Laocoön (El Greco) turmoil. The dark, sinister rocks of the foreground add to the intense emotional atmosphere. El Greco places the classical subject against a gloomy view of Toledo. El Greco’s use of Toledo as the backdrop for his depiction of Laocoön’s death may be based on local folklore that the people of Toledo descended from the Trojans. In the painting, the Trojan horse moves towards the city, a reminder of Laocoön’s failed attempt to convince his countrymen of the trap. El Greco portrays the city Toledo as a world of suffering, using color to create a sense of doom. The high horizon
Posthumous fame of El Greco Manet. The first painter who appears to have noticed the structural code in the morphology of the mature El Greco was Paul Cézanne, one of the forerunners of cubism. Maurice Denis, a deep admirer of Cézanne, was the first one to connect El Greco with Cézanne; he had the idea of connecting the early period of Cézanne to El Greco. In an article of his in 1907 Denis, when he is referring to El Greco, he does not omit any of the commonplaces which have been formulated about him, but, on the other hand, he establishes a new, dynamic relationship