Causalidad y redescubrimiento de El Greco

Abstract

The concept of symbolic capital of an artist is first defined. Throughout the work, the evolution of the symbolic capital attributed to El Greco over time is analyzed. An extensive review of the critics is carried out since the times in which the painter still lived to the present day. El Greco was a singular painter who, being an immigrant in Spain, arrived with the best training feasible at the time and with an enormous innovating capacity in aspects such as the organization of his business, his technique, his iconography, and his conceptualization of painting in the Spanish context of the Counter-Reformation. The creation of El Greco's own pictorial grammar is described, which includes elements that allow us to identify, undoubtedly, the work of the Cretan. Regarding the title of this work, the last part is of the study carried out on hundreds of monetizations of the painter's work throughout history, trying to determine the causes that led to his "rediscovery" at the end of the 19th century, achieving some interesting conclusions, such as that it is possible, under certain conditions, to establish cause-effect relationships between certain milestones and the changes of an artist's symbolic capital.