[edit] Life
[edit] Early years and family
Born in 1541, in either the village of Fodele or Candia (the Venetian name of Chandax, present day Heraklion) in Crete,[c] El Greco was descended from a prosperous urban family, which had probably been driven out of Chania to Candia after an uprising against the Venetians between 1526 and 1528. El Greco's father, Geórgios Theotokópoulos (d. 1556), was a merchant and tax collector. Nothing is known about his mother or his first wife, a Greek woman. El Greco's older brother, Manoússos Theotokópoulos (1531 – December 13, 1604), was a wealthy merchant and spent the last years of his life (1603–1604) in El Greco's Toledo home.
El Greco received his initial training as an icon painter of the Cretan school, the leading centre of post-Byzantine art. In addition to painting, he probably studied the classics of ancient Greece, and perhaps the Latin classics also; he left a "working library" of 130 books at his death, including the Bible in Greek and an annotated Vasari. Candia was a center for artistic activity where Eastern and Western cultures co-existed harmoniously, where around two hundred painters were active during the 16th century, and had organized a painters' guild, based on the Italian model. In 1563, at the age of twenty-two, El Greco was described in a document as a "master" ("maestro Domenigo"), meaning he was already a master of the guild and presumably operating his own workshop. Three years later, in June 1566, as a witness to a contract, he signed his name as μαΐστρος Μένεγος Θεοτοκόπουλος σγουράφος (Master Menégos Theotokópoulos, painter).[d]
Most scholars believe that the Theotokópoulos "family was almost certainly Greek Orthodox", although some Catholic sources still claim him from birth.[e] Like many Orthodox emigrants to Europe, he apparently transferred to Catholicism after his arrival, and certainly practiced as a Catholic in Spain, where he described himself as a "devout Catholic" in his will. The extensive archival research conducted since the early 1960s by scholars, such as Nikolaos Panayotakis, Pandelis Prevelakis and Maria Constantoudaki, indicates strongly that El Greco's family and ancestors were Greek Orthodox. One of his uncles was an Orthodox priest, and his name is not mentioned in the Catholic archival baptismal records on Crete. Prevelakis goes even further, expressing his doubt that El Greco was ever a practicing Roman Catholic.
[edit] Italy
It was natural for the young El Greco to pursue his career in Venice, Crete having been a possession of the Republic of Venice since 1211. Though the exact year is not clear, most scholars agree that El Greco went to Venice around 1567.[f] Knowledge of El Greco's years in Italy is limited. He lived in Venice until 1570 and, according to a letter written by his much older friend, the greatest miniaturist of the age, the Croatian Giulio Clovio, was a "disciple" of Titian, who was by then in his eighties but still vigorous. This may mean he worked in Titian's large studio, or not. Clovio characterized El Greco as "a rare talent in painting".
In 1570, El Greco moved to Rome, where he executed a series of works strongly marked by his Venetian apprenticeship. It is unknown how long he remained in Rome, though he may have returned to Venice (c. 1575–1576) before he left for Spain. In Rome, on the recommendation of Giulio Clovio, El Greco was received as a guest at the Palazzo Farnese, which Cardinal Alessandro Farnese had made a centre of the artistic and intellectual life of the city. There he came into contact with the intellectual elite of the city, including the Roman scholar Fulvio Orsini, whose collection would later include seven paintings by the artist (View of Mt. Sinai and a portrait of Clovio are among them).
Unlike other Cretan artists who had moved to Venice, El Greco substantially altered his style and sought to distinguish himself by inventing new and unusual interpretations of traditional religious subject matter. His works painted in Italy were influenced by the Venetian Renaissance style of the period, with agile, elongated figures reminiscent of Tintoretto and a chromatic framework that connects him to Titian. The Venetian painters also taught him to organize his multi-figured compositions in landscapes vibrant with atmospheric light. Clovio reports visiting El Greco on a summer's day while the artist was still in Rome. El Greco was sitting in a darkened room, because he found the darkness more conducive to thought than the light of the day, which disturbed his "inner light". As a result of his stay in Rome, his works were enriched with elements such as violent perspective vanishing points or strange attitudes struck by the figures with their repeated twisting and turning and tempestuous gestures; all elements of Mannerism.
By the time El Greco arrived in Rome, Michelangelo and Raphael were dead, but their example continued to be paramount and left little room for different approaches. Although the artistic heritage of these great masters was overwhelming for young painters, El Greco was determined to make his own mark in Rome defending his personal artistic views, ideas and style. He singled out Correggio and Parmigianino for particular praise, but he did not hesitate to dismiss Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel;[g] he extended an offer to Pope Pius V to paint over the whole work in accord with the new and stricter Catholic thinking. When he was later asked what he thought about Michelangelo, El Greco replied that "he was a good man, but he did not know how to paint". And thus we are confronted by a paradox: El Greco is said to have reacted most strongly or even condemned Michelangelo, but he had found it impossible to withstand his influence. Michelangelo's influence can be seen in later El Greco works such as the Allegory of the Holy League. By painting portraits of Michelangelo, Titian, Clovio and, presumably, Raphael in one of his works (The Purification of the Temple), El Greco not only expressed his gratitude but advanced the claim to rival these masters. As his own commentaries indicate, El Greco viewed Titian, Michelangelo and Raphael as models to emulate. In his 17th century Chronicles, Giulio Mancini included El Greco among the painters who had initiated, in various ways, a re-evaluation of Michelangelo's teachings.
Because of his unconventional artistic beliefs (such as his dismissal of Michelangelo's technique) and personality, El Greco soon acquired enemies in Rome. Architect and writer Pirro Ligorio called him a "foolish foreigner", and newly discovered archival material reveals a skirmish with Farnese, who obliged the young artist to leave his palace. On July 6, 1572, El Greco officially complained about this event. A few months later, on September 18, 1572, El Greco paid his dues to the Guild of Saint Luke in Rome as a miniature painter. At the end of that year, El Greco opened his own workshop and hired as assistants the painters Lattanzio Bonastri de Lucignano and Francisco Preboste.
[edit] Spain
[edit] Immigration to Toledo
In 1577, El Greco emigrated first to Madrid, then to Toledo, where he produced his mature works. At the time, Toledo was the religious capital of Spain and a populous city[h] with "an illustrious past, a prosperous present and an uncertain future". In Rome, El Greco had earned the respect of some intellectuals, but was also facing the hostility of certain art critics. During the 1570s the huge monastery-palace of El Escorial was still under construction and Philip II of Spain was experiencing difficulties in finding good artists for the many large paintings required to decorate it. Titian was dead, and Tintoretto, Veronese and Anthonis Mor all refused to come to Spain. Philip had to rely on the lesser talent of Juan Fernándes de Navarrete, whose gravedad y decoro ("seriousness and decorum") the king approved. However, he had just died in 1579; the moment should have been ideal for El Greco. Through Clovio and Orsini, El Greco met Benito Arias Montano, a Spanish humanist and agent of Philip; Pedro Chacón, a clergyman; and Luis de Castilla, son of Diego de Castilla, the dean of the Cathedral of Toledo. El Greco's friendship with Castilla would secure his first large commissions in Toledo. He arrived in Toledo by July 1577, and signed contracts for a group of paintings that was to adorn the church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo and for the renowned El Espolio. By September 1579 he had completed nine paintings for Santo Domingo, including The Trinity and The Assumption of the Virgin. These works would establish the painter's reputation in Toledo.
El Greco did not plan to settle permanently in Toledo, since his final aim was to win the favor of Philip and make his mark in his court. Indeed, he did manage to secure two important commissions from the monarch: Allegory of the Holy League and Martyrdom of St. Maurice. However, the king did not like these works and placed the St Maurice altarpiece in the chapter-house rather than the intended chapel. He gave no further commissions to El Greco. The exact reasons for the king's dissatisfaction remain unclear. Some scholars have suggested that Philip did not like the inclusion of living persons in a religious scene; some others that El Greco's works violated a basic rule of the Counter-Reformation, namely that in the image the content was paramount rather than the style. Philip took a close interest in his artistic commissions, and had very decided tastes; a long sought-after sculpted Crucifixion by Benvenuto Cellini also failed to please when it arrived, and was likewise exiled to a less prominent place. Philip's next experiment, with Federico Zuccari was even less successful. In any case, Philip's dissatisfaction ended any hopes of royal patronage El Greco may have had.
[edit] Mature works and later years
Lacking the favor of the king, El Greco was obliged to remain in Toledo, where he had been received in 1577 as a great painter. According to Hortensio Félix Paravicino, a 17th-century Spanish preacher and poet, "Crete gave him life and the painter's craft, Toledo a better homeland, where through Death he began to achieve eternal life." In 1585, he appears to have hired an assistant, Italian painter Francisco Preboste, and to have established a workshop capable of producing altar frames and statues as well as paintings. On March 12, 1586 he obtained the commission for The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, now his best-known work. The decade 1597 to 1607 was a period of intense activity for El Greco. During these years he received several major commissions, and his workshop created pictorial and sculptural ensembles for a variety of religious institutions. Among his major commissions of this period were three altars for the Chapel of San José in Toledo (1597–1599); three paintings (1596–1600) for the Colegio de Doña María de Aragon, an Augustinian monastery in Madrid, and the high altar, four lateral altars, and the painting St. Ildefonso for the Capilla Mayor of the Hospital de la Caridad (Hospital of Charity) at Illescas (1603–1605). The minutes of the commission of The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception (1607–1613), which were composed by the personnel of the municipality, describe El Greco as "one of the greatest men in both this kingdom and outside it".
Between 1607 and 1608 El Greco was involved in a protracted legal dispute with the authorities of the Hospital of Charity at Illescas concerning payment for his work, which included painting, sculpture and architecture;[i] this and other legal disputes contributed to the economic difficulties he experienced towards the end of his life. In 1608, he received his last major commission: for the Hospital of Saint John the Baptist in Toledo.
