The Greek was what they called the painter in Toledo, Spain, and although he often signed his real name in full (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), it was in Greek characters which, we may imagine, few of his patrons could read. It was as if he wished to emphasize that he was a stranger in a strange land. He was a learned and music-loving man, born in Crete, a Venetian dependency, in 1541. Early in his life he was trained to be a maker of sacred images. He was schooled in Venice, perhaps with Titian and Tintoretto, and in Rome. There he studied the work of Michelangelo. From Michelangelo he learned the structure of the human body in art and the ways in which an artist can twist and alter that structure to crea
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