I received a book as a Christmas gift titled “Spanish Art in New York,” which acts as a guide book to the museums, libraries, and other public spaces in New York City that have art works by significant Spanish artists. As I was flipping through the book, I happened upon El Greco’s well-known painting “View Of Toledo,” from 1599, which is part of the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Seeing this painting triggered a couple thoughts: one, I wrote a paper on this painting in college, as an art history major, and so I spent a fair amount of time studying this work at the time. Secondly, it made me realize that on my own trip to Spain, I was standing near where El Greco stood to paint this scene! This second notion prompted me to look back at my photos from my day trip to Toledo to make a comparison.
Even though I did an initial visual detail comparison as you can see above, let’s take a look at El Greco’s painting in full, which you can see below (reproduced here due to being in the public domain). One thing I want to draw attention to is the bridge … as you can see, it appears that one needs to cross this bridge and go up the hill to reach the city of Toledo on top of the hill.
I bring up the topic of the bridge, because when I was planning my day trip to Toledo, my guide books described how the train from Madrid left one outside the city (see my post on the Toledo train station here), and that there were a couple ways to reach the city – by taxi, or by walking. When I saw that one walking path took one over the Puente de Alcántara bridge, and that this bridge was built by the Romans around 104-106 AD, I determined I had to cross this bridge for myself. Think about it – how often can one say they walked over a bridge built almost 2,000 years ago? For some reason, that idea got me pretty excited just about crossing the bridge!
At any rate, you can see that the Puente de Alcántara bridge is in El Greco’s painting, and here’s my photograph of it (and the city of Toledo) from a similar vantage point. Granted, El Greco’s view is from a bit further away, but the angle of my view is similar to what he was looking at.
If you compare the two images, El Greco’s painting seems to have some taller buildings than what appear in my photograph, including a tall, vertical spire that looks like it could be a church. It’s hard to know (without doing a lot of research) whether any churches that existed in El Greco’s time were demolished over the centuries, and walking through Toledo, it feels like one has traveled back in time, meaning that there’s almost no modern structures.
I realize that getting excited about sharing a vantage point with El Greco seems like an art history geek thing, but I get a kick out of it.