The road to Toledo

I was introduced to the fine arts by accident, through my high-school Spanish textbook.

(That says a lot about the state of art education in public schools then, and now.)

The book was "El Camino Real" ("The Royal Road") and it was what we used in Señora Kersey's class at Hermitage High School in the late 1950s.

Inside the front cover was a full-page color reproduction of an oil painting, "The Burial of the Count of Orgaz." It was a dense Spanish Renaissance work by El Greco, which we knew meant "The Greek."

Leaving aside the obvious appeal of any word vaguely resembling "orgasm" to a high school kid, the painting intrigued me because I didn't understand it, because I had no clue as to who the Count of Orgaz was or why his burial was being commemorated, and because I knew next to nothing about El Greco.

I saw the picture of the painting every time I opened my Spanish textbook.

As the months progressed, I learned more. The Count of Orgaz was a pious knight who lived in the Spanish town of Toledo in the 14th century. Legend has it that Saint Stephen and Saint Augustine descended from heaven to help with his burial. One of the Count's bequests was to the town's church.

Fast-forward 200 years, to the 16th century: The church in Toledo finally got around to honoring the Count by commissioning a painting as part of a project to refurbish his burial chapel. They picked El Greco, a Greek immigrant, to execute the commission. The Spaniards called him El Greco because his real name, Doménikos Theotokópoulos, was more than a mouthful.

El Greco put himself into the painting. That's him, one of the mourners, just to the left of center, looking directly at you.

The painting, which still hangs in the church of Santo Tomé in Toledo, is considered to be one of El Greco's finest works.

Fast-forward again, this time to the 1960s. I saw the original painting.

I went to Spain with my friend Bobby Harris, who was a fellow Air Force medic when I was stationed in Germany. We spent a week in Madrid and Barcelona. Not far south of Madrid is Toledo. I decided to go see the actual painting of the Count's burial.

So Bobby and I boarded a bus on a warm, sunny morning.

Toledo which dates back to the Bronze Age, is a picturesque small city, and its winding, cobbled streets are crowded with tourists. My first sight of the city was breath-taking. It sits on a hilltop, bordered by a river below. When we slowed down on an adjacent hilltop, Toledo looked from afar as though it hadn't changed much over the centuries.

Once in the city, Bobby and I made our way to the church, Santo Tomé. And there it was, hanging on the wall: El Greco's painting of "The Burial of the Count of Orgaz." It was tucked away in a side chapel, in need of a good cleaning, and badly lit. But it was nevertheless a magnificent sight -- and far bigger than I had imagined.

I spent a good quarter hour studying it, and then Bobby and I walked back out into the brilliant sunshine.

It would be another 20 years before I went to work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where I learned more than I ever expected to about art and artists during a 33-year career.

They say you never forget your first. And I have never forgotten "The Burial of the Count of Orgaz," from that first look at it in my high school Spanish textbook to the first time I saw the original in a church 10 years later in Toledo.

It was the first time I fully realized that true fine art wasn't just in books. It was real.