El Greco made Toledo his home. Surviving contracts mention him as the tenant from 1585 onwards of a complex consisting of three apartments and twenty-four rooms which belonged to the Marquis de Villena. It was in these apartments, which also served as his workshop, that he passed the rest of his life, painting and studying. He lived in considerable style, sometimes employing musicians to play whilst he dined. It is not confirmed whether he lived with his Spanish female companion, Jerónima de Las Cuevas, whom he probably never married. She was the mother of his only son, Jorge Manuel, born in 1578, who also became a painter, assisted his father, and continued to repeat his compositions for many years after he inherited the studio.[j] In 1604, Jorge Manuel and Alfonsa de los Morales gave birth to El Greco's grandson, Gabriel, who was baptized by Gregorio Angulo, governor of Toledo and a personal friend of the artist.
During the course of the execution of a commission for the Hospital Tavera, El Greco fell seriously ill, and a month later, on April 7, 1614, he died. A few days earlier, on March 31, he had directed that his son should have the power to make his will. Two Greeks, friends of the painter, witnessed this last will and testament (El Greco never lost touch with his Greek origins). He was buried in the Church of Santo Domingo el Antigua, aged 73.
[edit] Art
[edit] Technique and style
The primacy of imagination and intuition over the subjective character of creation was a fundamental principle of El Greco's 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 if he manages to solve the most complex problems with obvious 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".
Art historian Max Dvořák was the first scholar to connect El Greco's art with Mannerism and Antinaturalism. Modern scholars characterize El Greco's theory as "typically Mannerist" and pinpoint its sources in the Neoplatonism of the Renaissance. Jonathan Brown believes that El Greco endeavored to create a sophisticated form of art; according to Nicholas Penny "once in Spain, El Greco was able to create a style of his own — one that disavowed most of the descriptive ambitions of painting".
In his mature works El Greco demonstrated a characteristic tendency to dramatize rather than to describe. The strong spiritual emotion transfers from painting directly to the audience. According to Pacheco, El Greco's perturbed, violent and at times seemingly careless-in-execution art was due to a studied effort to acquire a freedom of style. El Greco's preference for exceptionally tall and slender figures and elongated compositions, which served both his expressive purposes and aesthetic principles, led him to disregard the laws of nature and elongate his compositions to ever greater extents, particularly when they were destined for altarpieces. The anatomy of the human body becomes even more otherworldly in El Greco's mature works; for The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception El Greco asked to lengthen the altarpiece itself by another 1.5�feet (0.46�m) "because in this way the form will be perfect and not reduced, which is the worst thing that can happen to a figure'". A significant innovation of El Greco's mature works is the interweaving between form and space; a reciprocal relationship is developed between the two which completely unifies the painting surface. This interweaving would re-emerge three centuries later in the works of Cézanne and Picasso.
Another characteristic of El Greco's mature style is the use of light. As Jonathan Brown notes, "each figure seems to carry its own light within or reflects the light that emanates from an unseen source". Fernando Marias and Agustín Bustamante García, the scholars who transcribed El Greco's handwritten notes, connect the power that the painter gives to light with the ideas underlying Christian Neo-Platonism.
Modern scholarly research emphasizes the importance of Toledo for the complete development of El Greco's mature style and stresses the painter's ability to adjust his style in accordance with his surroundings. Harold Wethey asserts that "although Greek by descent and Italian by artistic preparation, the artist became so immersed in the religious environment of Spain that he became the most vital visual representative of Spanish mysticism". He believes that in El Greco's mature works "the devotional intensity of mood reflects the religious spirit of Roman Catholic Spain in the period of the Counter-Reformation".
El Greco also excelled as a portraitist, able not only to record a sitter's features but also to convey their character. His portraits are fewer in number than his religious paintings, but are of equally high quality. Wethey says that "by such simple means, the artist created a memorable characterization that places him in the highest rank as a portraitist, along with Titian and Rembrandt".
[edit] Suggested Byzantine affinities
Since the beginning of the 20th century, scholars have debated whether El Greco's style had Byzantine origins. Certain art historians had asserted that El Greco's roots were firmly in the Byzantine tradition, and that his most individual characteristics derive directly from the art of his ancestors, while others had argued that Byzantine art could not be related to El Greco's later work.
The discovery of the Dormition of the Virgin on Syros, an authentic and signed work from the painter's Cretan period, and the extensive archival research in the early 1960s, contributed to the rekindling and reassessment of these theories. Although following many conventions of the Byzantine icon, aspects of the style certainly show Venetian influence, and the composition, showing the death of Mary, combines the different doctrines of the Orthodox Dormition of the Virgin and the Catholic Assumption of the Virgin. Significant scholarly works of the second half of the 20th century devoted to El Greco reappraise many of the interpretations of his work, including his supposed Byzantinism. Based on the notes written in El Greco's own hand, on his unique style, and on the fact that El Greco signed his name in Greek characters, they see an organic continuity between Byzantine painting and his art. According to Marina Lambraki-Plaka "far from the influence of Italy, in a neutral place which was intellectually similar to his birthplace, Candia, the Byzantine elements of his education emerged and played a catalytic role in the new conception of the image which is presented to us in his mature work". In making this judgement, Lambraki-Plaka disagrees with Oxford University professors Cyril Mango and Elizabeth Jeffreys, who assert that "despite claims to the contrary, the only Byzantine element of his famous paintings was his signature in Greek lettering". Nikos Hadjinikolaou states that from 1570 El Greco's painting is "neither Byzantine nor post-Byzantine but Western European. The works he produced in Italy belong to the history of the Italian art, and those he produced in Spain to the history of Spanish art".
The English art historian David Davies seeks the roots of El Greco's style in the intellectual sources of his Greek-Christian education and in the world of his recollections from the liturgical and ceremonial aspect of the Orthodox Church. Davies believes that the religious climate of the Counter-Reformation and the aesthetics of mannerism acted as catalysts to activate his individual technique. He asserts that the philosophies of Platonism and ancient Neo-Platonism, the works of Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the texts of the Church fathers and the liturgy offer the keys to the understanding of El Greco's style. Summarizing the ensuing scholarly debate on this issue, José Álvarez Lopera, curator at the Museo del Prado, Madrid, concludes that the presence of "Byzantine memories" is obvious in El Greco's mature works, though there are still some obscure issues concerning his Byzantine origins needing further illumination.
[edit] Architecture and sculpture
El Greco was highly esteemed as an architect and sculptor during his lifetime. He usually designed complete altar compositions, working as architect and sculptor as well as painter – at, for instance, the Hospital de la Caridad. There he decorated the chapel of the hospital, but the wooden altar and the sculptures he created have in all probability perished. For El Espolio the master designed the original altar of gilded wood which has been destroyed, but his small sculptured group of the Miracle of St. Ildefonso still survives on the lower centre of the frame.
His most important architectural achievement was the church and Monastery of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, for which he also executed sculptures and paintings. El Greco is regarded as a painter who incorporated architecture in his painting. He is also credited with the architectural frames to his own paintings in Toledo. Pacheco characterized him as "a writer of painting, sculpture and architecture".
In the marginalia that El Greco inscribed in his copy of Daniele Barbaro's translation of Vitruvius' De architectura, he refuted Vitruvius' attachment to archaeological remains, canonical proportions, perspective and mathematics. He also saw Vitruvius' manner of distorting proportions in order to compensate for distance from the eye as responsible for creating monstrous forms. El Greco was averse to the very idea of rules in architecture; he believed above all in the freedom of invention and defended novelty, variety, and complexity. These ideas were, however, far too extreme for the architectural circles of his era and had no immediate resonance.
[edit] Legacy
[edit] Posthumous critical reputation
El Greco was disdained by the immediate generations after his death because his work was opposed in many respects to the principles of the early baroque style which came to the fore near the beginning of the 17th century and soon supplanted the last surviving traits of the 16th-century Mannerism. El Greco was deemed incomprehensible and had no important followers. Only his son and a few unknown painters produced weak copies of his works. Late 17th- and early 18th-century Spanish commentators praised his skill but criticized his antinaturalistic style and his complex iconography. Some of these commentators, such as Acislo Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco and Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez, described his mature work as "contemptible", "ridiculous" and "worthy of scorn". The views of Palomino and Bermúdez were frequently repeated in Spanish historiography, adorned with terms such as "strange", "queer", "original", "eccentric" and "odd". The phrase "sunk in eccentricity", often encountered in such texts, in time developed into "madness".[j]
With the arrival of Romantic sentiments in the late 18th century, El Greco's works were examined anew. To French writer Théophile Gautier, El Greco was the precursor of the European Romantic movement in all its craving for the strange and the extreme. Gautier regarded El Greco as the ideal romantic hero (the "gifted", the "misunderstood", the "mad"),[k] and was the first who explicitly expressed his admiration for El Greco's later technique. French art critics Zacharie Astruc and Paul Lefort helped to promote a widespread revival of interest in his painting. In the 1890s, Spanish painters living in Paris adopted him as their guide and mentor. However, in the popular English-speaking imagination he remained the man who "painted horrors in the Escorial" in the words of Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia in 1899.
In 1908, Spanish art historian Manuel Bartolomé Cossío published the first comprehensive catalogue of El Greco's works; in this book El Greco was presented as the founder of the Spanish School. The same year Julius Meier-Graefe, a scholar of French Impressionism, travelled in Spain, expecting to study Velásquez, but instead becoming fascinated by El Greco; he recorded his experiences in Spanische Reise (Spanish Journey, published in English in 1926), the book which widely established El Greco as a great painter of the past "outside a somewhat narrow circle". In El Greco's work, Meier-Graefe found foreshadowing of modernity. These are the words Meier-Graefe used to describe El Greco's impact on the artistic movements of his time:
To the English artist and critic Roger Fry in 1920, El Greco was the archetypal genius who did as he thought best "with complete indifference to what effect the right expression might have on the public". Fry described El Greco as "an old master who is not merely modern, but actually appears a good many steps ahead of us, turning back to show us the way".
