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
Posthumous fame of El Greco as a "mad painter" and, therefore, his "maddest" paintings were not admired but considered to be historical documents proving his "madness". During the operation of the Spanish Museum, El Greco became the ideal romantic hero, the gifted, the misunderstood, the marginal, the one who lost his reason because of the scorn of his contemporaries. The critics of "Courrier Français" and "La Presse" would retain the image of El Greco as a "mad painter". His "maddest" paintings were not admired but considered to be historical documents proving his "madness". In 1867, Paul Lefort, an expert on Spanish painting, dedicated an eight-page