Everything about Siglo De Oro totally explained
» This article is about the Spanish Golden Age of the 15th-17th centuries.:
For the earlier Golden Age of Islamic culture and Jewish culture in Spain, see Al-Andalus.
The
Spanish Golden Age (in
Spanish,
Siglo de Oro) was a period of flourishing in arts and literature in Spain, coinciding with the political decline and fall of the
Habsburgs (
Philip III,
Philip IV and
Charles II). This term doesn't generally imply any great precision about dates, but it begins no earlier than
1492, with the completion of the
reconquista and the voyages of
Christopher Columbus to the
New World, and politically ends no later than the
Treaty of the Pyrenees between
France and
Habsburg Spain in
1659. The last great writer of the period,
Pedro Calderon de la Barca, died in
1681 and his death is usually considered as the end of the Spanish Golden "Century" in the arts and literature.
The
Habsburgs, both in
Spain and
Austria, were great patrons of art in their countries.
El Escorial, the great royal monastery built by King
Philip II of Spain, invited the attention of some of Europe's greatest architects and painters.
Diego Velázquez, regarded as one of the most influential painters of European history and a greatly respected artist in his own time, cultivated a relationship with King Philip IV and his chief minister, the
Count-Duke of Olivares, leaving us several portraits that demonstrate his style and skill.
El Greco, another respected artist from the period, infused Spanish art with the styles of the Italian renaissance and helped create a uniquely Spanish style of painting. Some of Spain's greatest music is regarded as having been written in the period. Such composers as
Tomás Luis de Victoria,
Luis de Milán and
Alonso Lobo helped to shape
Renaissance music and the styles of
counterpoint and
polychoral music, and their influence lasted far into the
Baroque period which resulted in a revolution of music. Spanish literature blossomed as well, most famously demonstrated in the work of
Miguel de Cervantes, the author of
Don Quixote de la Mancha. Spain's most prolific playwright,
Lope de Vega, wrote possibly as many as one thousand plays during his lifetime, of which over four hundred survive to the present day.
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 (it means The Greek), wasn't 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
(External Link
), after asserting that he'd 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
He was born in June 6, 1599, in Seville. Both parents were from the minor nobility. He was the oldest of six children.
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 met the
Marqués de Spinola and painted his famous
Surrender of Breda celebrating
Spinola's earlier victory.
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
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, a leading Spanish painter of the next generation, ensured the enduring influence of his artistic approach.
Velazquez's most famous painting, however, is the celebrated
Las Meninas, in which the artist includes himself as one of the subjects.
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 pie 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
Tomás Luis de Victoria
Tomás Luis de Victoria, a Spanish composer of the sixteenth century, mainly of choral music, is widely regarded as one of the greatest Spanish classical composers. He joined the cause of
Ignatius of Loyola in the fight against the
Reformation and in
1575 became a priest. He lived for a short time in Italy, where he became acquainted with the polyphonic work of
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Like Zurbaran, Victoria mixed the technical qualities of Italian art with the religion and culture of his native Spain. He invigorated his work with emotional appeal and experimental, mystical rhythm and choruses. He broke from the dominant tendency among his contemporaries by avoiding complex counterpoint, preferring longer, simpler, less technical and more mysterious melodies, employing
dissonance in ways that the Italian members of the
Roman School shunned. He demonstrated considerable invention in musical thought by connecting the tone and emotion of his music to those of his lyrics, particularly in his
motets. Like Velázquez, Victoria was employed by the monarch - in Victoria's case, in the service of the queen. The
requiem he wrote upon her death in
1603 is regarded as one of his most enduring and mature works.
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.
Literature
The Spanish Golden Age was a time of great flourishing in poetry, prose and drama.
Cervantes and Don Quixote
Regarded by many as one of the finest works in any language,
El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha 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, and some believe that during these years he began work on his best-remembered novel. The first part of the novel was published in 1605; the second 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 satirical comedy, social commentary and forbearer of self-referential literature.
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's 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.
Poetry
This period also produced some of the most important Spanish works of poetry. Mystical literature in Spanish reached its summit with the works of
San Juan de la Cruz and
Teresa of Ávila.
Baroque poetry was dominated by the contrasting styles of
Francisco de Quevedo and
Luis de Góngora; both had a lasting influence on subsequent writers, and even on the Spanish language itself.
Other significant authors
The
picaresque genre flourished in this era, describing the life of
pícaros, living by their wits in a decadent society. One example is
El buscón, by Francisco de Quevedo.
Alonso de Ercilla wrote the epic poem, La Araucana, about the Spanish conquest of Chile.
Gil Vicente was Portuguese but his influence on Spanish playwriting was so wide that he's often considered part of the Spanish Golden Era.Further Information
Get more info on 'Siglo De Oro'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://spanish_golden_age.totallyexplained.com">Spanish Golden Age Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