During the same period, other researchers developed alternate, more radical theories. The physicians August Goldschmidt and Germán Beritens argued that El Greco painted such elongated human figures because he had vision problems (possibly progressive astigmatism or strabismus) that made him see bodies longer than they were, and at an angle to the perpendicular;[l] the physician Arturo Perera, however, attributed this style to the use of marijuana. Michael Kimmelman, a reviewer for The New York Times, stated that "to Greeks [El Greco] became the quintessential Greek painter; to the Spanish, the quintessential Spaniard".
As was proved by the campaign of the National Art Gallery in Athens to raise the funds for the purchase of Saint Peter in 1995, El Greco is loved not just by experts and art lovers but also by ordinary people; thanks to the donations mainly of individuals and public benefit foundations the National Art Gallery raised 1.2 million dollars and purchased the painting. Epitomizing the consensus of El Greco's impact, Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the United States, said in April 1980 that El Greco was "the most extraordinary painter that ever came along back then" and that he was "maybe three or four centuries ahead of his time".
[edit] Influence on other artists
El Greco's re-evaluation was not limited to scholars. According to Efi Foundoulaki, "painters and theoreticians from the beginning of the 20th century 'discovered' a new El Greco but in process they also discovered and revealed their own selves". His expressiveness and colors influenced Eugène Delacroix and Édouard Manet. To the Blaue Reiter group in Munich in 1912, El Greco typified that mystical inner construction that it was the task of their generation to rediscover. The first painter who appears to have noticed the structural code in the morphology of the mature El Greco was Paul Cézanne, one of the forerunners of cubism. Comparative morphological analyses of the two painters revealed their common elements, such as the distortion of the human body, the reddish and (in appearance only) unworked backgrounds and the similarities in the rendering of space. According to Brown, "Cézanne and El Greco are spiritual brothers despite the centuries which separate them". Fry observed that Cézanne drew from "his great discovery of the permeation of every part of the design with a uniform and continuous plastic theme".
The Symbolists, and Pablo Picasso during his Blue Period, drew on the cold tonality of El Greco, utilizing the anatomy of his ascetic figures. While Picasso was working on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, he visited his friend Ignacio Zuloaga in his studio in Paris and studied El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal (owned by Zuloaga since 1897). The relation between Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and the Opening of the Fifth Seal was pinpointed in the early 1980s, when the stylistic similarities and the relationship between the motifs of both works were analysed.
The early cubist explorations of Picasso were to uncover other aspects in the work of El Greco: structural analysis of his compositions, multi-faced refraction of form, interweaving of form and space, and special effects of highlights. Several traits of cubism, such as distortions and the materialistic rendering of time, have their analogies in El Greco's work. According to Picasso, El Greco's structure is cubist. On February 22, 1950, Picasso began his series of "paraphrases" of other painters' works with The Portrait of a Painter after El Greco. Foundoulaki asserts that Picasso "completed ... the process for the activation of the painterly values of El Greco which had been started by Manet and carried on by Cézanne".
The expressionists focused on the expressive distortions of El Greco. According to Franz Marc, one of the principal painters of the German expressionist movement, "we refer with pleasure and with steadfastness to the case of El Greco, because the glory of this painter is closely tied to the evolution of our new perceptions on art". Jackson Pollock, a major force in the abstract expressionist movement, was also influenced by El Greco. By 1943, Pollock had completed sixty drawing compositions after El Greco and owned three books on the Cretan master.
Contemporary painters are also inspired by El Greco's art. Kysa Johnson used El Greco's paintings of the Immaculate Conception as the compositional framework for some of her works, and the master's anatomical distortions are somewhat reflected in Fritz Chesnut's portraits.
El Greco's personality and work were a source of inspiration for poet Rainer Maria Rilke. One set of Rilke's poems (Himmelfahrt Mariae I.II., 1913) was based directly on El Greco's Immaculate Conception. Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, who felt a great spiritual affinity for El Greco, called his autobiography Report to Greco and wrote a tribute to the Cretan-born artist.
In 1998, the Greek electronic composer and artist Vangelis published El Greco, a symphonic album inspired by the artist. This album is an expansion of an earlier album by Vangelis, Foros Timis Ston Greco (A Tribute to El Greco, Φόρος Τιμής Στον Γκρέκο). The life of the Cretan-born artist is the subject of the recent film El Greco of Greek, Spanish and British production. Directed by Ioannis Smaragdis, the film began shooting in October 2006 on the island of Crete and debuted on the screen one year later; British actor Nick Ashdon has been cast to play El Greco.
[edit] Debates on attribution
The exact number of El Greco's works has been a hotly contested issue. In 1937, a highly influential study by art historian Rodolfo Pallucchini had the effect of greatly increasing the number of works accepted to be by El Greco. Pallucchini attributed to El Greco a small triptych in the Galleria Estense at Modena on the basis of a signature on the painting on the back of the central panel on the Modena triptych ("Χείρ Δομήνιχου", Created by the hand of Doménikos). There was consensus that the triptych was indeed an early work of El Greco and, therefore, Pallucchini's publication became the yardstick for attributions to the artist. Nevertheless, Wethey denied that the Modena triptych had any connection at all with the artist and, in 1962, produced a reactive catalogue raisonné with a greatly reduced corpus of materials. Whereas art historian José Camón Aznar had attributed between 787 and 829 paintings to the Cretan master, Wethey reduced the number to 285 authentic works and Halldor Sœhner, a German researcher of Spanish art, recognized only 137. Wethey and other scholars rejected the notion that Crete took any part in his formation and supported the elimination of a series of works from El Greco's oeuvre.
Since 1962, the discovery of the Dormition and the extensive archival research has gradually convinced scholars that Wethey's assessments were not entirely correct, and that his catalogue decisions may have distorted the perception of the whole nature of El Greco's origins, development and oeuvre. The discovery of the Dormition led to the attribution of three other signed works of "Doménicos" to El Greco (Modena Triptych, St. Luke Painting the Virgin and Child, and The Adoration of the Magi) and then to the acceptance of more works as authentic – some signed, some not (such as The Passion of Christ (Pietà with Angels) painted in 1566), – which were brought into the group of early works of El Greco. El Greco is now seen as an artist with a formative training on Crete; a series of works illuminate the style of early El Greco, some painted while he was still in Crete, some from his period in Venice, and some from his subsequent stay in Rome. Even Wethey accepted that "he [El Greco] probably had painted the little and much disputed triptych in the Galleria Estense at Modena before he left Crete". Nevertheless, disputes over the exact number of El Greco's authentic works remain unresolved, and the status of Wethey's catalogue raisonné is at the centre of these disagreements.
A few sculptures, including Epimetheus and Pandora, have been attributed to El Greco. This doubtful attribution is based on the testimony of Pacheco (he saw in El Greco's studio a series of figurines, but these may have been merely models). There are also four drawings among the surviving works of El Greco; three of them are preparatory works for the altarpiece of Santo Domingo el Antiguo and the fourth is a study for one of his paintings, The Crucifixion.

Summary:
El Greco (1541 – April 7, 1614) was a painter, sculptor, and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. "El Greco" (The Greek) was a nickname,[a][b] a reference to his Greek origin, and the artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος (Doménikos Theotokópoulos).
El Greco was born in Crete, which was at that time part of the Republic of Venice, and the centre of Post-Byzantine art. He trained and became a master within that tradition before travelling at age 26 to Venice, as other Greek artists had done. In 1570 he moved to Rome, where he opened a workshop and executed a series of works. During his stay in Italy, El Greco enriched his style with elements of Mannerism and of the Venetian Renaissance. In 1577, he moved to Toledo, Spain, where he lived and worked until his death. In Toledo, El Greco received several major commissions and produced his best known paintings.
El Greco's dramatic and expressionistic style was met with puzzlement by his contemporaries but found appreciation in the 20th century. El Greco is regarded as a precursor of both Expressionism and Cubism, while his personality and works were a source of inspiration for poets and writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Nikos Kazantzakis. El Greco has been characterized by modern scholars as an artist so individual that he belongs to no conventional school. He is best known for tortuously elongated figures and often fantastic or phantasmagorical pigmentation, marrying Byzantine traditions with those of Western painting.


[edit] Plot
The film opens with a series of grainy, color-warped still photographs appearing over melancholy piano music, representing the abstract memories of the unseen Herman Raucher (Robert Mulligan narrating in voiceover), a middle-aged man from Brooklyn. After the stills finish, we hear Raucher speaking in the present day (1971 according to the book), recalling the summer he spent on the island (fictionalized in the novel as "Packett Island") in 1942. The film flashes back to a day that then 15-year-old "Hermie" (Gary Grimes) and his friends�– jock Oscy (Jerry Houser) and introverted nerd Benjie (Oliver Conant)�– spent running and playing on the beach. In the middle of their goofing off, the three boys spot a newlywed young soldier carrying his bride (Jennifer O'Neill) into a house on the beach. The boys are all struck by her beauty, especially Hermie, who finds himself unable to get her out of his mind.
The next several days on the island find the boys continuing to spend their afternoons on the beach, where, in the midst of young, scantily-clad teenage girls, their thoughts invariably turn to sex; all of them are virgins, the height of their experience being when Oscy and Hermie touched a girl's breasts when they were twelve. While Oscy is more interested in sex with gorgeous girls, however, Hermie finds himself developing genuine romantic interest in the young bride, whose husband he spots leaving the island on a military transport boat one morning. Later that day, Hermie spots her trying to carry numerous bags of groceries by herself, and helps her get them back to her house. The two strike up a friendship and he agrees to return in the future to help her out with chores.
