Spanish Golden Age
The start of the Golden Age can be placed in 1492, with the end of the Reconquista, the voyages of Christopher Columbus to the New World, the expulsion of Jews from Spain, and the publication of Antonio de Nebrija's Grammar of the Castilian Language.
[3][4] Diego Velázquez, regarded as one of the most influential painters of European history and a greatly respected artist in his own time, was patronized by King Philip IV and his chief minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares.
During this period, Spain was an ideal environment for the Venetian-trained painter, with art flourishing throughout the empire and Toledo being a great place to receive commissions.
In his lifetime, El Greco was influential in creating a style based on impressions and emotion, characterized by elongated fingers and vibrant color and brushwork.
His works uniquely featured faces that captured expressions of somber attitudes and withdrawal while still having his subjects bear witness to the terrestrial world.
Widely regarded as one of Spain's most important and influential artists, he became a court painter for King Philip IV and gained increasing demand across Europe for his portraits of statesmen, aristocrats, and clergymen.
His portraits of the King, his chief minister the Count-Duke of Olivares, and the Pope showcased his belief in artistic realism and a style comparable to many of the Dutch masters.
Velázquez's friendship with Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, a leading Spanish painter of the next generation, ensured the enduring influence of his artistic approach.
His paintings of St. Francis of Assisi, the Immaculate Conception, and the Crucifixion of Christ reflected a significant aspect of seventeenth-century Spanish culture, set against the backdrop of religious conflict across Europe.
Zurbarán diverged from Velázquez's sharp realist interpretation of art and, to some extent, drew inspiration from the emotive content of El Greco and earlier Mannerist painters.
[5] Additionally, polychrome sculpture—which had reached a high level of sophistication in Seville by the time of Zurbarán's apprenticeship and surpassed that of the local painters—served as another important stylistic model for the young artist.
Following the completion of a pair of pictures for the Seville Cathedral, he began to specialize in the themes that brought him his greatest successes: Mary and the Child Jesus, and the Immaculate Conception.
This was his period of greatest activity, during which he received numerous important commissions, among them the altarpieces for the Augustinian monastery and the paintings for Santa María la Blanca (completed in 1665).
Although the Catholic Monarchs had already altered some rooms of the Alhambra after the conquest of the city in 1492, Charles V intended to construct a permanent residence befitting an emperor.
These sites have a dual nature; that is to say, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they were places in which the temporal power of the Spanish monarchy and the ecclesiastical predominance of the Roman Catholic religion in Spain found a common architectural manifestation.
Juan de Herrera was the architect who designed the first project in 1581 to remodel the old Plaza del Arrabal but construction did not start until 1617, during Philip III's reign.
In 1667, Alonso Cano, working with Gaspar de la Peña, altered the initial plan for the main façade, introducing Baroque elements.
The magnificence of the building would be even greater if the two large 81-meter towers foreseen in the plans had been built; however, the project remained incomplete for various reasons, including finance.
Soon enough, though, the Collegiate became obsolete due to the changes of preference during the period, and thanks to the newly established episcopal in the city, the Town Council decided to build a cathedral that would share similar architecture to neighboring capitals.
By the late sixteenth century, Valladolid's importance had been severely reduced, and many of the monumental projects, such as the cathedral, started during its prosperous years, had to be modified due to a lack of proper finance.
Thus, the building that stands now could not be finished completely, and due to several additions built during the 17th and 18th centuries, it lacks the purported stylistical uniformity sought by Herrera.
He broke from the dominant tendency among his contemporaries by avoiding complex counterpoint, preferring longer, simpler, less technical, and more mysterious melodies, and employing dissonance in ways that the Italian members of the Roman School shunned.
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.
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, and some believe that during these years he began work on his best-remembered novel.
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 international hit in its own time, interpreted variously as a satirical comedy, social commentary and forebear of self-referential literature.
A contemporary of Cervantes, Lope de Vega consolidated the essential genres and structures that would characterize the Spanish commercial drama, also known as "Comedia," throughout the 17th century.
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.
Another poet was Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, from the Spanish colonies overseas in New Spain (modern day Mexico).
Other well-known playwrights of the period include: As elsewhere in Europe, Spanish scholars participated in the humanist recovery and theorizing of Greek and Roman rhetorics.
