Art - Richard Cork marvels at the uncanny modernity of El Greco's vision
Does any other artist's career follow a trajectory as dramatic and un-expected as El Greco's? No one could have guessed, from the backward-looking icons he painted at the outset, that this obedient provincial youth would transform himself into such an original talent. Stiff, flat and determined to obey the dictates of post-Byzantine art, The Dormition of the Virgin proves how deeply immersed he was in the old- fashioned style favoured throughout Crete. It starts the National Gallery's revelatory show on a dutiful note, making us realise how far El Greco rebelled against the tradition upheld on the sleepy Mediterranean island where he was born.
Escaping to Venice at the age of 26, he lost no time casting off the past. He discarded his real name, Domenikos Theotoko-poulos, and Titian and Tintoretto became his masters. A small panel called The Entombment of Christ shows the extent of his desire for change: the subject - mourning figures bent over a corpse - is close to his earlier Dormition, but the old Byzantine stiffness has been replaced by a new dynamism. Although his grasp of anatomy and spatial logic is shaky, he injects an ur- gent, impulsive passion in- to the anguished men and women who surge round the dead martyr.
El Greco's Venetian work may be clumsy and uneven, but the sense of liberation is overwhelming. Moving to Rome three years later, where he registered himself officially as "Domenico Greco", the impetuous young painter became even more cock- sure. He managed to outrage local opinion by scorning Michelangelo - which is ironic given the clear influence of the latter on one of El Greco's works of this period, a small, agonised Pieta. But the drama of the thunderous sky behind the stricken mourners shows that he was asserting his identity with mounting confidence.
Settling in Spain around 1576, he felt audacious enough to paint the gaping mouth of hell in a large canvas called The Adoration of the Name of Jesus. It found favour with Philip II, who decreed that this tumultuous image be hung in the Escorial monastery. Even so, El Greco's decision to show Philip turning his back on hell proved prophetic. The king rejected the next painting El Greco submitted for royal approval, and he was forced instead to seek patronage from the church.
In Spain, religious authorities could be as difficult to please as the prickly monarch. But El Greco refused to dilute his outspoken art. The sky behind his monumental Crucifixion with Two Donors (c.1580) is so freely handled, so riven with unstable clouds and lethal flashes of lightning, that Christ's plight seems subdued by comparison.
Yet El Greco was able to respond with great tenderness to more intimate subjects. His burgeoning reputation earned him, in 1603, an extensive commission for the Hospital of Charity church at Illescas, a small town halfway between Toledo and Madrid. The climax of the scheme was "a retable for the altar of Our Lady" - four canvases installed in a baroque chapel. One of them, a roundel depicting the nativity (which has been lent to the exhibition), is El Greco's only surviving attempt to portray the holy manger attended simply by Mary and Joseph. Taking his cue from a passage in Isaiah declaring that "the ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib", he included both animals, although their heads alone are shown, and the ass is half-hidden in the penumbral region behind the virgin mother. The ox's head, extending its huge curved horn at a foreshortened angle that suggests how high the roundel must initially have been sited, does not distract attention from the baby - on the contrary, it directs our eyes towards the infant Christ. Smaller and more vulnerable than in most paintings, the baby lies on a sheet white enough for its glare to emblazon the figures staring down at him.
Not all El Greco's paintings are as spell-binding as this roundel. A mercifully small image of the virgin Mary, concentrating on her blanched face, suffers from an excess of sickly piety. But when he trained his eyes on real sitters, El Greco became a trenchant portraitist. Take his mesmeric full-length of a cardinal, probably the implacable Nino de Guevara who acted as inquisitor general between 1599 and 1602. He fixes El Greco with a terrifying stare through his black, thick-framed spectacles. The document he has dropped on the floor bears the artist's name, as if to suggest that El Greco himself was somehow suspected of heretical activities by the inquisition. But he refused to be cowed by his baleful sitter. The portrait defines the cardinal in all his silken malevolence, gripping one arm of the chair while his crimson robes buckle under the impact of the folds running through them like seismic fissures.
It is a truly electrifying performance, and helps to explain why one of the artist's friends once wrote a sonnet lauding El Greco's ability to "seize his fire". At their finest, we marvel at the uncanny modernity of these quicksilver paintings, and understand why Jackson Pollock avidly sketched one of the most headlong canvases on view here. Confronted by El Greco's white-hot visions, we feel the intervening centuries drop away. He becomes our contemporary. And we stare at his work with the same gaze of amazement as the soldiers in The Resurrection, thrown off-balance by Christ's volcanic eruption from the tomb.
"El Greco" is at the National Gallery, London WC2 (020 7747 2400) until 23 May
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