El Greco’s Italian years, on which Andrew W. Casper’s Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy centers, present scholars with a challenge. Next to no documentation survives for the ten years he spent there. He seems to have received no major commission, the number of works is small, and none are securely dated.

Most of El Greco’s Italian paintings have religious subjects, and Casper utilizes this fact to bring order to the material. According to Casper, one of the central artistic problems of the late sixteenth century Counter Reformation was the anxiety that images might be confused for what they represented and become idols. El Greco’s unique solution to this problem was to reinvent the Byzantine icon in a Western manner, insisting that devotion pass through the image to the prototype, while simultaneously proclaiming through showy artistry that his images were human made, and therefore not idols. Casper dubs this concept the “artful icon,” and it provides the thread that runs through the whole book.

In order to demonstrate the overarching significance of the “artful icon,” Casper begins with an analysis of El Greco’s icon of St. Luke Painting the Virgin and Child (before 1567), painted in Crete, and a group of Toledo-period pictures devoted to the theme of St. Veronica’s Veil (one painting ca. 1577–79 and three ca. 1580). In his discussion of the icon, Casper points out how unusual it was for an artist to sign such a work. By these means El Greco likened himself to the original artist of religious images, St. Luke. Casper’s analysis of the angel crowning Luke, however, is deeply flawed. According to his argument the angel not only does honor to the art of painting by crowning Luke, he communicates to him the otherwise absent image of the Virgin and Child, making clear in this way that holy images had heavenly origins. To substantiate this point, Casper introduces Western images where this is clearly true, where the vision of the Virgin and Child is represented, and where the angel clearly communicates with Luke. According to Casper, the only difference between the Western images and the El Greco is that the artist “appears to favor a completely internalized form of visionary apparition” (24). I would suggest that the absence of a vision is primarily that—an absence, especially since the angel is also not shown communicating with St. Luke; the angel simply crowns him. Building on this dubious hypothesis, Casper goes on to suggest that the communication of the vision to Luke is related to concepts in contemporary Italian art theory, especially the idea that image making ultimately comes from God. This analysis assumes that the young icon painter in Crete was au fait with the latest in Italian art theory, which is doubtful, and for which Casper does not offer evidence. Also, much of the “contemporary” theory Casper cites was published many years after El Greco’s departure from Crete. This creates a problem for the book as a whole because the “artful icon” premise depends on the notion that the icon image comes directly from God, which is what gives the icon its devotional potency.

Casper is on firmer footing when it comes to the artful side of the equation. He analyzes in the St. Veronica’s Veil series how El Greco went to great lengths to ensure that viewers do not confound the images with the relic itself. The pictures are mostly signed, and, moreover, Christ’s visage seems to hover over the cloth without conforming to its creases, which are painted with broad brushstrokes, further indexes of artful presence.

In chapter 2, Casper deploys his “artful icon” concept to analyze the paintings associated stylistically with the Modena triptych (ca. 1567). Why did El Greco adopt a new style once in Italy? For Casper the answer comes down to religious context: the Greek style did not fulfill the devotional expectations of his Italian clientele. To see El Greco as the product of circumstance, however, does not do justice to the self-confidence that is one of the hallmarks of his character. Also, there were ample opportunities for him to work in the Greek style—at S. Giorgio dei Greci in Venice, for instance. Yet as far as scholars know, El Greco chose to have nothing to do with the Greek community in Venice. Join this to the fact that El Greco himself chose to travel to Italy, and one is likely to conclude that he traveled there, as others have suggested, to learn the Italian manner of painting firsthand. He did so of his own volition.

There is also the question of the style of the paintings surrounding the Modena triptych. Casper describes them as Italian in style, and not Greek; but this does justice neither to their lingering Byzantinisms nor to their clumsiness. It is surely better to see these as exercises in learning a new mode of representation rather than as products of a Counter Reformation devotional imperative. Finally, there is the matter of the Byzantine style itself. Giorgio Vasari famously disparaged the maniera greca as the foil to Giotto’s modernity. El Greco objected to this aspect of Vasari, as evidenced in his Toledo-period annotations to The Lives of the Artists. How, then, to reconcile his supposed abandonment of the Byzantine style with the evidence that he saw this idiom in a positive light? For Casper the answer is clear: “his paintings reflected the demands of his market, not his own taste” (68). This does not fully mesh with El Greco’s later emphatic defense of the distinctiveness of his own art. Casper is rightly critical of Vasari’s dismissal of the maniera greca, but at the same time seems to share, perhaps unconsciously, many of the same preconceptions. On page 65, for instance, he casts the history of icon painting in post-Byzantine Crete as one in which all innovation stems from the demands of Western clients. And elsewhere he says that as El Greco’s works become more Italianate they became “more advanced in style” (52). While one cannot deny that Byzantine art making was conservative, it was not unchanging, and contact with the West was not the exclusive agent of change.

