El Greco Paints the Burial of Count Orgaz

1586

For the Church of Santo Tome in Toledo, Domenikos Theotokopoulos completed an enormous altarpiece showing the burial of a fourteenth-century nobleman attended by Saint Augustine and Saint Stephen while the sky above swarmed with elongated saints and angels. It became his masterpiece and a definition of Spanish mystical painting. Its division between naturalistic earthly zone and visionary heavenly zone created a visual theology making the invisible seem more real than the visible.