The Burial of the Count of Orgaz

Description

A line of black-clad gentlemen fills the lower half of the canvas, their pale faces turned toward a single moment of wonder: two saints in gold and green vestments bend to lower a dead man into his tomb. Above them the sky opens. The composition splits into two bands that still read as one continuous event, the solid earth below and a vision wrenched from it above, where clouds, limbs, and drapery twist upward in a narrow column of light toward Christ.

About Burial of the Count of Orgaz Reproduction

The subject is a local legend of Toledo. At the funeral of Don Gonzalo Ruiz, Count of Orgaz, Saint Stephen and Saint Augustine were said to have come down from heaven to bury him themselves, a reward for his piety in life. The lower register is a gathering of real faces, painted with the direct observation of a portraitist working from contemporaries of the artist in the city. Each man stands apart from his neighbour, dressed in the severe black of Spanish mourning, broken by white ruffs and the gleam of a single candle.

Above them the handling changes completely. Figures stretch and thin, colour turns cold and silver, and a small translucent soul rises through a gap in the clouds toward a seated Christ ringed by saints. This passage belongs to the mature years of El Greco in Toledo, when he had moved away from the firm modelling of his Venetian training toward the elongation and restless light that mark his late style. The painting was made for the parish church of Santo Tomé, where it still determines the shape of the chapel built to hold it.

The hand-painted reproduction

ByMuseum recreates this altarpiece as a hand-painted oil painting reproduction, built up layer by layer on canvas by a trained painter rather than output by any printer. The black of the mourners, the gold of the vestments, and the silvered blue of the vision above are matched by eye against the original, and the brush marks that carry that transition from earth to heaven are laid down by hand, not simulated. As a fine art reproduction it is made to order, so the scale and proportion of the work can be adjusted to the wall it will hang on. Living with it, the eye keeps finding new faces in that long row of mourners and new folds in the robes above, the way a wall this large rewards a second and third look rather than one glance.

• Hand-painted oil on canvas, created by a trained artist
• Available in multiple sizes to suit your wall
• Gallery-ready presentation, suited to classic or contemporary framing
• Certificate of authenticity included with every order
• 90 day returns, with a full refund or a free replacement and no restocking fee