Mannerism

@http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/mannerism-in-italy-and-spain.html
media type="youtube" key="d8dMYBPBX4g" height="315" width="420"

media type="youtube" key="suIUUGdNyWk" height="315" width="560"

media type="youtube" key="3_-hYeuJTzQ" height="315" width="420"

El Greco Biography
//El Greco's most celebrated painting,, was commissioned by the parish priest of Santo Tomé in Toledo in 1586 to celebrate the restitution of a financial obligation to the church. It honors a long-dead benefactor, at whose funeral Saints Stephen and Augustine were seen to miraculously appear to assist in the burial. The picture depicts this miracle as well as the count's soul being received into Paradise. When seen in the church, the painting has the arresting character of a vision. El Greco's son Jorge kneels fictively on the edge of the picture plane, looking out and indicating to the viewer the miracle El Greco has conjured up. The figure thus serves as intermediary between the real world of the viewer and the fictional world of the painting, which gains added resonance through the inclusion of a series of portraits of El Greco's contemporaries. (El Greco was a remarkable portraitist [[|29.100.5]], able not only to record a sitter's features but to convey his character.) Above the funeral is depicted a heavenly vision, where a very different visionary experience is depicted: the verisimilitude of the earthly event is rejected in favor of a world of shifting planes inhabited by chimera-like personages. The Burial of Count Orgaz is central to our understanding of El Greco because it encapsulates the object of his art, which is to suggest a visionary experience—something that is not an extension of our physical world but of our imaginative faculties.//

//taken from:// []