Maurice Barres - Greco ou o Segredo de Toledo

Today, Maurice Barrès [Charmes (Vosges), 1862 - Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1923] is widely referred to in the histories of French literature; he is the author of La Colinne Inspirée, his most beautiful novel, the man of Les Dérracinés, a multi-voiced novel where one might perhaps see the European fascism of thirty years later foreshadowed, or of this Greco, where the discoveries of Toledo and its painter intersect under a critical gaze, and to do what he himself recognized as the narrative of a "passionate ideology."

In 1902, during his prolonged pilgrimage in Toledo, Barrès was excited by what was then considered the most "difficult" painter in Spain; with El Greco, who in those years was met by very unresponsive audiences to the brutal divergences of his style, with looks only educated by the rules, who antagonized his elongated and distorted human proportions; with this painter, seen as gloomy and obscure, almost reduced to greens, blues, and yellows, with corpse-like flesh and rare reds that to the uninitiated recalled warm blood; with his art, which, by attempting to portray a people divided between Moorish and Semitic origins but dominated by Christian faith, claimed a space (one might say an impossible one to find) where the synthesis of Renaissance and Baroque patterns could be recognized, of Mannerist artificiality, but also a cold austerity not fatal to its fever of dream and revelation. Barrès’ Greco is not only the genius outside the norms of the painting of his time, but the fleeting truth of the soul of Toledo. And when he faces us, slender and "astigmatic," he asks us to see how he endowed his bodies with the soul that constantly escapes them. [Aníbal Fernandes, "Introduction"]