ABSTRACT
The modern museum has determined the ways in which art historians examine the pictorial art of El Greco. This chapter focuses on the monographic exhibitions engendered in 2014 for the 400th anniversary of El Greco's death, which occasioned numerous conferences held in Japan, Spain, and Greece. Coming from Crete via Venice and Rome to Toledo, El Greco exhibited astoundingly liberal behaviour by renting the lavish Casas Principales of the Marquis de Villena in 1585-86 and then again from 1604 until his death in 1614. Organised by the El Greco Foundation in Toledo and carried out at Madrid's Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza, the International Symposium addressed the multifaceted personality of El Greco, demonstrated in his excursive trajectory from Crete to Italy and from Madrid to Toledo. The chapter discusses that the exhibitions emphasized his sense of creative borrowings, unravelling El Greco's imitative gestures that do not conceal a non-Western origin.
