Doménikos Theotokópoulos (1541–1614) — known in Spain as "El Greco," the Greek — followed an unusual path. He grew up in Crete in the Byzantine icon tradition, learned Titian's colour in Venice and Michelangelo's body in Rome, then settled in the Spanish city of Toledo and developed a wholly personal style that fit no school completely.

His most famous work is "The Burial of the Count of Orgaz," made in 1586 for a church in Toledo. The painting sets two worlds one above the other. In the lower half, the funeral of the pious count, dead centuries before, is shown in a realistic scene: Toledo nobles in black, faces rendered like portraits, saints in golden armour lowering the body into the grave. In the upper half the heavens open; the count's soul is carried up by an angel among Christ, the Virgin, and the saints. The earth is grave and concrete; the heaven a state of ecstasy, undulating, elongating, almost melting.

El Greco's signature is most visible in this upper region: the figures far taller than natural proportion, drawn up like flames; the light seeming to come not from objects but from within; the colours — cold blues, acid greens, reds burning beneath a silvery grey — carrying an unreal vibration. To his contemporaries this was "faulty" drawing; but El Greco was not one who did not know the rule but one who knowingly transcended it.

Long regarded as "strange" and marginal, El Greco was rediscovered only at the start of the twentieth century. Cézanne, Picasso, and the Expressionists saw in his elongated forms and subjective colour a herald of modern painting. Three centuries earlier in Toledo, a Greek had already sensed that painting could show not what it sees but what it feels.