El entierro del conde de Orgaz

El Greco painted this for a small parish church in Toledo, Santo Tomé, where it still hangs today, on the very spot the story belongs to. The local priest commissioned it in 1586 to settle an old point of pride. Nearly three hundred years earlier, a pious nobleman known as the Count of Orgaz had been buried here, and legend held that Saints Stephen and Augustine had come down in person to lower his body into the grave. El Greco splits the painting in two. Along the bottom, the burial itself, the two saints in gleaming gold vestments holding the armoured corpse, watched by a row of Toledo gentlemen in black with white ruffs, real portraits of men the artist knew. Above them the sky tears open and heaven receives the count's soul in a rush of stretched, flickering figures. The boy in the lower left, pointing at the miracle, is thought to be El Greco's own son, and the handkerchief in his pocket carries the date, 1578, the year the boy was born.