The Expolio is in the cathedral; it belongs to the first period, before El Greco had shaken off Italian influences.  The colouring is rather cold.  The St. Maurice in the chapter hall of the Escorial is a long step toward a new method of expression. (A replica is in Bucharest.) The Ascension altar piece, formerly in Santo Domingo, now hangs in the Art Institute, Chicago.  At Toledo there are about eighty pieces of the master, not including his sculpture, retablos; like Tintoretto, he was accustomed to make little models in clay or wax for the figures in his pictures.  His last manner is best exemplified in the Divine Love and Profane Love, belonging to Senor Zuloaga, in The Adoration of the Shepherds, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Assumption at the Church of St. Vicente, Toledo.  His chalky whites, poisonous greens, violet shadows, discordant passages of lighting are, as Arthur Symons puts it:  Sharp and dim, gray and green, the colour of Toledo.  Greco composed his palette with white vermilion, lake, yellow ochre, ivory black.  Senor Beruete says that “he generally laid on an impasto for his flesh, put on in little touches, and then added a few definite strokes with the brush which, though accentuated, are very delicate...  The gradations of the values is in itself instructive.”

His human forms became more elongated as he aged; this applies only to his males; his women are of sweetness compounded and graceful in contour.  Some a mere arabesque, or living flames; some sinister and fantastic; from the sublime to the silly is with Greco not a wide stride.  But in all his surging, writhing sea of wraiths, saints, kings, damned souls and blest, a cerebral grip is manifest.  He knew a hawk from a handsaw despite his temperament of a mystic.  “He who carries his own most intimate emotions to their highest point becomes the first in a file of a long series of men”; but, adds Mr. Ellis:  “To be a leader of men one must turn one’s back on men.”  El Greco, like Charles Baudelaire, cultivated his hysteria.  He developed his individuality to the border line across which looms madness.  The transmogrification of his temperament after living in Toledo was profound.  Born Greek, in art a Venetian, the atmosphere of the Castilian plain changed the colour of his soul.  In him there was material enough for both a Savonarola or a Torquemada—­his piety was at once iconoclastic and fanatical.  And his restlessness, his ceaseless experiments, his absolute discoveries of new tonalities, his sense of mystic grandeur—­why here you have, if you will, a Berlioz of paint, a man of cold ardours, hot ecstasies, visions apocalyptic, with a brain like a gloomy cathedral in which the Tuba Mirum is sonorously chanted.  But Greco is on the side of the angels; Berlioz, like Goya, too often joined in the infernal antiphonies of Satan Mekatrig.  And Greco is as dramatic as either.