It Is A Very
Clean-Looking, Cold-Looking White Monument Of The Catholic Faith, With A
_Retablo_ Attributed To Berruguete, And Much Plateresque Gothic Detail
Mingled With Byzantine Ornament, And Moorish Arabesquing And The Famous
Stucco Honeycombing Which We Were Destined At Seville And Granada To
Find Almost Sickeningly Sweet.
Where the Rabbis read the law from their
pulpit the high altar stands, and the pious populace has for three
hundred years pushed the Jews from the surrounding streets, where they
had so humbled their dwellings to the lowliest lest they should rouse
the jealousy of their sleepless enemies.
VII
When we had visited this church there remained only the house of the
painter known as El Greco, for whom we had formed such a distaste,
because of the long features of the faces in his pictures, that our
guide could hardly persuade us his house was worth seeing. Now I am glad
he prevailed with us, for we have since come to find a peculiar charm in
these long features and the characteristic coloring of El Greco's
pictures. The little house full of memorials and the little garden full
of flowers, which ought to have been all forget-me-nots, were entirely
delightful. As every one but I knew, and even I now know, he was born a
Greek with the name of Theotocopuli, and studied tinder Titian till he
found his account in a manner of his own, making long noses and long
chins and high narrow foreheads in ashen gray, and at last went mad in
the excess of his manner.
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