The third chapter, on synthesis as an artistic ideal, addresses an issue that has long been central to an understanding of artists working slightly later, in particular Annibale Carracci. Casper argues that El Greco attempted in his later Italian paintings, in particular the Cleansing of the Temple (ca. 1570), to join together central Italian disegno with north Italian colorito. The point is most eloquently made by the painting itself, which “footnotes” the achievements of Michelangelo, Titian, and Raphael through the inclusion of their portraits together at the bottom right of the composition. Casper also introduces paintings on the theme of the Pietà and Annunciation to demonstrate El Greco’s goal of improving upon Michelangelo and Titian respectively.

Chapter 4, “The Theatrics of Counter-Reformation Narrative,” centers on the various versions of the Cleansing of the Temple (before 1570 and ca. 1570) and Christ Healing the Blind (two ca. 1570 and one ca. 1572). The two themes had rarely been represented in art, and Casper neatly demonstrates that El Greco likely chose these subjects because they responded to Counter Reformation ideals of a reforming and spiritually enlightened Church. The most insightful section of the chapter deals with the intelligent use of perspective made by El Greco in the Christ Healing the Blind paintings. With Christ’s healing arm lining up along one of the deep orthogonals, it is clear that El Greco has paralleled the sight-giving miracle with his own ability to allow viewers to see the open space behind.

For perhaps two years El Greco lived in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Chapter 5, “The Artist as Antiquarian in Christian Rome,” discusses the importance of this experience for El Greco’s artistic development. The portrait of his friend and fellow artist Giulio Clovio is convincingly discussed as representing secondhand El Greco’s desire to be considered an intellectual, gentleman artist. The Parma version of Christ Healing the Blind (ca. 1572) reflects very well how El Greco put his goal of being an intellectual painter into action. In the background is a ruin that alludes to the Baths of Diocletian, recently restored and reconfigured by Michelangelo as S. Maria degli Angeli. Not only do the baths potentially refer to the pool where the blind man went in the Gospel story to wash his eyes after Christ touched them; the fact that the pagan baths now stood restored as a Christian church could allude to the theme of spiritual enlightenment, the underlying significance of the story. Casper insists too much on seeing nearly everything created by El Greco in Rome under the rubric of devotion and the “artful icon,” including the Portrait of Giulio Clovio (ca. 1572) and the Boy Blowing an Ember (Soplón) (ca. 1570–72), but that should not blind us to the insights he offers here, especially with respect to the Parma Christ Healing the Blind.

In the final chapter, Casper journeys to Toledo and discusses El Greco’s work at Santo Domingo el Antiguo. Much of this is a necessary recapitulation of earlier work, aimed at demonstrating that El Greco very self-consciously designed the images to emphasize the Eucharist. The Assumption of the Virgin (1577–79), for instance, is noteworthy for the absence of figures in the center where the tomb of the Virgin is shown. Casper suggests that this displacement was made so as to allow a clear view of the tabernacle on the altar. More significantly, it also encouraged viewers to read the tabernacle and tomb as a theologically laden parallel. Also, by placing the altarpiece behind the tabernacle, containing as it would have done the real presence of Christ, El Greco clarified that his altarpiece was an image, and not an idol.

Overall, Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy is an uneven book. It insists too much on extolling the works of art rather than coming to terms honestly with their characteristics. The Modena triptych and its related pictures cannot only be described as being painted in an Italian mode. It overstates the problem the Counter Reformation church had with idolatry. Yes, this was a concern, but perhaps more pressing around the time of El Greco’s stay in Italy was the issue of artfulness getting in the way of religious expression. That is why the first generation of reform painters, like Girolamo Muziano and Scipione Pulzone, painted in a seemingly artless, self-effacing manner. Casper mentions the possibility of “too much art”—Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (1536–41) is particularly relevant here—but it is the problem of the idol to which he constantly returns. The book also would have been improved greatly through the inclusion of more comparative material. Many artists were dealing with the same pressures—Annibale Carracci, Federico Barocci—yet none of them developed a style similar to El Greco’s. How they coped with the issue of artfulness and devotion would help to give visual context to El Greco’s own efforts. Finally, the dubious notion of the “artful icon” is used too frequently and too insistently throughout the book. The best analysis comes when this hermeneutical straitjacket is left aside and Casper turns directly to an analysis of the paintings.