El Greco the other seventy), equal in value to a work by Titian or Tintoretto of that period. Therefore, it seems that El Greco traveled to Venice sometime after 27 December 1566. In one of his last articles, Wethey reassessed his previous estimations and accepted that El Greco left Crete in 1567. According to other archival material—drawings El Greco sent to a Cretan cartographer—he was in Venice by 1568. g. Mancini reports that El Greco said to the Pope that if the whole work was demolished he himself would do it in a decent manner and with seemliness. h. Toledo must have
Art of El Greco "odd". The phrase "sunk in eccentricity", often encountered in such texts, in time became his "madness". With the arrival of Romantic sentiments, El Greco's works were examined anew. To French writer Théophile Gautier, El Greco was the precursor of the European Romantic movement in all its craving for the strange and the extreme. French Romantic writers praised his work for the same "extravagance" and "madness" which had disturbed 18th century commentators. During the operation of the Spanish Museum in Paris, El Greco was admired as the ideal romantic hero and all the romantic stereotypes (the gifted, the misunderstood, the marginal,