Spanish Golden Age

For other uses, see Golden Age (disambiguation).

Library of the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, built in the context of the cultural humanism of the Renaissance.

Boys Eating Grapes and Melon, oil painting by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (c. 1650). It belongs to genre painting, a type notable for depicting everyday subjects in a realistic and naturalistic way.

The Battle of Lepanto (1571), in which it fell to Spain to organize the defense of Europe against the Ottoman Empire.

The Pillars of Hercules with the motto Plus Ultra, symbol of Emperor Charles V, at Seville City Hall (17th century), and origin of the symbol of the current peso.

The Spanish Golden Age (Siglo de Oro) is a historical period in which Spanish thought, art and letters flourished, and which coincided with the political and military rise of the Spanish Empire of the House of Trastámara and the House of Austria.

The Golden Age is not framed by specific dates, although it is generally considered to have lasted almost two centuries, between 1492, the year of the end of the Reconquista, the Discovery of America, and the publication of the Gramática castellana by Antonio de Nebrija, and 1681, when the last great writer of the Golden Age, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, died.

Name

It is Hesiod who first speaks of the five epochs or Ages of Man in Works and Days: the golden, the silver, the bronze, the heroic and the present iron age, each increasingly degraded. The term Siglo de Oro ("Golden Age"), then, was conceived in the likeness of this myth to celebrate an era of excellence in all spheres. According to Juan Manuel Rozas, the name arose in the admission speech to the RAE of Alonso Verdugo (1736), and Ignacio de Luzán took it for the third chapter of his very widely circulated Poética (1737); moreover, the scholar Gregorio Mayáns y Siscar used it the following year in the dedication of his Vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1738), whereby it was already authorized for use by the eighteenth-century literary critic Luis José Velázquez, Marquis of Valdeflores (1722–1772), in 1754 in his work Orígenes de la poesía castellana, although to refer exclusively to the period between the Catholic Monarchs and the death of Philip III, that is, the end of the 15th century, the entire 16th century and the 17th no later than 1621. Pedro Calderón de la Barca and other important authors were thus excluded. Later the definition was broadened, encompassing the whole classical era or peak of Spanish culture, essentially the Renaissance of the 16th century and the Baroque of the 17th century. For modern historiography and theorists, then, and keeping to specific dates of key events, the Golden Age spans from the publication of the Gramática castellana by Nebrija in 1492 to the death of Calderón in 1681.

At present the tendency is to define the concept of the Golden Age comprehensively, simply as relating to the cultural process of art, literature and thought, which logically cannot be dismembered or explained in a fragmented way, as has too often been attempted. As a basic postulate, a status for the Golden Age is inconceivable without the School of Salamanca.

Introduction

By the end of the 18th century the expression "Siglo de Oro" (coined in 1736, and which soon caught on) had already become popular, which aroused the admiration of Don Quixote in his famous speech on the Golden Age. But the broadening of its limits fell to Casiano Pellicer, who in 1804 extended it to Calderón and his school in his Tratado histórico sobre el origen y progreso de la comedia....

In the 19th century it was definitively established by the American Hispanist George Ticknor in his History of Spanish Literature; it still remained, however, to include Luis de Góngora and his followers, a task undertaken at the beginning of the 20th century by Alfonso Reyes and the Generation of '27.

Helmut Hatzfeld, on the other hand, divided the literary Golden Age into four aesthetic periods: Renaissance (1530–1580), Mannerism (1570–1600), Baroque (1600–1630) and Baroquism (1630–1670). José Antonio Maravall interprets the Baroque as "a historical concept" and delimits it between 1600 and 1670–80. Ángel del Río and Fernando Rodríguez de la Flor, for their part, consider that the Baroque spans the hundred years between 1580 and 1680.

With their dynastic union, the Catholic Monarchs had outlined a politically strong State, later consolidated, whose successes were envied by some contemporary intellectuals, such as Niccolò Machiavelli. The Jews who did not become Christians were expelled in 1492 and dispersed, founding Hispanic colonies throughout Europe, Asia and North Africa, where they continued to cultivate their language and to write literature in Castilian, so that they also produced notable figures such as José Penso de la Vega, Miguel de Silveira, Jacob Uziel, Miguel de Barrios, Antonio Enríquez Gómez, Juan de Prado, Isaac Cardoso, Abraham Zacuto, Isaac Orobio de Castro, Juan Pinto Delgado, Rodrigo Méndez Silva and Manuel de Pina, among others.

