View and Plan of Toledo

View and Plan of Toledo is one of El Greco's most unusual canvases because it combines two ways of depicting the city in a single picture: a panoramic view of Toledo, with its fields and overcast sky, and an urban plan that a young man displays in the lower right, with numbered buildings and an explanatory inscription. The work is dated to around 1610, in the final years of the painter's stay in the city, and it is most likely that it was commissioned by Pedro Salazar de Mendoza, administrator of the Tavera Hospital, a collector of maps and city views. The composition also carries symbolic meaning. On the left, a reclining figure of the river Tagus, holding a cornucopia and a vessel of water, evokes the fertility of the land and the city's ancient roots. At the centre, the Tavera Hospital floats on a cloud, a device El Greco also used in other landscapes to keep the view of the Bisagra Gate clear, and above, the Virgin descends to hand a chasuble to Saint Ildefonsus. This tension between the sacred and the almost surveying precision of the map gives the painting a position between landscape and narrative religious scene. The authorship of the plan has been debated. Some scholars proposed that El Greco's son Jorge Manuel drew it, given its detail, but his age at the time makes that unlikely. Others hold that El Greco made the plan himself from his own measurements, while a further hypothesis links it to an updated copy of the map by Alonso de Santa Cruz, supported by topographic notes found on the back of pages of the Escorial atlas. In any case, the plan would be among the oldest known maps of Toledo. The painting also shows signs of being unfinished: the reddish ground shows through the clouds, and the figure of the young man is only sketchily resolved, which suggests El Greco never completed it. It is recorded in the inventory of his possessions in 1614 and passed through the Hospital de Santiago, the convent of San Pedro Mártir and the monastery of San Juan de los Reyes before reaching the Museo del Greco in 1910.

Painter

El Greco

Date

1610

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

132 × 228 cm

Museum

El Greco Museum, Toledo

Genre

cityscape

Depicts

Toledo

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