El Greco biography

Hello, my name is Doménikos Theotokópoulos. But people call me El Greco. It is Spanish for “the Greek.”  I was born on the Greek island of Crete. You know where Crete is in the Mediterranean Sea, right? I studied painting as a young man at a monastery so my first artistic influences were creating Byzantine style religious icons, which are pictures of saints in churches. These paintings look kind of flat and lacked expression. Later, I went to Italy to study and learned to draw the human figure like Giotto so that my people were three-dimensional. Then I studied Renaissance…