Meanwhile, Benjie mentions that one of the books kept in the beach house his parents are renting is a sex manual. Oscy and Hermie convince the reluctant Benjie to steal the book; upon reading it, Oscy and Hermie become convinced they now know everything necessary to lose their virginity and become great lovers. They decide to put this hypothesis to the test by going to the island film house and picking up a trio of girls; Oscy happens to find three high-school girls, and sets about staking out the most attractive one, Miriam (Christopher Norris), for himself, "giving" Hermie her wallflower friend, Aggie (Katherine Allentuck) and leaving Benjie with Gloria, a heavyset girl with braces. Frightened by the reality of the concept of sex, Benjie runs away into the night, and is not seen by Hermie or Oscy again the whole summer. Gloria, thinking that her appearance repulsed Benjie, likewise walks away. Hermie and Oscy spend the entirety of the film (Now, Voyager - an anachronism, as that film wasn't released until October 1942) attempting to "score" with Miriam and Aggie, Oscy aggressively pursuing Miriam to the point that she strikes him, although Oscy soon learns that she is the island "hussy" and simply playing hard to get. Hermie, meanwhile, finds himself getting unexpected success with Aggie, who allows him to grope her breast for almost twelve minutes; it isn't until after the show Oscy points out to Hermie the reason for Aggie's passivity was that Hermie was in fact fondling her elbow.
The following morning, Hermie helps the young bride move boxes into her attic, and when he turns down her offer of monetary compensation, she thanks him for his honesty and friendship and gives him a kiss on the forehead. Later, in preparation for a marshmallow roast on the beach with Aggie and Miriam, Hermie and Oscy make carbon copies from the sex manual; then Hermie goes to the local drugstore, and in a protracted sequence attempts to build up the nerve to ask the pharmacist for condoms. He eventually does so, after purchasing some ice cream, telling the pharmacist that the condoms are for his "brother" and he thinks that they are, in fact, a type of water balloon.
That night, during the marshmallow roast, Hermie finds himself unable to "put the moves" on Aggie, although Oscy is successful in having sex with Miriam between some sand dunes; he is so successful, in fact, he eventually sneaks over to where Hermie and Aggie are roasting marshmallows and asks Hermie to give him some condoms, having run out of his own. Confused as to what's happening, Aggie follows Oscy back between the dunes, where she sees him having sex with Miriam and runs home crying. Hermie, too, sees the act, although he is more mesmerized than anything.
The next day, Hermie comes across the young bride sitting outside her house, writing a letter to her husband. Hermie offers to come keep her company that night and she says she looks forward to seeing him, finally revealing that her name is Dorothy. An elated Hermie goes home and puts on a suit, saddle shoes, and a dress shirt, and heads back to Dorothy's house, running into Oscy on the way; Oscy relates Miriam's appendix burst that morning and she's been rushed to the mainland. Hermie, now convinced he is at the brink of adulthood because of his relationship with Dorothy, brushes Oscy off and the two get into a fight. Oscy threatens to tell everyone on the island that Hermie is a homosexual, and storms off.
Hermie heads over to Dorothy's house, which he finds eerily quiet. Sneaking in, he discovers an empty bottle of whiskey, several cigarette butts, and a telegram from the U.S. Government, with a time stamp of just an hour prior, saying that Dorothy's husband is dead, his plane having been shot down over France. Dorothy comes out of her bedroom, crying, and Hermie comforts her. She moves to the record player and turns on an album and invites Hermie to dance with her. Near the end of the song, Dorothy kisses Hermie and the two embrace, slowly moving to the bedroom, where she makes love with him. Afterwards, Dorothy puts on her bathrobe and retires to the porch while Hermie dresses alone in her bedroom. He approaches her on the porch, where she can only say "good night" to him. Hermie leaves, his last image of Dorothy being that of her leaning against the railing, as she smokes a cigarette and stares off into the night sky.
Hermie spends the entire night roaming the island in a state of shock. At dawn he meets Oscy and the two share a silent moment of reconciliation, broken only by Oscy's informing Hermie that Miriam survived her appendix bursting but will remain hospitalized until autumn. Sensing that something traumatic has occurred between Hermie and Dorothy, Oscy, in an uncharacteristic act of sensitivity, lets Hermie be by himself, departing with the words, "Sometimes life is just one big pain in the ass."
Hermie goes back to Dorothy's house to try to sort out what has happened; he finds it abandoned, Dorothy having fled the island in the night. All that remains is an envelope tacked to her front door with Hermie's name on it. Hermie opens it; inside is a note from Dorothy, saying that she hopes he understands that she must go back home to arrange her husband's funeral and deal with familial obligations. She assures Hermie that she will never forget him, and that she hopes one day he will come to terms with what happened that night. Her note closes with the hope that Hermie may be spared the senseless tragedies of life.
In the film's final scene, Hermie is seen looking at Dorothy's old house and the ocean and remembering the day that he, Oscy, and Benjie first saw her, as the adult Herman Raucher sadly recounts that in the ensuing years he has never seen Dorothy again or learned what became of her.
[edit] Factual basis
The film (and subsequent novel) were memoirs written by Herman Raucher; they detailed the events in his life over the course of the summer he spent on Nantucket Island in 1942 when he was fourteen years old. Originally, the film was meant to be a tribute to his friend Oscar "Oscy" Seltzer, an Army medic killed in the Korean War. Seltzer was shot dead on a battlefield in Korea whilst attending to a wounded man; this happened on Raucher's birthday, and consequently, Raucher has not celebrated a birthday since. During the course of writing the screenplay, Raucher came to the realization that despite growing up with Oscy and having bonded with him through their formative years, the two had never really had any meaningful conversations or gotten to know one another on a more personal level.
Instead, Raucher decided to focus on the first major adult experience of his life, that of falling in love for the first time. The woman (named Dorothy, like her screen counterpart) was a fellow vacationer on the island whom Raucher had befriended one day when he helped her carry groceries home; he became a friend of her and her husband and helped her with chores after her husband was called to fight in World War II. Raucher went to bed with her one night when he came to visit her, arriving only minutes after she received notification of her husband's death. The next morning, Raucher discovered that she had left the island, leaving behind a note for him (which is read at the end of the film and reproduced in the book). He never saw her again; his last "encounter" with her, recounted on an episode of The Mike Douglas Show, came after the film's release in 1971, when she was one of over a dozen women who wrote letters to Raucher claiming to be "his" Dorothy. Raucher recognized the "real" Dorothy's handwriting, and she confirmed her identity by making references to certain events only she could have known about. She told Raucher that she had lived for years with the guilt that she had potentially traumatized him and ruined his life. She told Raucher that she was glad he turned out all right, and that they had best not re-visit the past.
In a 2002 interview, Raucher lamented never hearing from her again and expressed his hope that she was still alive. Raucher's novelization of the screenplay, with the dedication, "To those I love, past and present," serves more as the tribute to Seltzer that he had intended the film to be, with the focus of the book being more on the two boys' relationship than Raucher's relationship with Dorothy. Consequently, the book also mentions Seltzer's death, which is omitted from the film adaptation.
[edit] Production
Herman Raucher wrote the film script in the 1950s during his tenure as a television writer, but "couldn't give it away." In the 1960s, he met Robert Mulligan, who had just finished directing To Kill a Mockingbird. Raucher showed Mulligan the script, and Mulligan took it to Warner Bros., knowing that the studio was looking for a follow up to Mockingbird. Mulligan argued the film could be shot for the relatively low price of a million dollars, and Warner approved it. They had so little faith in the film becoming a box-office success, though, they shied from paying Raucher outright for the script, instead promising him ten percent of the gross.
When casting for the role of Dorothy, Warner Bros. declined to audition any actresses younger than the age of thirty; Jennifer O'Neill's agent, who had developed a fondness for the script, convinced Warner Bros. to audition his client, who was only twenty-two at the time. O'Neill auditioned for the role, albeit hesitantly, not wanting to perform any nude scenes; O'Neill ended up getting the role and Robert Mulligan agreed to find a way to make the film work without blatant nudity.
Though the film took place on Nantucket, by the 1970s the island was too far modernized to be convincingly transformed to resemble a 1940s resort, so production was taken to the West Coast of the United States. Shooting took place over eight weeks, during which Jennifer O'Neill was sequestered from the three boys cast as "The Terrible Trio," in order to ensure that they didn't become close and ruin the sense of awkwardness and distance that their characters felt towards Dorothy. Production ran smoothly, finishing on schedule.
After production, Warner Bros., still wary about the film only being a minor success, asked Raucher to adapt his script into a book. Raucher wrote it in three weeks, and Warner Bros. released it prior to the film to build interest in the story. The book quickly became a national bestseller, so that when trailers premiered in theatres, the film was billed as being "based on the national bestseller," despite the film having been completed first. Ultimately, the book became one of the best selling novels of the first half of the 1970s, requiring 23 re-prints between 1971 and 1974 to keep up with customer demand.
[edit] Soundtrack
The film's soundtrack consists almost entirely of compositions by Michel Legrand, many of which are variants upon "The Summer Knows", the film's theme. In addition to Legrand's scoring, the film also features the song "Hold Tight" by The Andrews Sisters and the theme from Now, Voyager. Due to this lack of songs, when the soundtrack was released, it contained not only the score to Summer, but also Legrand's composition "The Picasso Suite." In spite of this, many issues of the album are still labeled as exclusively being the soundtrack to Summer, while others contain the notation in small print on the album cover "Also contains 'The Picasso Suite'".
[edit] Reception and awards
The film became a blockbuster upon its release, grossing twenty-five million dollars, making it the fourth highest grossing film of 1971 and one of the most successful films in history, with an expense to profit ratio of 1:25; beyond that, it is estimated video rentals and purchases in the United States since the 1980s have produced an additional $20.5 million dollars. On this point, Raucher says his ten-percent of the gross, in addition to royalties from book sales, has "paid bills ever since."
As well as being a commercial success, Summer of '42 also received rave critical reviews. It went on to be nominated for over a dozen awards, including Golden Globe Awards for "Best Motion Picture - Drama" and "Best Director", and the Academy Award for "Best Original Screenplay". Ultimately, the film only won two awards, the "Best Score" Oscar" and the BAFTA Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music, both to Michel Legrand. Still, it counted among its fans Stanley Kubrick, who in a rare moment of pop-culture infusion into his films, had the film play on a television in a scene in The Shining.
