El Greco's Most Explicit Paintings | BBC Timestamp

The Church justified Spain's conquests on the grounds that they helped spread the Christian message. But while the Inquisition ruthlessly defended the purity of the Catholic faith, the exchange of ideas and influences was unstoppable. 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. Here in Toledo, the spiritual hearts of the Spanish Church cultures met and mixed, and in doing so, some of the very greatest European art of all time was created. It was the work of a visionary, a man whose style and intensity was centuries ahead of its time. He'd been born in Crete as Dominikos Theotokopoulos, but he was known here in Spain as El Greco, the Greek. El Greco brought to Spain the traditions of Greek Orthodox art, as well as the strange distortions of Italian mannerism. But his great achievement was combining those influences in a way that expressed the fanatical intensity of the religious culture of 16th century Toledo. In 1596, he began work on a dramatic view of the city. It's starkly lit beneath a stormy sky, a vision of a holy citadel where God's authority was made manifest through 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. This is the sacristy where the priests put on their robes before performing Mass. So it's fitting that El Greco chose as his subject the disrobing of Christ. What we see is the moment just before Christ's clothes 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. Now there's no blood in this painting, but we are symbolically reminded of the violence that's 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 Christ's blood sacrifice explicit when he painted his battered, distorted body hanging on the cross. The bloodstains trailing down towards a view not of the Holy Land, but of Toledo, the beating heart of the Spanish Empire. But Spain's conquests in the New World were not the norm in the 16th century. They were, in a sense, the exception. When European explorers first reached the shores of more powerful empires like India and China, they initially found themselves marginal players. In Japan, they encountered a feudal society too robust to be conquered. Although the details are vague, it's believed that the very first Europeans to reach Japan arrived by accident. They were a group of Portuguese merchants on board a Chinese ship that was driven ashore by a storm around the year 1543. The Japanese were fascinated by these new arrivals, who they regarded as little more than exotic novelties. But within just a few years, the Portuguese began to arrive in these waters in their own ships. And from the very beginning, it was obvious to them that the Japanese were not a people who they could treat the way the Spanish had treated the Aztecs. Japan was extremely wealthy. She had an enormous population, a highly sophisticated culture, and militarily, she was a formidable power. This was not a country in which Europeans could even dream of being conquistadors. So the Portuguese instead became Japan's trading partners.