El Greco died in Toledo on 7 April 1614, around age 72, about a month after he fell seriously ill. No surviving document names the illness.
He had lived in the city for nearly four decades. When the illness struck, he was still working on a commission for the Hospital Tavera.
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Visitors to Toledo are still shown where El Greco was buried: the crypt of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, the convent church whose altarpiece he had painted decades earlier. The story seems to close there, with a painter laid to rest in the church that launched his career in Spain.
It does not close there. Four years after the funeral, the nuns of Santo Domingo asked his son to take the body away. A settlement in 1618 let the convent keep the altar and the vault, and left Jorge Manuel with the job of removing his father's remains.
Where the body went next is far less certain than a visit to the convent suggests. I find that stranger than the missing diagnosis: a painter this famous, and nobody can say for sure where he lies.
What was El Greco painting when he fell ill?
The altarpiece of the Hospital Tavera in Toledo. A biography published for the Vatican Museums calls it his last major commission. He fell ill while it was underway and died a month later, with the canvases not finished.
The picture at the center of the project was a Baptism of Christ, dated between 1608 and 1614. Jesus kneels while Saint John the Baptist pours water over his head from a shell. Above them, God the Father and the dove of the Holy Spirit look down. Jorge Manuel finished it, and some specialists credit him with almost the entire canvas.
It reached the hospital shortly before 1624, ten years after the painter's death. By then it no longer had the place its maker intended. It was probably meant for the main altarpiece and ended up on the right-hand side. Finishing the painting was only part of what fell to his son.
What You'll Discover
Why he died without a will.
Where his son took the body.
What was found in the crypt.
What Toledo said when he died.