Description: Taking a global perspective as its focus, the book sheds new light on El Greco's highly original contribution to early Mediterranean and multi-institutional configurations of the Christian faith in Byzantium, Venice, Rome, Toledo, and Madrid.
Brief description: Livia Stoenescu is Associate Professor of Art History at the College of Architecture, Texas A&M University, College Station. She is the editor of Creative and Imaginative Powers in the Pictorial Art of El Greco (Brepols, 2016). In El Greco studies only, her contributions include "Pictorial Allegory in El Greco's Laocoön of Toledo," RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics (2017) and "The Dialogue of Classical and Devotional Cultures in El Greco's Laocoön of Toledo," Comitatus (2015).
Review Quotes: " ... a thoughtful and stimulating introduction to the art of the Cretan artist, filled with intuitive and subtle observations that -- meeting the author's promise in the introduction -- succeed in presenting El Greco's radical originality, his "extravagant" style as some of his contemporaries put it, as the result of a dynamic while critical dialogue with the art of his time." - Felipe Pereda, Seventeenth-Century News, 2020 "The color reproductions and notes are commendable. This volume makes El Greco seem much more at home in his own period than previous scholarship has. Summing Up: Recommended." - P. Emison, University of New Hampshire, CHOICE Reviews, July 2019