El Greco (medieval Castilian for "the Greek") is the popular name for Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος Dominikos Theotokópulos (1541, Fodele?, Candia (modern Heraklion), Crete – April 7, 1614, Toledo, Spain), a Cretan Greek painter, sculptor, and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. He is best known for tortuously elongated figures and often fantastic or phantasmagoric pigmentation.

He was a painter in Crete and first trained as an icon painter. At the age of twenty-six he journeyed to Venice where he is said to have studied western-style art under Titian and Tintoretto. He spent almost two years there before moving to Rome. In Rome, El Greco was influenced by the mannerist style as practiced by followers of Michelangelo. Mannerism appealed to him because of the talent and intelligence and virtuosity required to create the images. In 1577 he emigrated to Toledo — at the time the religious capital of Spain — where he produced his mature works. The Christian doctrines greatly influenced his life and his artwork, leading him to a successful career as a painter of altarpieces and portraits. Some works include The Annunciation, Laocoon, and The Repentent Peter. Many of El Greco's works are on display at Madrid's Museo del Prado; however others can be found in other places such as The Greco Museum and House in Toledo, The Museum of Santa Cruz in the same city, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

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Volume 21, number 2: Copley's Cargo
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In 1765, John Singleton Copley sent his painting Henry Pelham (Boy with a Squirrel) from Boston to London in hopes of receiving feedback from the arbiters of academic aesthetics. Several months later, he received the welcome news that Sir Joshua Reynolds had called the painting "wonderfull." In virtually every scholarly narrative of early American art, Boy with a Squirrel derives its canonical significance from this famous transatlantic relay. But the most basic reality of that relay–the massive fact of the Atlantic Ocean standing between Copley and his interlocutors–has barely been registered in the scholarship.This essay interprets Boy with a Squirrel in terms of the difficulty and delicacy of its transatlantic transmission. I argue that Copley, as he attempted to create a painting that would have the necessary transitive qualities, drew from an array of familiar discourses of Atlantic exchange and transport. The painting's profile format evoked strategies of numismatic exchange. The precise representation of the flying squirrel tapped into well-established transatlantic natural history circuits. The spatial transformations of the composition echoed not only empiricist theories of sensory conveyance (especially the writings of George Berkeley), but also mirrored the workaday dynamics of the shipping and reassembly of transatlantic commodities. Copley, like many other colonial artists, worked in a global community governed by distance, difference, and delay. By attending to the vehicular context of Boy with a Squirrel, we can begin to understand his strategies for articulating–and navigating–that new global space.

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