[edit] Sequel
In 1973, the film was followed up with a sequel, Class of '44, a slice-of-life film made up of vignettes about Herman Raucher and Oscar Selzter's experiences in college prior to fighting in the Korean War. The only crew member left from Summer of '42 was Raucher himself, with a new director and composer being brought in to replace Mulligan and Legrand. Of the principal four cast members of Summer of '42, only Jerry Houser and Gary Grimes returned for prominent roles. Oliver Conant did appear in the film, albeit for less than five minutes of screen time. Jennifer O'Neill did not appear in the film at all, nor was the character of Dorothy mentioned. The film met with poor critical reviews; the only three reviews available at rottentomatoes.com are resoundingly negative, with Channel 4 calling it "a big disappointment," and The New York Times stating "The only things worth attention in 'Class of 44' are the period details," and "'Class of '44' seems less like a movie than 95 minutes of animated wallpaper."
[edit] Influence
Legrand's theme song for the film, "The Summer Knows", has since become a pop standard, being recorded by such artists as Peter Nero (who had a charting hit with his 1971 version), Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams, and Barbra Streisand.
The 1973 song "Summer (The First Time)" by Bobby Goldsboro has almost exactly the same subject and apparent setting, although there is no direct credited link. Bryan Adams has, however, credited the film as being a partial inspiration for his 1985 hit "Summer of '69".
The Simpsons episode "Summer of 4 Ft. 2" (alternately titled 'Summer of 4'2"') was largely a parody of Summer of '42. It amalgamated scenes from another early '70s coming-of-age film, American Graffiti (both acknowledged in the DVD commentary for the episode).
There are also similarities between Summer of '42 and Malèna, another coming-of-age film set in the context of World War II, and starring Monica Bellucci and Giuseppe Sulfaro.
An episode of the 1970s sitcom Happy Days was loosely based upon Summer of '42, with Richie Cunningham befriending a Korean War widow.
In Family Guy episode "Play It Again, Brian", Brian wins an award for his essay and reads an excerpt: "She was Grace, in name and in essence. To those she loved, she exuded strength, life, laughter and light, and to me, also sorrow for circumstance that had bound her to my best friend through whom we met in the warmth and serenity of her home. Nothing from the first day I saw her and no one that has happened to me since, has ever been as frightning and as confusing, for no person I've ever known has ever done more to make me feel more sure, more insecure, more important and less significant." Later in that episode, he admits that he "ripped off" most of the essay from Summer of '42.
[edit] Remakes and re-releases
In the ensuing years since the film's release, Warner Bros. has attempted to buy back Raucher's ten-percent of the film as well as his rights to the story so it could be remade; Raucher has consistently declined. The 1988 film Stealing Home shares numerous similarities not only to Summer of '42 but also Class of '44, with several incidents (most notably a subplot dealing with the premature death of the protagonist's father and the protagonist's response to it) appearing to have been directly lifted from Raucher's own life; Jennifer O'Neill stated in 2002 she believes "Home" was an attempted remake of "Summer".
In 2001, Raucher consented to the film being made into an off Broadway musical play. He was on hand opening night, giving the cast a pep-talk which he concluded, "We've now done it every possible way--except go out and piss it in the snow!" The play met with positive critical and fan response, and was endorsed by Raucher himself, but the play was forced to close down in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks. Nevertheless, the play was enough to spark interest in the film and book with a new generation, prompting Warner to re-issue the book (which had since gone out of print, along with all of Raucher's other works) for sale with Barnes & Noble's online bookstore, and to restore the film and release it on DVD. The musical has since been performed across the country, at venues such as Kalliope Stage in Cleveland Heights, Ohio in 2004 (directed by Paul Gurgol) and Mill Mountain Theatre in Roanake, VA (directed by Jere Hodgin and choreographed by Bernard Monroe), and was subsequently recorded as a concert by the York Theatre Company in 2006.
In 2002, Jennifer O'Neill claimed to have obtained the rights to make a sequel to Summer of '42, based on a short story she wrote, which took place in an alternate reality in which Herman Raucher had a son and divorced his wife, went back to Nantucket in 1962 with a still-living Oscar Seltzer, and encountered Dorothy again and married her. As of 2006, this project—which O'Neill had hoped to produce with Lifetime television, has not been realized, and it is unknown whether O'Neill is still attempting to get it produced, or if Raucher (who technically has no say) consented to its production.

Summary:
Summer of '42 is a 1971 American "coming-of-age" drama film based on the memoirs of screenwriter Herman Raucher. It tells the story of Raucher as a boy, in his early teens on his 1942 summer vacation on Nantucket Island, off the coast of New England, who embarked on a one-sided romance with a woman, Dorothy, whose husband had gone off to fight in World War II. The film was directed by Robert Mulligan, and starred Gary Grimes as Hermie, Jerry Houser as his best friend Oscy, Oliver Conant as their nerdy young friend Benjie, Jennifer O'Neill as Hermie's mysterious love interest, and Katherine Allentuck and Christopher Norris as a pair of girls whom Hermie and Oscy attempt to seduce. Mulligan also has an uncredited role as the voice of the adult Hermie. Academy Award-winning actress Maureen Stapleton (Allentuck's real life mother) also appears in a small, uncredited voice role (calling after Hermie as he leaves the house in an early scene).
Raucher's novelization of his screenplay was released prior to the film's release and became a runaway bestseller, to the point that audiences lost sight of the fact that the book was based on the film and not vice-versa. Though a pop culture phenomenon in the first half of the 1970s, the novelization went out of print and slipped into obscurity throughout the next two decades until a Broadway adaptation in 2001 brought it back into the public light and prompted Barnes & Noble to acquire the publishing rights to the book. The next year, the film received a digitally remastered DVD release from Warner Bros. Today, the book remains in-print.


[edit] Bruges
After the German Army captured much of Belgium following the battle of the Frontiers in 1914, the Allied forces were left holding a thin strip of coastline to the west of the Yser. The remainder of the Belgian coast came under the occupation of German Marine Divisions, including the important strategic ports of Antwerp and Bruges. Whilst Antwerp was a deep water port vulnerable to British attack from the sea, Bruges, sitting six miles (10 km) inland, was comparatively safe from naval bombardment or coastal raids. A network of canals connected Bruges with the coast at Ostend and Zeebrugge, through which small warships such as destroyers, light cruisers and submarines could travel and find a safe harbour from which to launch raids into the English Channel and along the coasts of South-East England. U-boats could also depart from Bruges at night, cutting a day off the journey to the Western Approaches, more easily avoiding the North Sea Mine Barrage and allowing U-boat captains to gain familiarity with the net and mine defences of the English Channel, through which they had to pass to reach the main battlegrounds of the Atlantic.
During 1915 and 1916, the German Navy had developed Bruges from a small Flanders port into a major naval centre with large concrete bunkers for U-boats to shelter from nightly bombing raids, extensive barracks and training facilities for U-boat crews, and similar facilities for other classes of raiding warship. Bruges was therefore a vital asset in the German Navy's increasingly desperate struggle to prevent Britain from receiving food and matériel from the rest of the world. The significance of Bruges was not lost on British naval planners and two previous attempts to close the exit at Ostend, the smaller and narrower of the Bruges canals, had ended in failure. On 7 September 1915, four monitors of the Lord Clive class of the Dover Patrol had bombarded the dockyard, while German coastal artillery returned fire. Only 14 rounds were fired by the British with the result that only part of the dockyard was set on fire. In a bombardment on 22 September 1917 the lock gates were hit causing the basin to drain at low water.
Two years passed before the next attempt on the Ostend locks. The First Ostend Raid was conducted in tandem with the similar Zeebrugge Raid led by Admiral Roger Keyes on 23 April 1918; a large scale operation to block the wider canal at Zeebrugge. Both attacks largely failed, but whilst at Zeebrugge the operation came so close to success that it took several months for the British authorities to realise that it had been unsuccessful, at Ostend the attack had ended catastrophically. Both blockships intended to close off the canal had grounded over half a mile from their intended location and been scuttled by their crews under heavy artillery and long-range small arms fire, which caused severe casualties. Thus whilst Zeebrugge seemed to be blocked entirely, Ostend was open wide, nullifying any success which might have been achieved at the other port.
[edit] Planning
As British forces on the South-East Coast regrouped, remanned and repaired following heavy losses at Zeebrugge, Keyes planned a return to Ostend with the intention of closing the canal and consequently severing Bruges from the sea, closing the harbour and trapping the 18 U-boats and 25 destroyers present for months to come. Volunteers from amongst the force which had failed in April aided the planning with advice based on bitter experience. Amongst these volunteers were Lieutenant-Commander Henry Hardy of HMS Sirius, Commander Alfred Godsal, former captain of HMS Brilliant, and Brilliant's first lieutenant Victor Crutchley. These officers approached Commodore Hubert Lynes and Admiral Roger Keyes with a refined plan for a second attempt to block the port. Other officers came forward to participate as well and Keyes and Lynes devised an operational plan to attack the canal mouth at Ostend once more.
Two obsolete cruisers, the aged HMS Sappho and the battered veteran of Zeebrugge HMS Vindictive were fitted out for the operation by having their non-essential equipment stripped out, their essential equipment reinforced and picked crews selected from volunteers. The ships' forward ballast tanks were filled with concrete to both protect their bows during the attack, and act as a greater and more lasting obstacle once sunk. Vindictive was commanded by Godsal; her six officers and 48 crew were all volunteer veterans of the previous failed attempt by HMS Brilliant. The two sacrificial cruisers were, as with the previous attack, accompanied by four heavy monitors under Keyes' command, eight destroyers under Lynes in HMS Faulknor and five motor launches. The launches, like the blockships, were all crewed by volunteers; mostly veterans of previous operations against the Belgian ports.
The plan was similar to the failed operation of three weeks previously. Weather dependent, under cover of a smoke screen, aerial bombardment and offshore artillery, the blockships would steam directly into the channel, turn sideways and scuttle themselves. Their advance would be covered by artillery fire against German shore positions from the heavy monitors at distance and at closer range by gunfire from the destroyers. This cover was vital because Ostend was protected by a very strong 11" gun position known as the Tirpitz battery. Once the operation had been concluded, the motor launches would draw along the seaward side of the blockships, remove the surviving crews and take them to the monitors for passage back to Britain. This operation should thoroughly block the channel and coupled with the blockage at Zeebrugge (which the British authorities believed to be fully closed), should prevent use of Bruges by German raiding craft for months to come.
