Venice, Rome, Toledo, and Madrid.

A visually stunning examination of El Greco’s work that considers the artist’s constant reinvention and professional drive Renowned for a singular artistic vision, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, known as El Greco (1541–1614), developed his distinctive painting style as he assiduously pursued professional success. This fresh and engaging survey of El Greco’s work explores varied aspects of the artist’s career—his aesthetic education in Italy, the mixed reception of his mature works in Spain, his uncompromising approach to business, and the baroque logistics of his Toledo workshop—and reveals the depth of El Greco’s astounding ambition. The impressive volume focuses in particular on his 1577–79 altarpiece paintings for the Church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo—among them the magnificent Assumption of the Virgin—which heralded the artist’s arrival in Spain after productive periods of formation and re-formation in Crete, Venice, and Rome. Lavishly illustrated and clothbound with gilded edges, this publication features reproductions and scholarly discussions of more than 60 works ranging from large-scale canvases to intimate panels, with essays that elucidate the motives and meanings behind the artist’s constantly changing and inventive approach.

Looks at the full range of the sixteenth century artist's work in painting and sculpture, from his Byzantine icons to his late altarpieces.

Underlying the religious art of the Renaissance is a tension between the needs of the Church and the impulse to create great works. This beautifully illustrated book presents sacred images from the 15th and 16th centuries, leading up to two pivotal events in 1563. The Council of Trent, which signified the beginning of the Counter-Reformation, defined requirements that curtailed the freedom of painters and patrons in creating art for churches, while the founding of the Accademia del Desegno in Florence symbolically acknowledged that artists had achieved the status of creators not craftsmen. The author takes a fresh look at some of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance not typically associated with sacred imagery and shows how they navigated their way through the paradox of 'limited freedom' to forge a new kind of religious art. -- from Book Jacket

Winner of the 2022 Roland H. Bainton Book Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society & Conference In 1578, a fourteen-foot linen sheet bearing the faint bloodstained imprint of a human corpse was presented to tens of thousands of worshippers in Turin, Italy, as one of the original shrouds used to prepare Jesus Christ’s body for entombment. From that year into the next century, the Shroud of Turin emerged as Christianity’s preeminent religious artifact. In an unprecedented new look, Andrew R. Casper sheds new light on one of the world’s most famous and controversial religious objects. Since the early twentieth century, scores of scientists and forensic investigators have attributed the Shroud’s mysterious images to painterly, natural, or even supernatural forces. Casper, however, shows that this modern opposition of artifice and authenticity does not align with the cloth’s historical conception as an object of religious devotion. Examining the period of the Shroud’s most enthusiastic following, from the late 1500s through the 1600s, he reveals how it came to be considered an artful relic—a divine painting attributed to God’s artistry that contains traces of Christ’s body. Through probing analyses of materials created to perpetuate the Shroud’s cult following—including devotional, historical, and theological treatises as well as printed and painted reproductions—Casper uncovers historicized connections to late Renaissance and Baroque artistic cultures that frame an understanding of the Shroud’s bloodied corporeal impressions as an alloy of material authenticity and divine artifice. This groundbreaking book introduces rich, new material about the Shroud’s emergence as a sacred artifact. It will appeal to art historians specializing in religious and material studies, historians of religion, and to general readers interested in the Shroud of Turin.

The Origins of El Greco focuses on the evolution of the multifaceted relationship of Cretan painters with Western art during this rich period. The icon painters in the workshops on Crete in the 15th and 16th centuries-the setting in which El Greco was trained-were renowned for their skill in painting impeccable panels not only in the traditional Byzantine manner but also in a style inspired by Western models. The Origins of El Greco presents an extraordinary group of 15th and 16th century paintings, including works by El Greco. The color-illustrated catalogue features detailed descriptions of all 46 masterpieces included in the exhibition, some of them published for the first time, as well as 3 informative essays: Anastasia Drandaki, Curator, Byzantine Collection, Benaki Museum, Athens writes on "Between Byzantium and Venice: Icon Painting in Venetian Crete in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries", Olga Gratziou, Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology, University of Crete writes on "Cretan Architecture and Sculpture in the Venetian Period" and Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Professor Emeritus in Art History, University of Crete, and Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies, writes on "Early and Late El Greco".

Exploring all the available sources, this study, which until now was only available in Greek, presents us with an account of El Greco's life up to the time he left Crete for Italy in 1567 at the age of twenty-six, already an accomplished professional painter. Nikolaos Panagiotakes provides a thorough assessment of earlier research on Crete of the 16th century then goes on to present new conclusions on the life of El Greco deriving from the author's firsthand reading of Venetian archive material, including questions relating to his birthplace, family, name, religious affiliation, and apprenticeship as a painter. The evidence indicates that El Greco was an established professional 'master painter' earlier than had previously been thought and also that he had a family before leaving Crete, thus perhaps explaining why he did not later marry Jerónima de las Cuevas, with whom he had a son in Toledo. This work marks a valuable contribution to El Greco scholarship, particularly in its thoroughly substantiated assessment of the evidence regarding the formative years in the life of El Greco, one of the greatest of all European artists.