El Greco by Shirley Marie Dees

This artwork is from the Bronowski series although the related quote is placed on the back of the artwork. The entire image including the frame is 22.5" x 18.5". The main image is of El Greco's View of Toledo c.1600. In the original View of Toledo, El Greco altered the view of the city to fit his own imagination. Dees has also made minor changes, such as enlarging the city itself (to the right) and adding the foreground tree in the viewer's space (at the right). The following text which is quoted from Jacob Bronowski's Ascent of Man is affixed to the back of the artwork:

When Christianity came to win back Spain, the excitement of the struggle was on the frontier. Here Moors and Christians, and Jews too, mingled and made an extraordinary culture of different faiths. In 1085 the centre of this mixed culture was fixed for a time in the city of Toledo. Toledo was the intellectual port of entry into Christian Europe of all the classics that the Arabs had brought together from Greece, from the Middle East, from Asia.

We think of Italy as the birthplace of the Renaissance. But the conception was in Spain in the twelfth century, and it is symbolised and expressed by the famous school of translators at Toledo, where the ancient texts were turned from Greek (which Europe had forgotten) through Arabic and Hebrew into Latin...

And yet ... the most influential man who was translated was not a Greek... The perception of objects in space ... was a subject about which the Greeks were totally wrong. It was understood for the first time about the year AD 1000 by an eccentric mathematician whom we call Alhazen... Alhazen first recognised that we see an object because each point of it directs and reflects a ray into the eye... The concept of the cone of rays from object to the eye becomes the foundation of perspective."