The Burial of the Count of Orgaz

Judged figure by figure. The count in his armour and the two saints in gold cannot go: they are the event. The boy at the lower left cannot go: he points, he looks out, and he ties the painter’s household to the burial. The priest in the surplice at the right, reading the office and looking up, is the one man below who turns toward heaven, and he is the hinge between the zones. The angel and the soul are the only thing that crosses, and the intercession above is required by what the picture argues. What yields is population: the frieze is required as a body, the community that witnesses, but any one head could go, and the crowd of the blessed thins into filler at its edges. The life size below is compelled.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Three things can be stated, and they hold. Death is a passage witnessed by a community that for the most part does not see what it witnesses: the gentlemen keep their composure and look at one another or at nothing while the soul goes up above their heads. The sacred and the civic are one order: the city’s living men stand at a burial of 1323 as if it were their own day, which by the picture’s claim it is. And a good death is the fruit of a life’s works: the saints come for a man who endowed a church. That last is Counter-Reformation doctrine, and part of the disclosure is a parish’s case made in paint. The faces disclose more than the doctrine: gravity without grief, men attending to a death as an office.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Elevation is frequent, and of two kinds. Below, it rises in gold: the dalmatics of the two saints, painted with scenes, against the black of the frieze; the count’s armour, dark and holding reflections; the line of white ruffs, one band of light across the canvas. Above, it is transport: the cloud parting like a channel, the angel pressing the pale soul through it, the drawn-out bodies of the blessed rising toward a Christ in white at the apex. The meeting of the two, the priest’s lifted face and the angel’s ascent directly above the body, is the summit, prepared and answered across the whole height. Held below the top because the upper crowd is at its margins more agitated than elevated, and the frieze, magnificent as a band, is one held note.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Myth built, and load-bearing. The structure of the picture is the archetype: a body laid in the earth below, a soul carried up a narrow passage above, and the passage drawn as a birth. The angel brings the soul through a cleft in the cloud as through a womb, so that burial and second birth are one vertical act. Christ between the Virgin and the Baptist is the Byzantine image of judgement the painter grew up with, and here it decides the case of one man. The particulars stay particular: a Toledan lord, a parish priest, a boy with a handkerchief, men of 1586 in the ruffs of 1586. Held below the top because the heaven around the passage is of the crowded kind the Counter-Reformation commissioned everywhere; only the passage is the painter’s own construction.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The inheritance is threefold: the Byzantine icon of the painter’s Cretan training, with its intercession, its gold and its frontal Christ; the Venetian altarpiece in two zones, earth and glory, as in Titian’s Assunta, with Tintoretto’s figure in motion; and the Spanish funerary chapel. The departure: two laws of painting set against each other on purpose in one canvas, a sober portrait gallery below and an elongated, flame-like, weightless heaven above; a medieval miracle staged among living men painted from life; the soul shown as a translucent body passed through a channel of cloud. The stake: after the Martyrdom of Saint Maurice failed to please Philip II, the painter’s future lay with Toledo’s clergy and gentry, and this was his largest commission for them. Held below the top because the swerve was made inside the brief: the parish wanted a miracle and a glory.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Substitute another form and the work stops knowing what it knows. The canvas hangs over the tomb: the burial painted is the burial of the body lying below it, so the viewer in the chapel stands among the mourners, at their height, before a body that is actually there. The frieze runs horizontal and the heaven vertical, and the knowledge is the meeting of a closed human row with an opening above it. The two manners are the content: earth is painted as it is seen and heaven as it is believed, and the difference is what the picture asserts. Make it a small devotional panel and the mourners are no longer the viewer’s company; make it one manner and the two orders collapse into one. Held below the top because, reproduced, the canvas still says much of what it says.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Evidence over promise: about 440 years, but attention was thin for much of them. The painter was largely set aside in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the canvas, though always in its church, was not argued over at length until the revival of the later nineteenth. Since then the questions have stayed open: who the mourners are, and whether the painter is among them; whether Philip II is among the blessed; what the soul is and why it is drawn as it is; whether the two manners are a unity or a fault; how far the picture is Byzantine and how far Venetian; how much is the parish’s case and how much the painter’s vision. Held below the top by the late start of the evidence, and because much of the argument is identification, which settles nothing about meaning.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Seen in its church since 1588, so force and reach are scored together. The force is high: a group portrait, a funerary altarpiece and a vision made one canvas, two pictorial laws in one field, a real reorganisation of what an altarpiece could hold. The reach is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve. In its own field it had little following beyond the painter’s Toledo workshop, and Spanish painting went toward the naturalism of Ribera and Zurbarán; the reach came about three centuries late, and belongs largely to the painter’s work as a whole. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the El Greco revival of the later nineteenth century, Meier-Graefe’s Spanish journey, the painters who looked to Toledo, and Picasso’s Evocation (The Burial of Casagemas) of 1901, a burial below and a heaven above, its direct answer.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Survival over centuries, with the form whole. The composition reads as it was made: frieze, cloud, passage and heaven. Presence is the rarer fact. The canvas has stayed in the church for which it was painted, over the burial it shows, for about 440 years, in a living parish; even through the two centuries of the painter’s eclipse it was in view in Toledo, and since the revival it has been among the most visited pictures in Spain. Fame is presence, not proof, and counts for little here. Repairs by later hands bear on survival only. The surface is fixed to its moment in its ruffs and in a parish’s claims, and none of that stands between a viewer and a burial watched by heaven. The eclipse and a fabric repaired keep the figure from rising further.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Command of oil on a canvas that holds a row of men at life size, judged by the anchors every medium answers to. The making is load-bearing below: the black of the frieze is varied by a few touches into a row of distinct faces, each a portrait; the ruffs are laid in quick whites that read as linen only at a distance; the gold dalmatics carry painted scenes inside the painting; the armour holds reflections; the surplice at the right is painted transparent over the black beneath. The upper register is looser by design, its bodies drawn out and lit from within, and it commands that manner. The cost: the upper crowd is less resolved than the frieze, some heads are perfunctory, and the join of cloud to frieze is abrupt. The command is not equal across the whole field.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the count’s armoured body at the bottom, painted with weight and reflections, and Christ at the apex, white and nearly without mass. They do not obey one law of rendering; the picture runs two on purpose. The law that governs both is the picture’s argument: earth painted as seen and heaven as believed, joined at one point, the passage of the soul, and by a few glances upward, the priest’s and a mourner’s. Read so, the range is wide, from portrait realism to visionary distortion in one field. The objection stands: the seam is a seam, not a modulation, and the agitation above is not answered by the stillness below. The range is credited and the abruptness charged.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The orders held: the sacred, as a whole heaven with its hierarchy; death and the body; society, Toledo’s nobility and clergy painted as themselves; history, a burial of 1323 enacted by men of 1586; the family, in the boy at the threshold; consciousness, in faces turned inward at a death; and art, in a picture that sets its viewer among the mourners. They are integrated, not listed: the vertical from the tomb to Christ runs through every one. Whether the king is among the blessed, and the painter among the mourners, is disputed, and nothing rests on either. What holds the axis is what is absent: labour (no one here works but the priests at their office), the natural order (no landscape, no sky but cloud), and the poor.

Score: 8.6 / 10