Domenikos Theotokopoulos walked into 16th-century Rome and reportedly declared that Michelangelo was a good man who did not know how to paint. This episode traces the life of the artist history remembers as El Greco: a guild master of Byzantine icon painting on Venetian-controlled Crete by age 22, who abandoned that security to learn the oil-paint techniques of Titian and Tintoretto in Venice, got himself evicted from the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, and was rejected by King Philip II of Spain over The Martyrdom of Saint Maurice.

Stranded in Toledo, he found total creative freedom, painted The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, and developed the elongated figures, unnatural light and acidic colors that led later doctors to diagnose him with astigmatism or narcotics use. We unpack why those theories fail, what Neoplatonism has to do with flame-shaped ...