Jorge Manuel Theocupulus

In El Greco's great canvas The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, painted in Toledo in 1586, a small boy in the front row looks straight out at us and points to the miracle unfolding behind him. On the handkerchief in his pocket is a date, 1578. That was the birth year of Jorge Manuel Theotokópoulos, the painter's only son, and the boy is almost certainly him.

He grew up inside his father's workshop and learned to paint there. El Greco, the Cretan-born master whose stretched figures and cold light still look modern, leaned on him more and more, and when the old man died in 1614 Jorge Manuel inherited the studio, its debts, and the task of finishing its unsold commissions. His own paintings copy his father's manner so closely that the two hands are hard to tell apart.

Painting was not where he ended up. He turned to architecture and building, working in the plain, severe Herrerian style then favoured in Spain, and in 1625 was named master builder and sculptor of Toledo Cathedral, where he raised the dome over its Mozarabic chapel. He died in 1631, six years into that post.