[edit] Attack on Ostend
All preparations for the operation were completed by the first week of May and on the 9 May the weather was near-perfect for the attack. The British armada had collected at Dunkirk in Allied-held France and departed port shortly after dark. Two minutes after midnight, the force suffered a setback when Sappho suffered a minor boiler explosion and had to return to Dunkirk, unable to complete the journey. Although this accident halved the ability of the force to block Ostend, Lynes decided to continue the operation, and at 01.30, the force closed on the port, making the final preparations for the assault. Torpedoes fired from motor launches demolished machine gun posts on the ends of the piers marking the canal, beginning the attack. Ten heavy bombers of the newly-formed Royal Air Force then flew over, dropping incendiary bombs on German positions but not causing significant damage. At the same time, long range artillery of the Royal Marine Artillery opened fire on Ostend from Allied positions around the Belgian town of Ypres.
In preparation for the attack, Godsal and Lynes had carefully consulted available charts of Ostend following the previous operation's failure caused by German repositioning of navigation buoys. This careful study was however rendered worthless by a sudden fog which obliterated all sight of the shore. Steaming back and forth across the harbour entrance in the fog as the monitors and German shore batteries engaged in a long range artillery duel over the lost cruiser, Godsal looked for the piers marking the entrance to the canal. As he searched, two German torpedo boats sailed from Ostend to intercept the cruiser, but in the heavy fog they collided and, disabled, limped back to shore. During this period, Godsal's motor launches lost track of the cruiser in the murk, and it was not until the third pass that Vindictive found the entrance, accompanied by only one of the launches. Heading straight into the mouth of the canal, guided by a flare dropped by the launch, Vindictive became an instant target of the German batteries and was badly damaged, the shellfire exacerbating the damage suffered in the earlier Zeebrugge Raid and seriously damaging Vindictive's port propeller.
Alfred Godsal intended to swing Vindictive broadside on into the channel mouth but as he ordered the turn, the right screw broke down completely, preventing the cruiser from fully turning. Before this was realised on the cruiser's bridge, a shell fired from a gun battery on shore struck Commander Godsal directly, killing him instantly and shattering the bridge structure. Most of the bridge crew were killed or wounded by the blast, including First Lieutenant Victor Crutchley, who staggered to the wheel and attempted to force the ship to make the full turn into the channel. The damaged propeller made this move impossible and the drifting cruiser floated out of the channel and became stuck on a sandbank outside, only partially obscuring the entrance way.
[edit] Evacuation of HMS Vindictive
Realising that further manoeuvring would be pointless, Crutchley ordered the charges to be blown and the ship evacuated. As Engineer-Lieutenant William Bury prepared to detonate the scuttling charges, Crutchley took a survey of the ship and ordered all survivors to take to the boats on the seaward side of the wreck. As men scrambled down the ship's flank away from the shells and machine-gun bullets spitting from the harbour entrance, Crutchley made a final survey with an electric torch looking for wounded men amongst the dead on the decks. Satisfied that none alive remained aboard, he too leapt onto the deck of a motor launch bobbing below. The rescue mission itself however was not going as planned. Of the five motor launches attached to the expedition, only one had remained with cruiser in the fog; ML254 commanded by Lieutenant Geoffrey Drummond. The launch, like the cruiser, was riddled with bullets; her commander was wounded and her executive officer dead. Despite her sheltered position behind the cruiser, fire from shore continued to enfilade the launch and a number of those aboard, including Lieutenant Bury, suffered broken ankles as they jumped onto the heaving deck.
ML254 then began slowly to leave the harbour mouth, carrying 38 survivors of Vindictive's 55 crew huddled on deck, where they remained exposed to machine gun fire from the shore. As Drummond turned his boat seawards and proceeded back to the offshore squadron which was still engaged in an artillery duel with the German defenders, one of the missing launches, ML276 passed her, having caught up with the lost cruiser at this late stage. Drummond called to ML276's commander, Lieutenant Rowley Bourke, that he believed there were still men in the water and Bourke immediately entered the harbour to search for them. Drummond's launch proceeded to the rendezvous with the destroyer HMS Warwick, overweighted and sinking, so severe was the damage she had suffered.
Hearing cries, Bourke entered the harbour but could not identify the lost men. Despite heavy machine gun and artillery fire, Bourke returned to the scene of the wreck four times before they discovered two sailors and the Vindictive's badly wounded navigation officer Sir John Alleyne clinging to an upturned boat. Hauling the men aboard, Bourke turned for the safety of the open sea but as he did two 6" shells struck the launch, smashing the lifeboat and destroying the compressed air tanks, which stalled the engines and caused a wave of highly corrosive acid to wash over the deck, causing severe damage to the launch's hull and almost suffocating the unconscious Alleyne. Under heavy fire, the boat staggered out of the harbour and was taken under tow by another late-arriving motor launch. After the operation, Bourke's launch was discovered to have 55 separate bullet and shrapnel holes.
Offshore, as the Warwick's officers, Keyes' staff and the survivors of the Vindictive gathered on the destroyer's deck to discuss the operation, an enormous explosion rocked the ship causing her to list severely. The Warwick had struck one of the defensive mines off Ostend and was now in danger of sinking herself. The destroyer HMS Velox was lashed alongside and survivors from Warwick, Vindictive and ML254 transferred across to the sound ship. This ragged ensemble did not reach Dover until early the following morning, the Warwick still afloat. British casualties were reported in the immediate aftermath as being eight dead, ten missing and 29 wounded. German losses were three killed and eight wounded.
[edit] Aftermath
Despite German claims that the blockage did not impede their operations, the operation to close the Ostend canal seemed to have been at least partially successful. The channel was largely blocked and so Bruges was ostensibly closed off from the open sea, even if the position of the blockship meant that smaller ships could get through. In fact, however, the entire operation had been rendered moot before it even began, due to events at the wider canal in Zeebrugge. British assessments of that operation had ultimately proven optimistic and the channel there had not been properly closed. Small coastal submarines of the UC Class had been able to pass through the channel as early as the morning after the Zeebrugge Raid and German naval engineers were able to dredge channels around the blockages at both ports over the coming weeks.
At Ostend, the Vindictive did prevent larger warships passing through the channel, although smaller craft could still come and go at will. Ultimately, the larger warships in Bruges were trapped there for the remaining months of the war; the town was captured by the Allies in October 1918. Ultimately the blockages at Ostend and Zeebrugge took several years to clear completely, not being totally removed until 1921. On a strategic scale however, the effects of the raids at Ostend and Zeebrugge on the battle of the Atlantic were negligible. Despite this ultimate failure, in Britain the Ostend Raid was feted as a success. Three Victoria Crosses and a host of lesser awards were given to the men involved. The Admiralty presented it as a fine example of daring and careful planning from the Royal Navy, providing a valuable morale boost at one of the most critical moments of the war.

Summary:
The Second Ostend Raid (officially known as Operation VS) was the latter of two failed attempts by the Royal Navy to block the channels accessing the Belgian port of Ostend during the Spring of 1918. The German Navy had used the port since 1915 as a base for their U-boat activities during the battle of the Atlantic and the strategic advantages conferred by the Belgian ports in the conflict were very important.
A successful blockade of these bases would force German submarines to operate out of more distant ports, such as Wilhelmshaven, on the German coast. This would expose them for longer to Allied countermeasures and reduce the time they could spend raiding. The ports of Ostend and Zeebrugge (which had been partially blocked in the Zeebrugge Raid three weeks previously) provided sea access via canals for the major inland port of Bruges. Bruges was used as a base for small warships and submarines. As it was six miles (10 km) inland, it was immune to most naval artillery fire and coastal raids, providing a safe harbour for training and repair.
The Ostend Raid was largely a failure as a result of heavy German resistance and British navigational difficulties in poor weather. In anticipation of a raid, the Germans had removed the navigation buoys and without them the British had difficulty finding the narrow channel into the harbour in poor weather. When they did discover the entrance, German resistance proved too strong for the operation to be completed as originally planned.
Despite its failure, the raid was presented in Britain as a courageous and daring gamble which came very close to success. Three Victoria Crosses and numerous other gallantry medals were awarded to sailors who participated in the operation. British casualties in the raid were heavy, compared to minimal German losses.


[edit] Origins
Both geologic and climatic events helped to make Australia's fauna unique. Australia was once part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, which also included South America, Africa, India and Antarctica. Gondwana began to break up 140�million years ago (MYA); 50 MYA Australia separated from Antarctica and was relatively isolated until the collision of the Indo-Australian Plate with Asia in the Miocene era 5.3 MYA. The establishment and evolution of the present-day fauna was apparently shaped by the unique climate and the geology of the continent. As Australia drifted, it was, to some extent, isolated from the effects of global climate change. The unique fauna that originated in Gondwana, such as the marsupials, survived and adapted in Australia.
After the Miocene, fauna of Asian origin were able to establish themselves in Australia. The Wallace Line—the hypothetical line separating the zoogeographical regions of Asia and Australasia—marks the tectonic boundary between the Eurasian and Indo-Australian plates. This continental boundary prevented the formation of land bridges and resulted in a distinct zoological distribution, with limited overlap, of most Asian and Australian fauna, with the exception of birds. Following the emergence of the circumpolar current in the mid-Oligocene era (some 15 MYA), the Australian climate became increasingly arid, giving rise to a diverse group of arid-specialised organisms, just as the wet tropical and seasonally wet areas gave rise to their own uniquely adapted species.