In January 1492 Castile conquered Granada, thereby ending the period of Muslim political rule in the Peninsula, although a Morisco minority lived on, more or less tolerated, until the time of Philip III. Moreover, in October Columbus reached America, and the warlike zeal cultivated during the medieval wars of the Reconquista would be projected onto the new lands. Conquistadors, missionaries and adventurers, with their risky expeditions and their thirst for gold and for evangelization, were the protagonists of "the most extraordinary epic in human history", as the historian Pierre Vilar writes. However, and above all in the mid-16th century, Spanish Erasmians and Protestants were persecuted or had to emigrate, among them the translators of the Bible into Castilian, such as Francisco de Enzinas, Casiodoro de Reina and Cipriano de Valera, as well as the Protestant humanists Juan Pérez de Pineda, Antonio del Corro and Juan de Luna, among others.

During the cultural and economic peak of this era, Spain attained international prestige throughout Europe. Whatever came from Spain was often imitated, and the learning and study of the language spread (see Hispanism).

Portrait of a 17th-century gentleman (1618–1623), a work by Juan Bautista Maíno, held in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

The most cultivated cultural fields were literature, the visual arts, music and architecture. Knowledge accumulated at the prestigious universities of Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares.

The most important cities of this period are: Seville, for receiving the colonial riches and the most important European merchants and bankers; Madrid, as seat of the Court; Toledo; Valencia; Valladolid (which was capital of the Kingdom at the beginning of the 17th century); and Zaragoza.

View of Toledo Under a Storm (1596), by El Greco.

View of the city of Seville from Triana in the 16th century. Along the Guadalquivir River arrived the Fleet of the Indies, which connected the city with the American viceroyalties.

In the field of the humanities, their cultivation was more extensive than deep and more popularizing than erudite in character, even though philology offered eminent testimonies such as the Complutensian Polyglot Bible (1520) or the Antwerp Polyglot (1572), and the numerous grammars and vocabularies of the newly discovered indigenous languages, the work of the many missionary friars who evangelized the newly discovered continent.

Complutensian Polyglot Bible (1520), begun and financed by Cardinal Cisneros; it was the first polyglot or multilingual Bible, with texts in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Aramaic.

In the scientific field, too, there were important advances which, for example in agronomy, came to constitute a revolution. For if the Old World brought sugarcane, wheat and the grapevine to the New, the New brought to the Old the potato, maize, the bean, cacao, the tomato, the pepper and tobacco. Linguistics developed notably with authors such as Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas (Minerva). In geography and cartography, the cosmographer Martín Cortés de Albacar discovered the magnetic declination of the compass and the magnetic north pole, which he then placed —it moves over the course of history— in Greenland, and developed the nocturlabe; his disciple Alonso de Santa Cruz would invent the spherical chart or cylindrical projection. In anthropology and the natural sciences (botany, mineralogy, etc.) the Discovery of America provided information about new peoples, species and phenomena. There were also eminent figures in mathematics, such as Sebastián Izquierdo and his calculation of combinations and permutations; Juan Caramuel, responsible for probability calculus; Pedro Nunes, discoverer of the loxodrome and inventor of the nonius; Antonio Hugo de Omerique, Pedro Ciruelo, Juan de Rojas y Sarmiento, Rodrigo Zamorano and others.

Depiction of an ore-processing hacienda (hacienda de beneficio) of the Proaño mine in Zacatecas, using the patio process invented by Bartolomé de Medina in the 16th century. This method made it possible to separate silver from other metals using mercury and various salts, and is an example of the practical application of the scientific discoveries of the Golden Age.

In the field of medicine and pharmacology, the botanist Andrés Laguna stands out, as does the discovery by the Countess of Chinchón (1638) of the properties of cinchona, forerunner of quinine, against fevers and malaria. In psychology and pedagogy, Juan Luis Vives and Juan Huarte de San Juan (Examen de ingenios para las sciencias, 1575) stand out; while philosophy saw the emergence of the prolegomena of Rationalism with Francisco Sánchez the Skeptic and exponents of the School of Salamanca such as Francisco Suárez. Likewise, owing to the great impact of the discoveries of new peoples, natural law and the law of nations developed, with figures such as Bartolomé de las Casas, an influential precursor of human rights and defender of jusnaturalism in his De regia potestate; or Francisco de Vitoria.

The Golden Age spans two aesthetic periods, corresponding to the Renaissance of the 16th century (the Catholic Monarchs, Charles I and Philip II) and the Baroque of the 17th century (Philip III, Philip IV and Charles II). The axis between these two eras or phases can be placed at the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation.

