The painter El Greco Was El Greco Astigmatic? El Greco, or “The Greek,” was the nickname of Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541–1614), a great artist of the seventeenth century. Born on the island of Crete, he studied art in Italy with Titian, another famous painter, and moved to Spain in 1577. As he grew older, the human figures in his paintings became progressively more elongated, almost looking unnatural. This lengthening is one of the most distinctive characteristics of his style, making it relatively easy for art historians to tell the difference between his paintings and those produced by other artists of the period. Some art historians suggested that his distortion of the human figure might have been the result of astigmatism. They theorized that El Greco had a type of astigmatism that caused him to see elongated human figures as normally proportioned. Though this theory is interesting, researchers generally believe his style was purposeful, not the result of a...