El Greco, his real name was Domenikos Theotocopoulos, was born in 1541, Candia. He was from a prosperous family, which had been driven out of Chania to Candia after an uprising against the Venetians between 1526 and 1528. El Greco's father, Geórgios Theotokópoulos was a merchant and tax collector.

El Greco received training as an icon painter of the Cretan school, the center of post-Byzantine art. In addition to painting, he studied the classics of ancient Greece, and Latin classics. In 1563, at the age of twenty-two, El Greco was described in a document as a "master" ("maestro Domenigo"), meaning he was already a master and probably operating his own workshop.

In 1570 El Greco moved to Rome, where he executed a series of works strongly marked by his Venetian apprenticeship. It is unknown how long he remained in Rome before he left for Spain. While he was living in Rome, El Greco was received as a guest at the Palazzo Farnese, a palace Cardinal Alessandro Farnese had made a center for the artistic and intellectual life of the city. He came into contact with the elite of the city, including the Roman scholar Fulvio Orsini, whose collection would later include seven paintings by the artist.

By the time El Greco arrived in Rome, Michelangelo and Raphael were dead, but their example continued to be paramount and left little room for different approaches. Their artistic heritage was overwhelming for young painters but El Greco was determined to make his own mark, defending his personal artistic views, ideas and style. He dismissed Michelangelo by telling the Pope "he was a good man, but he did not know how to paint" but it is obvious that the great masters of the past had an influence on the owrk of El Greco.

El Greco conveyed the awesomeness of great spiritual events with a sense of mystic rapture, and in his late work he went even further in freeing his figures from earth-bound restrictions. He was known to have been a perfectionist in his techniques, making many preparatory drawings for all of his paintings and sculpting clay or wax models to work out arrangements of figures in his compositions. He also made oil studies, as some small scale oils still exist but it is generally believed that these were made by an assistant or pupil as a visual record of the final painting. He was a slow painter and reworked fixed paintings many times over before being satisfied with a already finished work. This improvement on his first brushstrokes was considered a poor effort to improve an "already beautiful" painting. He also always signed his name, Domenikos Theotocopoulos, incorporating Greek characters, and sometimes followed by Kres (Cretan).

In 1577, El Greco emigrated first to Madrid, then to Toledo, where he produced his mature works. A succession of great altarpieces followed, as well as, a string of portraits, even though he was never able to secure much royal patronage.

El Greco had a proud temperament and believed himself to be an artist-philosopher rather that a craftsman and lived a lavish life-style, employing musicians to play whilst he dined. Needless to say, he had many financial difficulties near the end of his life.

Interest in El Greco's art was revived at the end of the 19th century. With the development of Expressionism in the 20th century , El Greco came into his own. The strangeness of his art has inspired many theories, for example that he was mad or suffered from astigmatism, but his rapturous paintings make complete sense as an expression of the religious fervour of his adopted country, Spain.