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Painting Spain, in the time of the Italian Renaissance, had seen few great artists come to its shores. The Italian holdings and relationships made by Queen Isabella's husband and later Spain's sole monarch, Ferdinand of Aragon, launched a steady traffic of intellectuals across the Mediterranean between Valencia, Seville, and Florence. Luis de Morales, one of the leading exponents of Spanish mannerist painting, retained a distinctly Spanish style in his work, reminiscent of medieval art. Spanish art, particularly that of Morales, contained a strong mark of mysticism and religion that was encouraged by the counter-reformation and the patronage of Spain's strongly Catholic monarchs and aristocracy. El Greco Widely regarded as having the greatest impact in bringing the Italian Renaissance to Spain, El Greco, as his name implies, was not Spanish at all, but was born Domenikos Theotokopoulos in Crete. He studied the great Italian masters of his time - Titian, Tintoretto, and Michaelangelo - when he lived in Italy from 1568 to 1577. According to legend*, after asserting that he would paint a mural as good as one of Michaelangelo's if they demolished one of the Italian artist's, El Greco quickly fell out of favor in Italy, and soon found a new home in the city of Toledo in southern Spain. He was influential in creating a style based on impressions and emotion, with elongated fingers and vibrant color and brushwork. His paintings of the city of Toledo became models for a new European tradition in landscapes, influencing the work of the later Dutch masters. Diego Velázquez Born in 1599, two generations after El Greco, Diego Velázquez is widely regarded as one of Spain's most important and influential artists. He was a court painter for King Philip IV and found increasingly high demand for his portraits from statesmen, aristocrats, and clergymen across Europe. His portraits of the King, his chief minister, the Count-duke of Olivares, and the Pope himself demonstrated a belief in artistic realism and a style comparable to many of the Dutch masters. In the wake of the Thirty Years' War, Velázquez accompanied the Marqués de Spinola on a campaign in the Netherlands, where he painted his famous Surrender of Breda. Spinola was struck by his ability to express emotion through realism in both his portraits and landscapes; his work in the latter, in which he launched one of European art's first experiments in outdoor lighting, became another lasting influence on Western painting. Velázquez's friendship with Bartolome Esteban Murillo, a leading Spanish painter of the next generation, ensured the enduring influence of his artistic approach. Francisco de Zurbarán The religious element in Spanish art, in many circles, grew in importance with the counter-reformation. The austere, ascetic, and severe work of Francisco de Zurbarán exemplified this thread in Spanish art, along with the work of composer Tomás Luis de Victoria. Philip IV actively patronized artists who agreed with his views on the counter-reformation and religion. The mysticism of Zurbarán's work - influenced by Saint Theresa of Avila - became a hallmark of Spanish art in later generations. Influenced by Caravaggio and the Italian masters, Zurbarán devoted himself to an artistic expression of religion and faith. His paintings of St. Francis of Assisi, the immaculate conception, and the crucifixion of Christ reflected a third facet of Spanish culture in the seventeenth century, against the backdrop of religious war across Europe. Zurbarán broke from Velázquez's sharp realist interpretation of art and looked, to some extent, to the emotive content of El Greco and the earlier mannerist painters for inspiration and technique, though Zurbarán respected and maintained the lighting and physical nuance of Velázquez. Other significant painters Music Spain's music was invigorated, as its painters were, by religion. Tomás Luis de Victoria
Alonso Lobo Victoria's work was complemented by Alonso Lobo - a man Victoria respected as his equal. Lobo's work - also choral and religious in its content - stressed the austere, minimalist nature of religious music. Lobo sought out a medium between the emotional intensity of Victoria and the technical ability of Palestrina; the solution he found became the foundation of the baroque musical style in Spain. Spanish guitar The first known collection of Spanish guitar music was composed by Luis de Milán in 1536. Serving the ducal court of Valencia, Luis de Milán all but defined Spanish guitar music, which up to that point had been confined to the countryside rather than to the court. Spanish guitar - which had always been an important part of Spanish culture - began to experience a revival with Luis de Milán's work among Spanish aristocrats and merchants who popularized the style throughout Europe. Spanish guitar music (as shaped by Luis de Milán) would be revived again in the nineteenth century, and would retain a strong following to the present day. Literature The Spanish Golden Age was a time of great flourishing in poety, prose and drama. Góngora The most prominent figure in Golden Age poetry was Luis de Góngora. Two of his works, Soledades and the Polifemo, are landmarks of a poetic movement known as culteranismo. Much of his poetry exhibits an extravagant elaboration of style (estilo culto) that came to be known as Gongorismo. While he was criticised for affected Latinisms, unnatural transpositions, strained metaphors and frequent obscurity, he was a man of rare genius, who expanded the Spanish lexicon and boldly explored the boundaries of the metaphor and of Spanish syntax. It was only in the hands of those who imitated Góngora's style without inheriting his genius that culteranismo became absurd. Góngora sustained a long poetic and personal feud with his satirical rival, Francisco de Quevedo; probably the only Spanish poet of his time that matched him in talent and inventiveness. Don Quixote Regarded by many as one of the finest works in the Spanish languageDon Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes was one of the first novels published in Europe; it gave Cervantes a stature in the Spanish-speaking world comparable to his contemporary William Shakespeare in English. The novel, like Spain itself, was caught between the Middle Ages and the modern world. A veteran of the Battle of Lepanto (1571), Cervantes had fallen on hard times in the late 1590s and was imprisoned for debt in 1597, when he began work on his best-remembered novel. The final installment was published in 1615, a year before the author's death. Don Quixote resembled both the medieval, chivalric romances of an earlier time and the novels of the early modern world. It parodied classical morality and chivalry, found comedy in knighthood, and criticized social structures and the perceived madness of Spain's rigid society. The work has endured to the present day as a landmark in world literary history, and it was an immediate international hit in its own time, interpreted variously as a simple comedy or a social commentary. Lope de Vega and Spanish drama A contemporary of Cervantes, Lope de Vega consolidated the essential genres and structures which would characterize the Spanish commercial drama, also known as the "Comedia", throughout the 17th century. While Lope de Vega wrote prose and poetry as well, he is best remembered for his plays, particularly those grounded in Spanish history. Like Cervantes, Lope de Vega served with the Spanish army and was fascinated with the Spanish nobility. In the hundreds of plays he wrote, with settings ranging from the Biblical times to legendary Spanish history to classical mythology to his own time, Lope de Vega frequently took a comical approach just as Cervantes did, taking a conventional moral play and dressing it up in good humor and cynicism. His stated goal was to entertain the public, much as Cervantes's was. In bringing morality, comedy, drama, and popular wit together, Lope de Vega is often compared to his English contemporary Shakespeare. Some have argued that as a social critic, Lope de Vega attacked, like Cervantes, many of the ancient institutions of his country - aristocracy, chivalry, and rigid morality, among others. The Lope de Vega and Cervantes represented an alternative artistic perspective to the religious asceticism of Francisco Zurbarán. Lope de Vega's "cloak-and-sword" plays, which mingled intrigue, romance, and comedy together were carried on by his literary successor, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, in the later seventeenth century. Other well-known playwrights of the period include: Tirso de Molina; Agustín Moreto; Juan Pérez de Montalbán; Juan Ruiz de Alarcón; Guillén de Castro and Antonio Mira de Amescua. Other significant authors See also | |||||||||||
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