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
El Greco fallacy El Greco fallacy The El Greco fallacy is typically a perceptive fallacy, where it is assumed that particular perceptual abnormalities will influence interactions with the world of a similar nature. It is named after an erroneous explanation for the vertically distorted painting style of El Greco, which held that the artist must have seen the world as distorted by a peculiar astigmatism, and thus painted this distorted world. This theoretical astigmatism cannot explain El Greco's style though, as he would have seen his canvases distorted in the same way, and painting onto them would have cancelled out any distortion. It