Baroque Art: Velasquez and El Greco's dangerous poratraits

Velasquez and El Greco chose a dangerous way to earn a living.

Velasquez painted Pope Innocent X, said to e the ugliest man in Rome and not at all innocent . . .

. . . and the resulting image is presentable.  The pope is said to have commented that the painting "is quite lifelike."  Home free.

El Greco had the more difficult assignment.  He was assigned to paint the Grand Inquisitor, the most powerful man in Spain in the 17th Century, a man who held the unchecked power of life and death over every person under his sway.

Simply entitled A Cardinal. 

Is this the way you would chose to portray the man who, with a gesture, could insure your most horrible death?  The clenched left hand does it for me. I would not have painted a clenched left hand.   The Metropolitan Museum's description is more explicit and should be read if you would understand this painting.  

I think The Cardinal is the greatest of all portraits, except perhaps Picasso's of Gertrude Stein:

But I confess a prejudice:  I like Miss Stein and wish I could have been her friend.

The following painting

is not a portrait at all, but a painting I like a lot, and so did Miss Stein.

My take:  a man made more ruthlessly dangerous by fear.

Monty Python has a skit of the Spanish Inquisition, which is as funny as usual, if you can forget history.  Somehow horrible history is much with us these days -- perhaps most days --, and still the skit raises a chuckle.  Enjoy!

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Google -- with whom I plan to enter into a civil union when Abe and I become unionized, so much do I love it -- amazes me once again.

Here is the text of the chapter from Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov entitled The Grand Inquisitor.  I had a lingering doubt about religious faith before I read this chapter; I had none after.  Read it, and be forewarned:  Ivan's objection to a belief in god is unanswerable by any I have posed the issue to.  

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Robert Choate was a familiar at Miss Stein's home in Paris.  He wrote The Eater of Darkness.  I believed that I was the only person in the world to have read The Eater of Darkens, a funny and curious book.  I am delighted to find -- google is pleased to present to me -- a current review devoted to forgotten literature, of The Eater of Darkness.   The review treats the book with the respect it is due.  Good for you, Robert Choate!  Good for you, Reviewer.