Doménikos Theotokópoulos, known as El Greco (Castilian for "The Greek") (1541 – April 7, 1614), was a prominent painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance, whose dramatic and expressionistic style was met with puzzlement by his contemporaries but found appreciation in the 20th century.

El Greco was disdained by the immediate generations after his death because his work was opposed in many respects to the principles of the early baroque style which came to the fore near the beginning of the 17th century and soon supplanted the last surviving traits of the 16th century Mannerism. El Greco was deemed incomprehensible and had no important followers. Only his son and a few unknown painters produced weak copies of his works. Late 17th- and early 18th-century Spanish commentators praised his skill but criticized his antinaturalistic style and his complex iconography. Some of these commentators, such as Acislo Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco and Ceán Bermúdez described his mature work as "contemptible", "ridiculous" and "worthy of scorn".

The views of Palomino and Bermúdez were frequently repeated in Spanish historiography, adorned with terms such as "strange", "queer", "original", "eccentric" and "odd". The phrase "sunk in eccentricity", often encountered in such texts, in time developed into "madness".

In 1838 the Spanish Museum of king Louis-Philippe was inaugurated at the Louvre on January 7, 1838. In 1835 Louis-Philippe had sent Baron Isidore Justin Séverin Taylor to Spain, in order to purchase, on his account, a representative group of works from the Spanish School. Taylor enriched the king's collection with nine paintings by El Greco: four with religious motifs, four portraits and an Evangelist. Among 450 paintings by 85 Spanish painters, the French public was able to see typical works of El Greco for the first time. During this period the idea that El Greco represents the beginning of the Spanish School was formulated for the first time in an allusive manner. The ruling ideology of the founders of the museum placed El Greco at the beginning of the Spanish School, and gave him more or less the title of its founder. In 1838 the A of Spanish painting was already El Greco while the Z was Goya. Nevertheless, Murillo, Velázquez, Ribera, Cano and Zurbarán were the painters to whom critics, artists and public referred reacted favorably to the Spanish Museum. Only a small élite preferred El Greco and Goya.

With the arrival of Romantic sentiments, El Greco's works were examined anew. To French writer Théophile Gautier, a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and literary critic, El Greco was the precursor of the European Romantic movement in all its craving for the strange and the extreme. Gautier would esteem and admire the later technique of El Greco, connecting him to art contemporary with himself: "The best works of his second period resemble the romantic paintings of a great deal". The critic Zacharie Astruc and the scholar Paul Lefort helped to promote a widespread revival of interest in his painting.

It was precisely then that the myth of El Greco's madness came into being. The second Romantic generation, the adherents of the Theory of art for art's sake, were in search of the fantastic and the rare, whatever eluded norms and limitations, what resisted interpretation and was unique. Consequently, madness was re-evaluated. The myth of El Greco's madness came in two versions. On the one hand, Théophile Gautier believed that El Greco went mad from excessive artistic sensitivity. On the other hand, the public and the critics would not possess the ideological criteria of Gautier and would retain the image of El Greco as a "mad painter" and, therefore, his "maddest" paintings were not admired but considered to be historical documents proving his "madness". During the operation of the Spanish Museum, El Greco became the ideal romantic hero, the gifted, the misunderstood, the marginal, the one who lost his reason because of the scorn of his contemporaries. The critics of Courrier Français and La Presse would retain the image of El Greco as a "mad painter".

In 1867, Paul Lefort, an expert on Spanish painting, dedicated an eight-page article to El Greco with engravings of four works. In this article, Lefort extols El Greco, refuting the all-powerful commonplace of his "madness" and proclaiming him the founder of the Spanish School. Between 1860–1880 the archival research reveals some new important documents, such as a letter written by the Croatian miniaturist, Giulio Clovio, who characterized El Greco as "a rare talent in painting". In the 1890s, Spanish painters living in Paris adopted him as their guide and mentor. During this period, however, El Greco continued to still be a matter for the "happy few". Lefort was opposed to distinguished critics such as Charles Blanc and Louis Viardot, whose hostile comments on El Greco were a powerful commonplace. Therefore, Lefort wrote an article recommending the repossession of El Greco by the historians.

It was a great moment. A pure righteous conscience stood on one tray of the balance, an empire on the other, and it was you, man's conscience, that tipped the scales. This conscience will be able to stand before the Lord as the Last Judgement and not be judged. It will judge, because human dignity, purity and valor fill even God with terror ... Art is not submission and rules, but a demon which smashes the moulds ... Greco's inner-archangel's breast had thrust him on savage freedom's single hope, this world's most excellent garret.