The primacy of imagination and intuition over the subjective character of creation was a fundamental principle of El Greco's (1541-1614) style.
El Greco discarded classicist criteria such as measure and proportion. He believed that grace is the supreme quest of art, but the painter achieves grace only by managing to solve the most complex problems with ease.
El Greco regarded color as the most important and the most ungovernable element of painting, and declared that color had primacy over form.
Francisco Pacheco, a painter and theoretician who visited El Greco in 1611, wrote that the painter liked "the colors crude and unmixed in great blots as a boastful display of his dexterity" and that "he believed in constant repainting and retouching in order to make the broad masses tell flat as in nature".