El Greco's impossible greens

Stand in front of an El Greco and the first thing you notice is that everyone is too tall. Bodies stretch and taper as if gravity had loosened its grip, all of them leaning, reaching, pulled toward something above the frame.

Then the colour: acid greens, bruised violets, a cold silver light that belongs to no real afternoon. For a sixteenth-century painter this was close to heresy — the natural world rendered unnatural on purpose, in service of feeling over fact.

He painted the body as if it were already trying to leave.

Critics for centuries decided he was simply a bad draughtsman, or that astigmatism had warped his vision. It took the modernists — Picasso among them — to recognise a deliberate, radical distortion, a man bending the body to make it carry more than it should.

The Old Masters are often sold to us as solemn and safe. El Greco is proof they could be as strange as anything hanging in a gallery of contemporary art today.