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I first heard the story about El Greco's curtain-drawn room in a bar called "Pub des Artistes." It was what my effete grandmother called a "watering hole" for painters, writers, aesthetes, and others who, although they had never heard of it, were more fin than siècle. Most of the custom there believed they were bar-coded for fame and immortality and increasingly suffered, like El Greco, from what can only be called "room fever." They were neurotic, manic depressive, melancholy and sceptical. In short, the patrons of the Pub des Artistes were Baroque and, at times, even baroque: they were victims of a room-milieu essential to Art, yet uncongenial to healthy living. Once the pink gin flowed, there were those who even insisted that it was simply because El Greco was near-sighted, hence the perspectivism of his painting was always visually awry, and only made more so by the darkened room.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-8931-4_5

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