Literature

Title page of the editio princeps of El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605).

Portrait of the religious and poet Saint John of the Cross. Together with Saint Teresa of Jesus, he is considered the summit of Christian experiential mysticism.

In its classical age Spain produced some characteristic aesthetics and literary genres that were very influential in the later development of world literature. Among the aesthetics, the development of a realist and popularizing one was fundamental, as it had been taking shape throughout the peninsular Middle Ages as a critical counterpart to the excessive, chivalric and ennobling idealism of the Renaissance: thus were created genres as naturalistic as the Celestinesque (Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, Segunda Celestina, etc.), the picaresque novel (La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzmán de Alfarache, La vida del Buscón or Estebanillo González), or the protean modern polyphonic novel (Don Quijote de la Mancha), which Cervantes defined as "unbound writing".

This literary popularization corresponds to a subsequent popularization of humanistic knowledge through the popular genres of miscellanies or silvas de varia lección, widely read and translated throughout Europe, among whose most important authors were Pedro Mejía, Luis Zapata and Antonio de Torquemada.

To this anticlassical tendency also corresponds the formula of the comedia nueva created by Lope de Vega and spread through his Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (1609): an unequaled explosion of dramatic creativity accompanied Lope de Vega and his disciples (Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, Tirso de Molina, Guillén de Castro, Antonio Mira de Amescua, Luis Vélez de Guevara, Juan Pérez de Montalbán, among others), who, like him, broke the Aristotelian unities of action, time and place. All the dramatic authors of Europe later turned to the classical Spanish theater of the Golden Age in search of plots, a rich storehouse and quarry of modern themes and structures whose polishing would yield them works of classical character.

At the end of the 16th century mysticism developed notably at the hands of Juan de la Cruz, Juan Bautista de la Concepción, Juan de Ávila and Teresa de Jesús; and asceticism, with authors such as Luis de León and Luis de Granada, only to decline in the 17th century after a last innovative current, the quietism of Miguel de Molinos.

Many of the literary themes of the 16th century came from the rich and multicultural medieval, Arabic and Hebrew tradition, from the romancero, and from the Italianizing imprint on Spanish culture —owing to the political presence of the Spanish kingdom in the Italian peninsula for a considerable time. On the other hand, dramatic genres such as the entremés and the courtly novel also introduced the realist aesthetic into the corrales de comedias, and even the comedia de capa y espada had its popular representative in the figure of the gracioso.

This current of popularizing realism was succeeded by a religious, noble and courtly reaction of Baroque character that also made notable aesthetic contributions, but which already corresponded to an era of political, economic and social crisis. The clear and popular language of the 16th century, the living, creative and perpetually effervescent Castilian of Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Saint Teresa, would be succeeded by the darker, more enigmatic and courtly language of the Baroque. And so arises the paradox that the Spanish literature of the Renaissance, from five centuries ago, is clearer, more legible and more understandable than the literature of the Baroque, from only four centuries ago.

Indeed, the literary language of the 17th century becomes rarefied with the aesthetics of conceptismo and culteranismo, whose aim was to elevate the noble above the vulgar, intellectualizing the art of the word; literature is transformed into a kind of scholasticism, into a game or a courtly spectacle, although the moralizing and extremely ingenious productions of a Francisco de Quevedo and a Baltasar Gracián distort the language, giving it greater expressive flexibility and a new quarry of words (cultisms). The lucid Pedro Calderón de la Barca created the formula of the auto sacramental, which represents the antipopular and splendorous popularization of theology, in deliberate antithesis to the entremés, which nonetheless still remained in currency; for these authors are still indebted to and admirers of the authors of the 17th century, whom they consciously imitate, although in order not to repeat themselves they refine their formulas and stylize in courtly fashion what others had already created, so that themes and dramatic formulas already used by other earlier authors are perfected. The school of Calderón would carry on with this model, which José de Cañizares and Antonio de Zamora would continue and definitively close at the beginning of the 18th century.

Poetry

Portrait of the writer Luis de Góngora by Diego Velázquez. His rivalry with Quevedo would exemplify the clash of the two main literary currents of the moment: culteranismo and conceptismo. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1620.

Portrait of the New Spanish poet Juana de Asbaje y Ramírez, better known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, by Miguel Cabrera (c. 1750). National Museum of History, Mexico.

