Art and literature played a large role in Spain during the Renaissance time, affecting people both mentally and physically, and still do today. People over time have come up with very simple yet complex ways to express their thoughts, imagination, suffering, stories, ideas, and so on. Anybody can draw a single line and give it a name with a story behind it just because they felt like it and anyone handed a book and a writing utensil can write out anything they want and call themselves an artist, author, or even both. The complex portion of people’s personal innovation is understanding their perspective or their original creation.
The painting Girl with a Pearl Earring is an example. Nobody but the creator, Johannes Vermeer himself knows the story behind the woman in the painting. Whether she is enthused, melancholy, or if she exists at all. Other authors and artists during the Golden Age expressed many things such as religion and romance. Literature was and still is very powerful as far as people express a situation or the author’s personal feelings. Romances of chivalry were extremely popular in Spain in the first half of the 16th century. In a society where the vast majority was illiterate, stories and texts dealing with romances of chivalry were limited to the nobility, the church, and next-level classes such as universities, lawyers, administrators, merchants, and so on. Because Spanish author, Miguel de Cervantes, thought people during his time, the Golden Age, acted dramatically about the most ridiculous things such as romance, Cervantes wrote “Don Quixote de la Mancha” as an example of his perspective on society then and how hopeless people seemed to act towards something as compact as not having a lover.
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Cervantes thought the people around him were absurd, “Don Quixote de la Mancha” is a sarcastic novel. Nevertheless, the very popularity of the romances also drew the critical attention of moralists, theologians, and humanists. The romances were attacked both for form and content. They were bashed and labeled as wicked and full of lies that could mislead readers and plunge them into bad behavior. The discovery of the New World and the colonization of huge parts of Latin America, along with masterful works of Spanish art, music, and literature, left long-lasting marks on history that continue to influence our world today. Extraordinary artistic achievements in music, art, and literature created a “Golden Age” in Spain in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. Many of Spain’s most famous artists were in the employ of the Royal court, the Spanish aristocracy, and the church, their fame not only reaching beyond the borders of their own country in their own time but becoming important for European artists in the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s difficult to pin down such periods as the Renaissance in a single time frame, but some critics say that the Spanish Golden Age really began with some highly influential poetry in the mid-1500s. A large amount of poetry that came out of the Golden Age at the start was influenced by popular trends in Italy, where people might say the Renaissance began. Spanish poetry during the period was initially marked by the adoption of Italian meters and verse forms such as those used by Garcilaso de la Vega.
Spanish poetry was eventually marked by the arrogance and wordplay of the Baroque movements known as “culturalism y concepts”, whose chief practitioners were Luis de Góngora y Argote and Quevedo. Garcilaso de la Vega was the first major poet in the Golden Age of Spanish literature. After writing poetry in pretty standard Spanish meters for a short period, Garcilaso was eventually introduced to the poet, Juan Boscán Almogáver, who quickly introduced him to Italian meters which further attracted Garcilaso through Juans’ close study of Italian Renaissance poets such as Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Jacopo Sannazzaro. Garcilaso’s major theme is the sadness and misfortunes of romantic love as conventionally described in more pastoral poetry. He continually rewrote, polished, and improved his poetry, lifting his work high above, and influencing the people around him. Garcilaso’s small body of work contained 38 sonnets, 5 Canciones, 3 eclogues, 2 elegies, 1 epistle, and 8 songs. These works were shortly accepted as classics and largely determined the course of lyric poetry throughout Spain’s Golden Age. Later, Spanish poetry took on the elaborate wordplay and conceits of the Baroque movements. It often had an extravagant style of architecture, music, paintings, and sculptures. Other arts flourished in Europe from the early 17th until the mid-18th century. In terms of painting, the Spanish Golden Age is divided into two phases, the late Renaissance and the Baroque. Paintings from the Renaissance period reflect the innovation that was happening at the time. One of the most important painters from the former was the Greek artist, Doménikos Theotokópoulos, known as El Greco meaning “The Greek” in his adopted country of Spain. He was trained in Venice, Rome, and Byzantium, he was well-versed in the works of Titian and Tintoretto, and was especially influenced by the Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet, Michelangelo.
