Iglesia de Santo Tomé

The Church of Santo Tomé holds one of the great paintings of the Spanish Renaissance: El Greco's The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, completed in 1586. The painting occupies an entire side chapel and depicts the 1323 burial of Don Gonzalo Ruiz de Toledo — the Count of Orgaz — with saints descending from heaven to lay his body to rest. El Greco divided the canvas into two zones: the earthly ceremony below, with Toledo's 16th-century nobility attending in their ruffs and armour; and above, a swirling vision of heaven in which the soul of the count ascends.

The painting is extraordinary in its ambition and in its execution. The faces in the lower register are individual portraits of real Toledans; the upper half is pure visionary painting. The two halves barely seem to belong to the same pictorial world — which may be exactly the point.

The chapel holding the painting is small and often crowded, particularly in the morning. Visit early or late in the afternoon. The admission charge is specifically to see the painting, and it is entirely worth it.

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A story
El Greco completed *The Burial of the Count of Orgaz* in 1586, two years after the commission and decades after the event it depicts — a nobleman's burial in 1323 at which Saints Augustine and Stephen supposedly appeared to lower the body into the grave. El Greco painted himself into the crowd, along with his son Jorge Manuel, who points a finger directly at the viewer as if inviting you into the scene.