The painting before your eyes conveys wisdom and beauty with great power. How so? The highest and loftiest truths are those of Divine Revelation. Catholic faith combined with the expertise of the painter’s art can give us this “everything-at-once” “all-this-and-heaven-too” perception and possession of the Beautiful.
Wisdom and Beauty shine forth in this painting and make it such an accomplishment of art, that it is indeed one of the supreme achievements of sacred art of all time: El entierro del conde de Orgaz, “The Burial of Count Orgaz” by Domḗnikos Theotokópoulos, named “El Greco” (1541-1614).
The parish church of Santo Tomé in Toledo is the burial place of the venerable Lord of Orgaz. His heirs, the counts of Orgaz, commissioned the artist with this painting. It was to be of massive size and to represent his burial, along with the apparition of Saints Lawrence and Saint Augustine which took place on that occasion, with a heavenly scene descending from above.
Note that the lower half depicting the funeral rites is surrounded by darkness, rendered more stark and dramatic by the black vestments of the parish priest and the black dress of the devout gentlemen accompanying the body. This is the earth in its ultimate end: death and corruption.
Yet the faith suffusing the scene makes it strangely consoling. The tender affection, piety, solidly held hopes, and deep supernatural conviction which most obviously characterize all the earthly participants is striking.
El Greco himself is there looking straight at us…
…as is the descendant of the Lord of Orgaz, the present, living count.
El Greco in a flash of inspiration depicts his six-year-old son, Jorge Manuel in possession of a paper bearing the year of his birth and his father’s signature The boy is later to become a painter and sculptor himself. He gazes at the viewers as does his father, and points at the dead body of the count, thus joining new life and earthly vocation with death.
And since there is no secular, atheist world-view here, earth and heaven interpenetrate without losing their very different qualities, indeed, two inhabitants of heaven appear on earth: St Lawrence the Deacon and St Augustine, splendidly dressed amid the severely dressed, but prosperous mourners. Although they are clearly of the highest heavenly and clerical dignity far above the gentlemen in their knightly jackets, they in fact perform the lowliest duty of the poor as gravediggers, placing the body in the grave.
Their rich vestments draw the eye, and by the little illustrations on them of the martyrdom of St Stephen, the apostles, and the skull and cross-bones of Adam, they draw the present narrative into the deepest past, even as it moves forward from earth to heaven, the ultimate future.
The passage from earth to heaven is carefully represented as a movement from the earth, as from a womb of a life doomed to die, into the light and company of heavenly glory. The soul of the count, represented as in Byzantine iconography as an infant, is assisted to rise into heaven through a uterine passage in which the light of glory begins to shine. Bodily nature in its most radical expressions, childbirth and burial, is thus made an expression of the union of the spiritual with the material.
This is a painting which on every level, like the lived Catholicity it expresses, contains not only the dichotomies, the extremes, but also the continuities which unite them. It is, “bittersweet,” or in art terminology chiaroscuro, a marriage of darkness and light, or in the Byzantine tradition El Greco continues, charmolypi, “a sorrow which gives joy.” This last, Greek notion is perhaps the best way appropriately to characterize the hopeful, soulful solemnity of the master painter whom we call “the Greek.”
Joy-giving sorrow is the principal affective theme of Greek monasticism, leading to heartfelt repentance, or penthos, and so this heavenly-earthly, penitential sensibility is represented in this Latin context by two habited friars, a Franciscan in grey and Augustinian in black. East and West, too, are thus brought together by the artist, while retaining their own qualities.
This painting is a marvel. So much is contained in a single glance!
Dare we then go on to describe the heavenly scene? It contains Jesus in his final, just judgment, but also the merciful intercession of his Mother and the Baptist.
It has revelation in its Old and New forms, Moses and David are there, in a kind of limbo-like place lower and to the side, but then there are also the apostles and martyrs, and even the living.
We even descry the then-living Philip II and Gregory XIII seated among the saints. So just as heaven’s saints visit the earth below, some of this world’s worthies visit heaven.
The angels must not be passed over as their ministry exercised in continuity with the visible sacramental rites of the church is everywhere discreetly asserted. El Greco was raised in a rite of the Eastern church whose liturgy is permeated with the sense of the union of the earthly and heavenly worship in a continuous hierarchy of the bestowing and receiving of spiritual gifts. Heaven accompanies the earthly and earthly needs penetrate the heavens. The body of each contains the whole and the whole contains the bodies of each, and it is their spirits which allow each to be in all and all in each.
And the viewer is drawn in and that he is a part of this grand reality.
No wonder then that El Greco himself called this painting “my sublime work!”