[edit] Mammals
Australia has a rich mammalian fossil history, as well as a variety of extant mammalian species, dominated by the marsupials. The fossil record shows that monotremes have been present in Australia since the Early Cretaceous 145–99 MYA, and that marsupials and placental mammals date from the Eocene 56–34 MYA, when modern mammals first appeared in the fossil record. Although marsupials and placental mammals did coexist in Australia in the Eocene, only marsupials have survived to the present. The placental mammals made their reappearance in Australia in the Miocene, when Australia moved closer to Indonesia, and bats and rodents started to appear reliably in the fossil record.[citation needed] The marsupials evolved to fill specific ecological niches, and in many cases they are physically similar to the placental mammals in Eurasia and North America that occupy similar niches, a phenomenon known as convergent evolution. For example, the top predator in Australia, the Tasmanian Tiger, bore a striking resemblance to canids such as the Gray Wolf;[citation needed] gliding possums and flying squirrels have similar adaptations enabling their arboreal lifestyle;[citation needed] and the Numbat and anteaters are both digging insectivores.
[edit] Birds
Australia and its territories are home to around 800 species of bird; about 350 of these are endemic to the zoogeographic region that covers Australia, New Guinea and New Zealand.[citation needed] The fossil record of birds in Australia is patchy; however, there are records of the ancestors of contemporary species as early as the Late Oligocene. Birds with a Gondwanan history include the flightless ratites (the Emu and Southern Cassowary), megapodes (the Malleefowl and Australian Brush-turkey), and a huge group of endemic parrots, order Psittaciformes. Australian parrots comprise a sixth of the world’s parrots, including many cockatoos and galahs. The Kookaburra is the largest species of the kingfisher family, known for its call, which sounds uncannily like loud, echoing human laughter.
The passerines of Australia, also known as songbirds or perching birds, include wrens, robins, the magpie group, thornbills, pardalotes, the huge honeyeater family, treecreepers, lyrebirds, Birds of Paradise and bowerbirds. The Satin Bowerbird has attracted the interest of evolutionary psychologists; it has a complex courtship ritual in which the male creates a bower filled with blue, shiny items to woo mates.
Relatively recent colonists from Eurasia are swallows,[citation needed] larks, thrushes, cisticolas, sunbirds, and some raptors, including the large Wedge-tailed Eagle.[citation needed] A number of bird species have been introduced by humans; some, like the European Goldfinch and Greenfinch, coexist happily with Australian species,[citation needed] while others, such as the Common Starling, Common Blackbird, House Sparrow and Indian Mynah, are destructive of some native bird species and thus destabilise the native ecosystem.
About 200 species of seabird live on the Australian coast, including many species of migratory seabird. Australia is at the southern end of the East Asian-Australasian flyway for migratory water birds, which extends from Far-East Russia and Alaska through Southeast Asia to Australia and New Zealand. About two million birds travel this route to and from Australia each year.[citation needed] One very common large seabird is the Australian Pelican, which can be found in most waterways in Australia. The Little Penguin is the only species of penguin that breeds on mainland Australia.
[edit] Amphibians and reptiles
Australia has four families of native frogs and one introduced toad, the Cane Toad. In 1935 the Cane Toad was introduced to Australia in a failed attempt to control pests in sugarcane crops. It has since become a devastating pest, spreading across northern Australia. As well as competing with native insectivores for food, the Cane Toad produces a venom that is toxic to native fauna, as well as to humans. The Myobatrachidae, or southern frogs, are Australia's largest group of frogs, with 120 species from 21 genera.[citation needed] A notable member of this group is the colourful and endangered Corroboree Frog. The tree frogs, from family Hylidae, are common in high rainfall areas on the north and east coasts; there are 77 Australian species from three genera.[citation needed] The 18 species from two genera[citation needed] of the Microhylidae frogs are restricted to the rainforests; the smallest species, the Scanty Frog, is from this family.[citation needed] There is a single species from the world's dominant frog group, family Ranidae — the Australian Wood Frog — which only occurs in the Queensland rainforests. As elsewhere, there has been a precipitous decline in Australia's frog populations in recent years. Although the full reasons for the decline are uncertain, it can be at least partly attributed to the fatal amphibian fungal disease chytridiomycosis.
Australia has both saltwater and freshwater crocodiles. The Saltwater Crocodile, known colloquially as the "salty," is the largest living crocodile species; reaching over 7�m, and weighing over 1,000�kg, they can and do kill people. They live on the coast and in the freshwater rivers and wetlands of northern Australia, and they are farmed for their meat and leather. Freshwater Crocodiles, found only in northern Australia, are not considered dangerous to humans.
The Australian coast is visited by six species of sea turtle: the Flatback, Green Sea, Hawksbill, Olive Ridley, Loggerhead and the Leatherback Sea Turtles; all are protected in Australian waters. There are 29 species of Australian freshwater turtles from eight genera of family Chelidae.[citation needed] The Pig-nosed Turtle is the only Australian turtle not of that family. Australia and Antarctica are the only continents without any living species of land tortoise.[citation needed]
Australia is the only continent[citation needed] where venomous snakes outnumber their non-venomous cousins. Australian snakes belong to seven families. Of these, the most venomous species,[citation needed] including the Fierce Snake, Eastern Brown Snake, Taipan and Eastern Tiger Snake are from the family Elapidae. Of the 200 species of elapid, 86 are found only in Australia.[citation needed] Thirty-three sea snakes from family Hydrophiidae inhabit Australia's northern waters; many are extremely venomous. Two species of sea snake from the Acrochordidae also occur in Australian waters. Australia has only 11 species from the world's most significant snake family Colubridae; none are endemic, and they are considered to be relatively recent arrivals from Asia. There are 15 python species and 31 species of insectivorous blind snake.[citation needed]
There are more lizards in Australia than anywhere else in the world,[citation needed] with representatives of five families. There are 114 species in 18 genera of gecko found throughout the Australian continent.[citation needed] The Pygopodidae is a family of limbless lizards endemic to the Australian region; of the 34 species from eight genera, only one species does not occur in Australia.[citation needed] The Agamidae or Dragon lizards are represented by 66 species in 13 genera,[citation needed] including the Thorny Devil, Bearded Dragon and Frill-necked Lizard. There are 26 species of monitor lizard,[citation needed] family Varanidae, in Australia, where they are commonly known as goannas. The largest Australian monitor is the Perentie, which can reach up to 2�m in length. There are 389 species of skink from 38 genera, comprising about 50% of the total Australian lizard fauna;[citation needed] this group includes the blue-tongued lizards.
[edit] Fish
More than 4,400 species of fish inhabit Australia's waterways; of these, 90% are endemic. However, because of the relative scarcity of freshwater waterways, Australia has only 170 species of freshwater fish.[citation needed] Two families of freshwater fish have ancient origins: the arowana or "bony tongues," and the Queensland lungfish. The Queensland lungfish is the most primitive of the lungfish, having evolved before Australia separated from Gondwana. One of the smallest freshwater fish, peculiar to the southwest of Western Australia, is the salamanderfish, which can survive desiccation in the dry season by burrowing into mud. Other families with a potentially Gondwanan origin include the Retropinnidae, Galaxiidae, Aplochitonidae and Percichthyidae.[citation needed]Apart from the ancient freshwater species, 70% of Australia's freshwater fish have affinities with tropical Indo-Pacific marine species that have adapted to freshwater. Nevertheless, fossil evidence indicates that many of these freshwater species are still ancient in origin.[citation needed] These species include freshwater lampreys, herrings, catfish, rainbowfish, and some 50 species of gudgeon, including the Sleepy Cod.[citation needed] Native freshwater game fish include the Barramundi, Murray Cod, and Golden Perch.[citation needed] Two species of endangered freshwater shark are found in the Northern Territory.
Several exotic freshwater fish species, including brown, brook and rainbow trout, Atlantic and Chinook salmon, redfin perch, carp and mosquitofish, have been introduced to Australian waterways. The mosquitofish is a particularly aggressive species known for harassing and nipping the fins of other fish. It has been linked to declines and localised extinctions of several small native fish species. The introduced trout species have had serious negative impacts on a number of upland native fish species including trout cod, Macquarie perch and galaxias species as well as other upland fauna such as the Spotted Tree Frog. The carp is strongly implicated in the dramatic loss in waterweed, decline of small native fish species and permanently elevated levels of turbidity in the Murray-Darling Basin of southwest Australia.[citation needed]
Most of Australia's fish species are marine.[citation needed] Groups of interest include the moray eels and squirrelfish, as well as the pipefish and seahorses, whose males incubate their partner's eggs in a specialised pouch. There are 80 species of grouper in Australian waters,[citation needed] including one of the world's biggest bony fish, the Giant Grouper, which can grow as large as 2.7�m and weigh up to 400�kg. The trevally, a group of 50 species of silver schooling fish, and the snappers are popular species for commercial fishing. The Great Barrier Reef supports a huge variety of small- and medium-sized reef fish, including the damselfish, butterflyfish, angelfish, gobies, cardinalfish, wrassees, triggerfish and surgeonfish. There are several venomous fish, among them several species of stonefish and pufferfish and the red lionfish, all of which have toxins that can kill humans. There are 11 venomous species of stingray,[citation needed] the largest of which is the smooth stingray. The barracudas are one of the reef's largest species. However, large reef fish should not be eaten for fear of ciguatera poisoning.
Sharks inhabit all the coastal waters and estuarine habitats of Australia’s coast. There are 166 species, including 30 species of requiem shark, 32 of catshark, six of wobbegong shark, and 40 of dogfish shark. There are three species from the family Heterodontidae: the Port Jackson shark, the zebra bullhead shark and the crested bullhead shark.[citation needed] In 2004, there were 12 unprovoked shark attacks in Australia, of which two were fatal. Only 3 species of shark pose a significant threat to humans: the bull shark, the tiger shark and the great white shark. Some popular beaches in Queensland and New South Wales are protected by shark netting, a method that has reduced the population of both dangerous and harmless shark species through accidental entanglement.[citation needed] The overfishing of sharks has also significantly reduced shark numbers in Australian waters, and several species are now endangered.[citation needed] A megamouth shark was found on a Perth beach in 1988; very little is known about this species, but this discovery may indicate the presence of the species in Australian coastal waters.
