El Greco of Chandax, present day Heraklion) on Crete, El Greco was descended from a prosperous urban family, which had probably been driven out of Chania to Candia after an uprising against the Catholic Venetians between 1526 and 1528. El Greco's father, Geórgios Theotokópoulos (d. 1556), was a merchant and tax collector. Nothing is known about his mother or his first wife, also Greek. El Greco's older brother, Manoússos Theotokópoulos (1531 – 13 December 1604), was a wealthy merchant and spent the last years of his life (1603–1604) in El Greco's Toledo home. El Greco received his initial training as an icon
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