El Greco’s style evolved toward a very particular interpretation of Mannerism during his Toledo period. He lived in the Spanish city from 1577 to his death in 1614, and today still preserves a large part of his revolutionary work, with representative paintings including El Expolio (“The Disrobing of Christ”) and El Entierro del Conde Orgaz (“The Burial of the Count of Orgaz”). El Greco’s painting style is characterized by stretched, unnatural figures, unnatural lighting, and saturated colors. Diego Velazquez is also an amazing and important artist around the same era. Velázquez is universally acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest artists. The natural and realistic style in which he was trained provided a language for the expression of his remarkable power of observation and noticing the detail in both a living model and still life. Stimulated by the study of 16th-century Venetian painting, he developed from a master of faithful likeness and characterization into the creator of masterpieces of visual impression unique in his time. The main source of information about Velázquez’s early career is the pamphlet Arte de la Pintura (“The Art of Painting”), which was published in 1649 by his father-in-law, Francisco Pacheco, who is known more as a biographer and theoretician than as a painter.
Velázquez was phenomenal at noticing such detail and recognizing colors most people may not pay as much attention to when it comes to observing a model or still object, making a person guess the temperature in the painting because of how realistic it is, or how a person is feeling in one of his paintings just by looking at them, his paintings have feeling, emotion which made Velázquez an icon in the art community. There were plenty more icons that made history that the art community looks into today such as Bartolome Esteban Murillo and Francisco de Zurbaran and plenty more artists will be accepted as icons such as these as time goes on. As said before, art and literature took up a great portion of Spain during the Golden Age, but so did theatre and drama. While Don Quixote eclipses all other creations of this time in enduring popularity, Spanish theatre and drama of the Golden Age couldn’t be ignored. The period witnessed the almost single-handed creation of the Spanish national theatre by the incredibly productive dramatist, Lope de Vega. His inception of a dramatic tradition using specifically Spanish themes, values, and subject matter further evolved by Tirso de Molina and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Among the highlights of the period’s religious literature are “The Mystical Glorifications of Spirituality” by St. Teresa of Ávila, Luis de León, and St. John of the Cross. Tirso de Molina who studied at the University of Alcalá and in 1601 was supposed in the Mercedarian Order. Tirso built on the “free-and-easy” instructions that Lope had propounded for dramatic construction. Sometimes he borrowed from the vast common stock of Spanish stage material, and other times he relied on his own imagination. In his plays, he sometimes featured the religious and philosophical aspects that attracted his own theological interest. Other times, he drew on his own accurate and historical knowledge, gained while traveling for his order through Spain, Portugal, and the West Indies.
The most powerful dramas associated with his name are two tragedies, El burlador de Sevilla (“The Seducer of Seville”) and El Condenado Por Desconfiado (“The Doubted Damned”). Pedro Calderón de la Barca was a dramatist and poet who succeeded Lope de Vega as the greatest Spanish dramatist of the Golden Age. Among his best-known secular dramas are El Médico de Su Honra (“The Surgeon of His Honour”), La Vida Es sueño (“Life Is a Dream”), El alcalde de Zalamea (“The Mayor of Zalamea”), and La Hija del Aire (“The Daughter of the Air”), sometimes considered his masterpiece. Lope also wrote operas and plays with religious or mythological themes. Drama and theatre were the beginning of acting, and entertainment and were also the start of making fiction stories physical to give people a better idea and overall a better experience in learning. Art and literature will continue to make a large impact on people’s lives mentally and physically. Especially artists who are mentally ill and express their illness through their art, making people around them step in their shoes and get an idea of what it’s like. It’ll make people really think of what life is like for that artist and how their illness affects so much of their life. Art makes people take a step back and look at how the people around them are and shows how creative one person can actually be, how talented one person can be, and how much one person can achieve and communicate creatively. Artists create art to express things, others, and themselves and always will, taking action by creating original art and metaphors. Literature is art, theatre is art, drama, poetry, all novels. Anything and everything created by man is an art and will always make some sort of impact on everyone’s life.
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