[edit] Invertebrates
Of the estimated 200,000 animal species in Australia, about 96% are invertebrates. While the full extent of invertebrate diversity is uncertain, 90% of insects and molluscs are considered endemic. Invertebrates occupy many ecological niches and are important in all ecosystems as decomposers, pollinators, and food sources. The largest group of invertebrates is the insects, comprising 75% of Australia's known species of animals. The most diverse insect orders are the Coleoptera, with 28,200 species of beetles and weevils, the Lepidoptera with 20,816 species[citation needed] including butterflies and moths, and 12,781 species of Hymenoptera,[citation needed] including the ants, bees and wasps. Order Diptera, which includes the flies and mosquitoes, comprises 7,786 species,[citation needed] Order Hemiptera, including bugs, aphids and hoppers, comprises 5,650 species; and there are 2,827 species[citation needed] of order Orthoptera, including grasshoppers, crickets and katydids. Introduced species that pose a significant threat to native species include the European wasp, the red fire ant, the yellow crazy ant and feral honeybees which compete with native bees.
Australia has a wide variety of arachnids, including 135 species of spider that are familiar enough to have common names.[citation needed] There are numerous highly venomous species, including the notorious Sydney funnel-web and redback spiders, whose bites can be deadly. There are thousands of species of mites and ticks from order Acarina. Australia also has eight species of pseudoscorpion and nine scorpion species.
In the Annelida (sub)class Oligochaeta there are many families of aquatic worms, and for native terrestrial worms: the Enchytraeidae (pot worms) and the "true" earthworms in families Acanthodrilidae, Octochaetidae and Megascolecidae.[citation needed] The latter includes the world's largest earthworm, the giant Gippsland earthworm, found only in Gippsland, Victoria. On average they reach 80�cm in length, but specimens up to 3.7�m in length have been found.[citation needed]
The large family Parastacidae includes 124 species of Australian freshwater crayfish.[citation needed] These include the world's smallest crayfish, the swamp crayfish, which does not exceed 30�mm in length, and the world's largest crayfish, the Tasmanian giant freshwater crayfish, measuring up to 76�cm long and weighing 4.5�kg. The crayfish genus Cherax includes the common yabby, in addition to the farmed species marron and Queensland red claw. Species from the genus Engaeus, commonly known as the land crayfish, are also found in Australia. Engaeus species are not entirely aquatic, because they spend most of their lives living in burrows. Australia has seven species of freshwater crab from the genus Austrothelphusa. These crabs live burrowed into the banks of waterways and can plug their burrows, surviving through several years of drought. The extremely primitive freshwater mountain shrimp, found only in Tasmania, are a unique group, resembling species found in the fossil record from 200 MYA.
A huge variety of marine invertebrates are found in Australian waters, with the Great Barrier Reef an important source of this diversity.[citation needed] Families include the Porifera or sea sponges, the Cnidaria (includes the jellyfish, corals and sea anemones, comb jellies), the Echinodermata (includes the sea urchins, sea stars, brittle stars, sea cucumbers, the lamp shells) and the Mollusca (includes snails, slugs, limpets, squid, octopus, cockles, oysters, clams, and chitons). Venomous invertebrates include the box jellyfish, the blue-ringed octopus, and ten species of cone snail,[citation needed] which can cause respiratory failure and death in humans. The crown-of-thorns starfish usually inhabits the Reef at low densities. However, under conditions that are not yet well understood, they can reproduce to reach an unsustainable population density when coral is devoured at a rate faster than it can regenerate. This presents a serious reef management issue.[citation needed] Other problematic marine invertebrates include the native species purple sea-urchin and the white urchin, which have been able to take over marine habitats and form urchin barrens due to the over harvesting of their natural predators which include abalone and rock lobster.[citation needed] Introduced invertebrate pests include the Asian mussel, New Zealand green-lipped mussel, black-striped mussel and the Northern Pacific seastar, all of which displace native shellfish.[citation needed]
There are many unique marine crustaceans in Australian waters. The best-known class, to which all the edible species of crustacean belong, is Malacostraca.[citation needed] The warm waters of northern Australia are home to many species of decapod crustaceans, including crabs, false crabs, hermit crabs, lobsters, shrimps, and prawns. The Peracarids, including the amphipods and isopods, are more diverse in the colder waters of southern Australia.[citation needed] Less-well-known marine groups include the classes Remipedia, Cephalocarida, Branchiopoda, Maxillopoda (which includes the barnacles, copepods and fish lice), and the Ostracoda. Notable species include the Tasmanian giant crab, the second largest crab species in the world,[citation needed] found in deep water, and weighing up to 13�kg, and the Australian spiny lobsters, such as the Western rock lobster, which are distinct from other lobster species as they do not have claws.
[edit] Invasive species
Introduction of exotic fauna in Australia by design, accident and natural processes has led to a considerable number of invasive, feral and pest species which have flourished and now impact the environment adversely. Introduced organisms affect the environment in a number of ways.[citation needed] Rabbits render land economically useless by eating everything. Red Foxes affect local endemic fauna by predation while the cane toad poisons the predators by being eaten. The invasive species include birds (Indian Mynah) and fish (common carp), insects (red imported fire ant) and molluscs (Asian mussel). The problem is compounded by invasive exotic flora as well as introduced diseases, fungi and parasites.
Costly, laborious and time-consuming efforts at control of these species has met with little success and this continues to be a major problem area in the conservation of Australia's biodiversity.
[edit] Human impact and conservation
For at least 40,000 years, Australia's fauna played an integral role in the traditional lifestyles of Indigenous Australians, who exploited many species as a source of food and skins. Vertebrates commonly harvested included macropods, opossums, seals, fish and the Short-tailed Shearwater, most commonly known as the Muttonbird. Invertebrates used as food included insects such as the Bogong moth and larvae collectively called witchetty grubs and molluscs. The use of fire-stick farming, in which large swathes of bushland were burnt to facilitate hunting, modified both flora and fauna — and are thought to have contributed to the extinction of large herbivores with a specialised diet, such as the flightless birds from the genus Genyornis. The role of hunting and landscape modification by aboriginal people in the extinction of the Australian megafauna is debated.
The impact of Aborigines on native species populations is widely considered to be less significant than that of the European settlers, whose impact on the landscape has been on a relatively large scale. Since European settlement, direct exploitation of native fauna, habitat destruction and the introduction of exotic predators and competitive herbivores has led to the extinction of some 27 mammal, 23 bird and 4 frog species. Much of Australia's fauna is protected by legislation;[citation needed] a notable exception is kangaroos, which are prolific and are regularly culled. The federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 was created to meet Australia's obligations as a signatory to the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity. This act protects all native fauna and provides for the identification and protection of threatened species. In each state and territory, there is statutory listing of threatened species. At present, 380 animal species are classified as either endangered or threatened under the EPBC Act, and other species are protected under state and territory legislation. More broadly, a complete cataloguing of all the species within Australia has been undertaken, a key step in the conservation of Australian fauna and biodiversity. In 1973, the federal government established the Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS), which coordinates research in the taxonomy, identification, classification and distribution of flora and fauna. The ABRS maintains free online databases cataloguing much of the described Australian flora and fauna. Impacts such as the illegal setting of traps in rivers affect animals such as the Australian platypus, along with lack of awareness each year an average of 2–5 Australians lose their lives to what is presumed a safe creature. The key is understanding of Australia's diverse wildlife and fauna; what seems safe is often deadly.
Australia is a member of the International Whaling Commission and is strongly opposed to commercial whaling—all Cetacean species are protected in Australian waters. Australia is also a signatory to the CITES agreement and prohibits the export of endangered species. Protected areas have been created in every state and territory to protect and preserve the country's unique ecosystems. These protected areas include national parks and other reserves, as well as 64 wetlands registered under the Ramsar Convention and 16 World Heritage Sites. As of 2002, 10.8% (774,619.51�km²) of the total land area of Australia is within protected areas. Protected marine zones have been created in many areas to preserve marine biodiversity; as of 2002, these areas cover about 7% (646,000�km²) of Australia's marine jurisdiction. The Great Barrier Reef is managed by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority under specific federal and state legislation. Some of Australia's fisheries are already overexploited, and quotas have been set for the sustainable harvest of many marine species.
The State of the Environment Report, 2001, prepared by independent researchers for the federal government, concluded that the condition of the environment and environmental management in Australia had worsened since the previous report in 1996. Of particular relevance to wildlife conservation, the report indicated that many processes—such as salinity, changing hydrological conditions, land clearing, fragmentation of ecosystems, poor management of the coastal environment, and invasive species—pose major problems for protecting Australia's biodiversity.

Summary:
The fauna of Australia consists of a huge variety of strange and unique animals; some 83% of mammals, 89% of reptiles, 90% of fish and insects and 93% of amphibians that inhabit the continent are endemic to Australia. This high level of endemism can be attributed to the continent's long geographic isolation, tectonic stability, and the effects of an unusual pattern of climate change on the soil and flora over geological time. A unique feature of Australia's fauna is the relative scarcity of native placental mammals. Consequently the marsupials—a group of mammals that raise their young in a pouch, including the macropods, possums and dasyuromorphs—occupy many of the ecological niches placental animals occupy elsewhere in the world. Australia is home to two of the five known extant species of monotremes and has numerous venomous species, which include the Platypus, spiders, scorpions, octopus, jellyfish, molluscs, stonefish, and stingrays. Uniquely, Australia has more venomous than non-venomous species of snakes.
The settlement of Australia by Indigenous Australians more than 61,000�years ago +9,000/-13,000 years, and by Europeans from 1788, has significantly affected the fauna. Hunting, the introduction of non-native species, and land-management practices involving the modification or destruction of habitats have led to numerous extinctions. Some examples include the Paradise Parrot, Pig-footed Bandicoot and the Broad-faced Potoroo. Unsustainable land use still threatens the survival of many species. To target threats to the survival of its fauna, Australia has passed wide-ranging federal and state legislation and established numerous protected areas.