Spain experienced a great wave of Italianism that invaded literature and the visual arts during the 16th century, which constitutes one of the defining features of the Renaissance: Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Boscán and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza introduced the Italian hendecasyllabic verse and the stanza forms and themes of Petrarchism; Boscán wrote the manifesto of the new school in the Epístola a la duquesa de Soma and translated The Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione, the ideal of the Renaissance gentleman, into perfect Castilian prose. Against them rose a nationalist current headed by the nostalgic Cristóbal de Castillejo, resident in Vienna, and Ambrosio Montesino, both partisans of the octosyllable, of Castilian coplas and of popular inspiration; all of them were, however, Renaissance authors.

In the second half of the 16th century the Italian tendency and the native Castilian one coexisted, and asceticism and mysticism developed, reaching summits such as those represented by Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa of Jesus and Luis de León, among many others that would deserve a long review; Ignatius of Loyola created the Society of Jesus, which would instruct great scholars throughout Europe in all orders of knowledge and would also foster the study of the classical languages. Petrarchism continued to be cultivated by authors such as Fernando de Herrera, and a group of young new authors began to develop a new Romancero, sometimes on Moorish themes: Lope de Vega, who would also develop a learned casticismo through his various songbooks (Rimas, Rimas sacras, La Circe, La Filomela, Rimas humanas y divinas...), Luis de Góngora and Miguel de Cervantes, among others; the best poem of learned epic in Spanish was composed in this era by Alonso de Ercilla: La Araucana, which narrates the conquest of Chile by the Spaniards. In 1584, the year in which La Araucana was published, Francisco Hernández Blasco brought out another extensive epic poem in stanzas on an evangelical subject, the Universal redención, which would go through numerous later editions and enjoy notable success. Among the exceptional figures of lyric poetry appear poets as interesting as Francisco de Aldana; Andrés Fernández de Andrada, author of the serene and meditative Epístola moral a Fabio; the brothers Bartolomé and Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola; Fernando de Herrera; Francisco de Medrano; Francisco de Rioja; Rodrigo Caro; Baltasar del Alcázar; and Bernardo de Balbuena, who in 1624 would give the world the second great learned epic in Spanish, El Bernardo o Victoria de Roncesvalles.

Portrait of the writer Francisco de Quevedo, the foremost exponent of conceptismo, dressed as a knight of the Order of Santiago. Instituto Valencia de Don Juan, mid-17th century.

Later, during the 17th century, literary expression was dominated by the aesthetic movements of conceptismo and culteranismo, the former expressed in the poetry of Francisco de Quevedo, chiefly satirical, moral and philosophical-existential, and the latter in the lyric poetry of Luis de Góngora (the Sonetos, the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea and above all his Soledades). Conceptismo was distinguished by economy of form, in order to express the maximum meaning in a minimum of words; this complexity was expressed above all in paradoxes and ellipses. Culteranismo, on the contrary, extended the form of a minimal meaning and was distinguished by syntactic complexity, by the constant use of hyperbaton, which makes reading very difficult, and by the profusion of ornamental and culturalist elements in the poem, which had to be deciphered like an enigma. Both, however, seem to be two sides of the same coin that sought to refine expression in order to make it more difficult and courtly. Luis de Góngora attracted to his style important poets of very marked personality, such as the Count of Villamediana, Gabriel Bocángel, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Juan de Jáuregui, while conceptismo had more moderate followers, such as the Count of Salinas, or followers imbued with a learned casticismo, such as Lope de Vega and Bernardino de Rebolledo.

Theater

Main article: Spanish Golden Age theater

Portrait of the poet and playwright Lope de Vega y Carpio. Lázaro Galdiano Museum, early 17th century.

In the Golden Age the "monster of nature", as Cervantes called him, was Lope de Vega, also known as "the Phoenix of Wits", author of more than four hundred plays, as well as novels, epic and narrative poems and several collections of secular, religious and humorous lyric poetry. Lope stood out as a consummate master of the sonnet. His contribution to world theater was chiefly a prodigious imagination, which his contemporaries and his Spanish and European successors drew upon, extracting themes, plots, motifs and every kind of inspiration. His theater, polymetric, breaks with the unities of action, place and time, and also with that of style, mixing the tragic with the comic. He set out his particular dramatic art in his Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (1609). He made the classicist norms of Aristotelianism more flexible to suit his time, and thereby opened the doors to the renewal of dramatic art. He also created the mold of the so-called comedia de capa y espada. In the comedia palatina, he was the author who most often resorted to settings in the Kingdom of Hungary, a device that would become frequent in the literature of the period. Lope's cycle of Hungarian comedies consists of around twenty works.

