View of Toledo, El Greco Ceramic Tree Decoration

View of Toledo, is one of the two surviving landscapes painted by El Greco. The other, called View and Plan of Toledo lies at Museo Del Greco, Toledo, Spain. Along with Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night, some landscapes by William Turner, and some works by Monet, it is among the best known depictions of the sky in Western art, and features sharp colour contrast between the sky and the hills below. Painted in a Mannerist (or Baroque) style, the work takes liberties with the actual layout of Toledo (some buildings are depicted in different positions than their actual location, but truthfully depicts on the side the Castle of San Servando). El Greco (1541 – April 7, 1614) was a painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. "El Greco" (The Greek) was a nickname,a reference to his Greek origin, and the artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος (Doménikos Theotokópoulos). El Greco was born on Crete, which was at that time part of the Republic of Venice, and the centre of Post-Byzantine art. He trained and became a master within that tradition before travelling at age 26 to Venice, as other Greek artists had done. In 1570 he moved to Rome, where he opened a workshop and executed a series of works. During his stay in Italy, El Greco enriched his style with elements of Mannerism and of the Venetian Renaissance. In 1577, he moved to Toledo, Spain, where he lived and worked until his death. In Toledo, El Greco received several major commissions and produced his best known paintings. El Greco's dramatic and expressionistic style was met with puzzlement by his contemporaries but found appreciation in the 20th century. El Greco is regarded as a precursor of both Expressionism and Cubism, while his personality and works were a source of inspiration for poets and writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Nikos Kazantzakis. El Greco has been chraacterised by modern scholars as an artist so individual that he belongs to no conventional school. He is best known for tortuously elongated figures and often fantastic or phantasmagorical pigmentation, marrying Byzantine traditions with those of Western painting.