"The accidents of our bodily constitution can always play this revealing role on the condition that they become a means of extending our knowledge by the consciousness which we have of them, instead of being submitted to as pure facts which dominate us. Ultimately, El Greco's supposed visual disorder was conquered by him and so profoundly integrated into his manner of thinking and being that it appears finally as the necessary expression of his being much more than as a peculiarity imposed from the outside. It is no longer a paradox to say that "El Greco was astigmatic because he produced elongated bodies." Everything which was accidental in the individual, that is, everything which revealed partial and independent dialectics without relationship to the total signification of his life, has been assimilated and centered in his deeper life. Bodily events have ceased to constitute autonomous cycles, to follow the abstract patterns of biology and psychology, and have received a new meaning."
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior (1942), as translated by Alden Fisher (1963), p. 203
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/El_Greco
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El Greco
Doménikos Theotokópoulos (Greek language: Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος, 1541–7 April 1614), most widely known as El Greco (Spanish language for "The Greek"), was a painter, sculptor, and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. The nickname "El Greco" refers both to his Greek origin and Spanish citizenship. The artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek alphabet: Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος (Doménikos Theotokópoulos), often adding the word Κρής (Krēs, "Cretan"). El Greco is regar
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