Toledo - Museo de Santa Cruz

The old Hospital houses the Museo de Santa Cruz. The Archeological section, in the rooms around the patio, contains prehistoric, Roman and Visigothic antiquities. The museum's collection of pictures begins in the three rooms on the ground floor. Particularly notable items are Flemish tapestries of the 15th and 16th centuries and a tapestry with the signs of the Zodiac which was woven for the Cathedral. Among the old masters displayed here are a Flemish portrait of Philibert II of Savoy and a picture by Morales, ''Christ in Chains''. Here too is the standard flown by Don John of Austria in the battle of Lepanto (1571). On the first floor are the museum's most valuable works, including a retablo dedicated to the Virgin with figures by Alonso Berruguete, works by Luis Tristán, a pupil of El Greco's, Ribera and the Master of Sigena, a ''Crucifixion'' by Goya and above all a superb collection of pictures by El Greco, among them his ''Assumption of the Virgin'', a late work. On the first floor there is also the section of applied and decorative art.