"The Greek" invades Italy and Spain: the artist Domenikos Theotokopoulos--El Greco--introduced "such an extravagant style that to this day nothing has been seen to equal it, " noted 17th-century writer Jose Martinez. "Attempting to discuss it would confuse the soundest minds".

THE GREAT 16th-century painter known to posterity as El Greco (1541-1614) was one of the most original artists of his age, celebrated for his highly expressive and visionary religious paintings and psychologically compelling portraits, as well as his rare incursions into landscape, genre, mythology, and sculpture. His late works, in which mystical content, expressive distortions, and monumental scale are taken to ever greater extremes, culminates in the "Adoration of Shepherds" (c. 1613), the spectacular painting created to decorate ins own tomb.

From his beginnings as an icon painter in his native Crete, to his time in Venice and Rome and his study of Italian art, to his definitive move to Toledo, Spain, and his creation of a uniquely personal and deeply spiritual style, his work sometimes has been associated with the great mystics of Counter--Reformation Spain, yet his paintings have had a profound influence on the protagonists of 20th-century modernism, including Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock.

A unique synthesis of late medieval Byzantine traditions and the art of the Italian Renaissance, El Greco's work sought to create an innovative and spiritually more intense relationship between viewer and image. Although he established a large and productive workshop in Toledo, he founded no school, and for almost two centuries following his death, his works were decried for their extravagance--except for his astonishing portraits, which Spanish Baroque artist Diego Velazquez took as his model. A sympathetic interest in his art was the result of the 19th-century Romantic movement's new emphasis on individual expression and Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin saw themselves as his artistic heirs. More recently, his works have inspired the expressive abstractions of generations of 20th-century painters.

"St. Luke Painting the Virgin'" (c. 1565) and "The Dormition of the Virgin" (c. 1567) are among the rare, early works documenting El Greco's training as a painter of religious imagery in his island birthplace. The archaizing abstractions of these images--based on late medieval prototypes--reflect his country's continuing reverence for the traditions of its Greek heritage. The style and sacred function of Byzantine icons, which rejected mimesis in favor of an attempt to mystically embody the living presence of the divine, greatly shaped El Greco's approach to religious art. Throughout his career, he always signed his works with his Greek name, Domenikos Theotokopoulos.

A number of key works illustrate the transforming effects of El Greco's stay in Italy, beginning with his arrival in Venice in 1567, and his subsequent stay in Rome, from 1570 until 1577. The "Purification of the Temple" (c. 1575), with its deep, stage-like space, bold brushwork, and dramatic lighting shows the powerful influence of Titian as well as the Venetian mannerist Tintoretto. During the Counter Reformation, the theme reprised several times by El Greco, was interpreted as the purification of the Church. Works from the artist's sojourn in Rome display El Greco's study of the art of Michelangelo Buonarroti and his awareness of Italian art theory. He became a member of a small circle of antiquarians. "Boy Blowing on an Ember to Light a Candle ('Soplon')" (c. 1572) is a rare and charming example of El Greco's excursion into genre painting as well as an emulation of a celebrated lost work of ancient art.

In 1577, El Greco ("The Greek")traveled to Spain, where he hoped to find royal patronage--unsuccessfully, as it turned out. Instead, he settled permanently in Toledo, still an intellectual and religious center of the country. Once again, he found his place among a circle of scholars and church reformers who appreciated his signature style, with its elongated, undulating forms and sometimes dissonant colors. "The Adoration of the Name of Jesus" (c. 1577-79) was among the first works he painted in Spain--perhaps an attempt to attract the attention of Philip II, who is shown kneeling in the foreground. The artist painted two versions of this religious allegory. Although the larger of the two versions found a place in Philip II's grandiose palace, the Escorial, El Greco did not become one of the king's artists.

The increasingly ethereal and otherworldly quality of his religious works can be traced in a series of important canvases from the 1580s and 1590s, including "The Crucifixion with Two Donors" (c. 1580), "The Agony in the Garden" (c. 1592), "The Virgin and Child with Saints Martina and Agnes" (c. 1597), "Saint Martin and the Beggar" (c. 1599), and "The Resurrection" (c. 1597). In the latter work, one of El Greco's most celebrated pieces, expressive distortion and mystical drama are taken to unprecedented extremes. Emerging from the tomb with an almost explosive force, Christ acts as a magnet, pulling the figures below, drawn out to impossible lengths, heavenward.

El Greco's artistic explorations of spirituality and mysticism culminate in "Adoration of the Shepherds." Here, the body of the infant Christ, tiny on the l0-foot-tall canvas, emits an incandescent glow that illuminates the entire composition. Celestial as well as earthly worshippers appear to be weightless, slowly spiraling in adoration around his form. The painting is an unrivaled example of the artist's visual expression of ecstatic union with the divine.

El Greco's finest portraits, meanwhile, are notable for their probing displays of character and psychological intensity. Among the most famous examples are "A Cardinal (probably Don Fernando Nino de Guevara)" (c. 1600-01)--whose piercing gaze suggests the stern rectitude with which he carried out his duties--and his compelling portrayal of the young cleric "Fray Hortensio Felix Paravicino" (c. 1609). A noted professor of rhetoric, he was one of El Greco's admirers in Toledo and dedicated four poems to the artist. Rare examples of El Greco's activities as a landscape painter include his famous "View of Toledo" (c. 1597-99), sometimes considered the first expressionist landscape in Western art.

Also worth noting is "Laocoon" (c. 1610), a late work in which El Greco openly vied with the celebrated first-century sculpture in the Vatican signed by Hagesandros, Polydoros, and Athenodoros of Rhodes. The subject, taken from Virgil's Aeneid, concerns the gods' punishment of the Trojan priest Laocoon in front of the walls of Troy, which El Greco shows as Toledo. The writhing forms and expressions of despair and physical pain make it one of his most powerful works.

"In his own time," states Philippe de Montebello, director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, "El Greco's highly personal style--with its dematerialization of the figure and its expressive effects of light and color--was without precedent and often astonished his contemporaries. Yet, it is only in the last 150 years that he has come to be appreciated as one of the great creative geniuses of Western art."

"El Greco" is on view through Jan. 11, 2004, at The Metropolitan Museum of An.