Judge this one honestly before you spend your time. The painting is Renaissance, not medieval, and it is a five-minute visit. It is on the list because of what it depicts and what it hangs in.
The tower is fourteenth-century Mudéjar, slender, brick, visible across half the city, and it stands — as Toledo Monumental notes — most probably on the foundation of an Islamic minaret. The church was rebuilt at the expense of Gonzalo Ruiz de Toledo, lord of Orgaz, who died in 1323, which is the connection that produced the painting two and a half centuries later.
The Entierro del Señor de Orgaz was painted between 1586 and 1588 for the burial chapel, and it stays where it was made — a rare thing for a picture of this rank. It shows the miracle in which Saint Stephen and Saint Augustine came down in person to bury Don Gonzalo. The lower half is a Toledo funeral of 1586: two rows of local gentlemen in black with white ruffs, contemporary portraits, standing in as witnesses to an event of the 1320s. The boy at the left, generally identified as the painter’s son Jorge Manuel, holds a handkerchief inscribed with the year of his birth.
What to look at, for our purposes: the armour. The count is lowered into the grave in a full harness of polished and gilt plate, and El Greco painted the reflections in it — the faces and robes of the saints coming back off the breastplate. It is one of the finest pieces of painted metal anywhere, and it is the reason this entry sits in a list about a city of armourers.
The practicalities are blunt. Entry is from the Plaza del Conde, the painting is shown in a room off the church built for the purpose, and the rest of the interior — sculpture, a silver tabernacle — is not what anyone is there for. €4, or nothing extra on the €14 wristband. In the middle of the day there is a queue on the square.
