El Laberinto is a 1974 novel by the Argentine writer Manuel Mujica Laínez

Manuel Mujica Laínez

Manuel Mujica Láinez was an Argentine novelist, essayist and art critic.-Biography:...

.

It purports to tell the story of Ginés de Silva, the boy shown holding a torch in the lower left-hand corner of El Greco

El Greco

El Greco was a painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. "El Greco" was a nickname, a reference to his ethnic Greek origin, and the artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος .El Greco was born on Crete, which was at...

's 1586 painting The Burial of Count Orgaz.

This picaresque Bildungsroman

Bildungsroman

In literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...

 presents, a rich and highly amusing series of pictures from the boy's Seville

Seville

Seville is the artistic, historic, cultural, and financial capital of southern Spain. It is the capital of the autonomous community of Andalusia and of the province of Seville. It is situated on the plain of the River Guadalquivir, with an average elevation of above sea level...

 childhood in the 1570s to the old man's death in early colonial Argentina

Argentina

Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

 in the 1650s. Thus it connects, somehow, its author's Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

-preoccupied novels (Bomarzo

Bomarzo (Mujica Laínez)

Bomarzo is a novel by the Argentine writer Manuel Mujica Láinez, written in 1962 and later adapted by its author to an opera libretto set by Alberto Ginastera, which had its premiere in Washington, D.C., in 1967....

 and El unicornio) with which it forms a kind of trilogy, with Mujica Laínez' Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...

cycle.

As usual with Manuel Mujica Laínez, the main love-story in this novel involves a same-sex relationship.