Few other painters of the sixteenth-century speak with such a clear voice to some of the major concerns, if not debates of this particular field of the discipline of Art History: the geography of art, for example; the coexistence of diverse and conflicting temporalities within one and the same historical period-in other words, how painters reflected on the relation of their art to the past, and maybe also to their future viewers; and, last but not least, the way artists' mobility in this period challenges the nationalistic burden that shaped art history since it was born as a modern humanistic discipline. El Greco did not only transition across two very different geographies, he also travelled across two worlds that had very different, if not opposite ways to think of the place of the art of painting in relation to the traditions that legitimized its practice: the evangelical fathers for the Cretan icon-painters of the maniera greca, on the one hand; the authority of nature and the legendary traces of a remote, lost, antiquity for his Italian contemporaries, on the other. ...the book compares El Greco's strategy to that of other contemporary painters such as Federico Zuccaro (a painter with whom El Greco did not only come across both in Spain and in Italy, but might have been responsible for giving him a copy of Giorgio Vasari's Lives in whose margins the Greek would later scribble his thoughts). Overall, however, Livia Stoenescu's The Pictorial Art of El Greco is a thoughtful and stimulating introduction to the art of the Cretan artist, filled with intuitive and subtle observations that-meeting the author's promise in the introduction-succeed in presenting El Greco's radical originality, his "extravagant" style as some