The story
Most people who step into Santo Tomé in Toledo come for one painting. They enter through a separate door and stand before El Greco's Burial of the Count of Orgaz, a canvas more than four and a half metres tall, hung above the tomb of the man it shows.
That man was Gonzalo Ruiz de Toledo, lord of the town of Orgaz, who paid to rebuild this parish church and died in 1323. A local legend held that at his funeral Saint Stephen and Saint Augustine came down from heaven and laid him in the grave with their own hands. More than 250 years later the parish priest, Andrés Núñez, won a lawsuit forcing the town of Orgaz to keep paying the count's old bequest, and he commissioned the picture to honour the benefactor. The contract of March 1586 told El Greco, the Cretan painter settled in Toledo, what to show: the miracle below, heaven opening above, and the gentlemen of Toledo standing as mourners.
El Greco followed it closely. The two saints in gold vestments lower the armoured body, while a row of Toledans in black looks on, painted as portraits of men of the painter's own day. The small boy at the lower left, pointing to the scene, is usually identified as El Greco's son Jorge Manuel, and the handkerchief in his pocket carries the date 1578, the year the boy was born.
Outside, the church keeps its 14th-century brick tower in the Mudéjar manner, built in the tradition of Toledo's Muslim craftsmen, on the edge of the city's old Jewish quarter.