Alongside him stand out his disciples Guillén de Castro, who dispenses with the comic character of the gracioso and produces great chivalric dramas about honor, along with comedies of conjugal unhappiness or tragedies dealing with tyrannicide; Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, who contributed his great ethical sense in criticizing social defects and great mastery in characterization; Luis Vélez de Guevara, who excelled at great historical and honor dramas; Antonio Mira de Amescua, very learned and rich in philosophical ideas; and Tirso de Molina, a master in the art of diabolically complicating the plot and of creating characters such as Don Juan in El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra.

Representative masterpieces of the Spanish theater of the Golden Age include Numancia by Miguel de Cervantes, a sober national heroic drama; by Lope, El caballero de Olmedo, a poetic drama on the very edge of the fantastic and full of Celestinesque echoes; Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña, a forerunner of the Spanish rural drama; El perro del hortelano, a delightful comedy in which a noblewoman toys with the amorous intentions of her plebeian secretary; La dama boba, in which love perfects the beings it torments; and Fuenteovejuna, a drama of collective honor, among many other pieces in which there is always some brilliant scene.

Portrait of the playwright Juan Ruiz de Alarcón y Mendoza, prolific in the genre of the comedy of character. Church of Santa Prisca, Taxco, 17th century.

Las mocedades del Cid by Guillén de Castro, inspiration for the famous "Cornelian dilemma" of Le Cid by Pierre Corneille; Reinar después de morir by Luis Vélez de Guevara, on the subject of Inés de Castro, which with this work passed into European drama; La verdad sospechosa and Las paredes oyen, by Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, which attack the vices of hypocrisy and slander and served as inspiration for Molière and other French comic playwrights; El esclavo del demonio by Antonio Mira de Amescua, on the Faust theme; La prudencia en la mujer, which explores the theme of repeated betrayal and in which the strong character of the Queen Regent María de Molina appears; and El burlador de Sevilla, by Tirso de Molina, on the theme of the donjuan and the legend of the stone guest.

The other great dramatist of the Golden Age to create his own school was Calderón de la Barca; his characters are cold reasoners and often obsessive; his versification consciously reduces Lope de Vega's metrical repertoire and also the number of scenes, because the dramatic structures are more carefully crafted and tend toward synthesis; he is also more concerned than Lope with scenographic elements, and he reworks earlier comedies, correcting, suppressing, adding and perfecting; he is a master in the art of syllogistic reasoning and uses an abstract, rhetorical and elaborate language which nonetheless represents an understandable popularization of culteranismo; he excels especially in the auto sacramental, an allegorical genre suited to his qualities which he brought to perfection, and also in comedy.

Portrait of the writer Pedro Calderón de la Barca, prominent in the genre of theater. Engraving from Las glorias nacionales (1852), University of Seville.

Among the works of Calderón, masterpieces stand out such as La vida es sueño, on the themes of free will and destiny; El príncipe constante, in which an existential conception of life appears; the two parts of La hija del aire, the great tragedy of ambition in the person of Queen Semiramis; and the great honor dramas about characters driven mad by jealousy, such as El mayor monstruo del mundo, El médico de su honra or El pintor de su deshonra. Among his comedies, La dama duende stands out, and he likewise cultivated mythological dramas such as Céfalo y Procris, from which he himself derived the burlesque comedy of the same title; and also autos sacramentales such as El gran teatro del mundo or El gran mercado del mundo, which captivated the imagination of the English and German Romantics.

He had as disciples and imitators of these qualities a series of authors who reworked earlier plays by Lope or his disciples, polishing and perfecting them: Agustín Moreto, master of dialogue and courtly comedy; Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, as gifted for tragedy as for comedy; Antonio de Solís, also a historian and the owner of a prose that is already Neoclassical; and Francisco Bances Candamo, a theorist of drama, among others no less important.

Among his disciples we have the classic comedies of Agustín Moreto, such as the comedia palatina El desdén, con el desdén, the figurón comedy El lindo don Diego and the religious drama San Franco de Sena, which harks back to El condenado por desconfiado by Tirso de Molina; Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, with the figurón comedy Entre bobos anda el juego, the honor drama Del rey abajo ninguno and the delightful and modern comedy Abre el ojo. By Antonio de Solís, El amor al uso and Un bobo hace ciento; by Francisco Bances Candamo, the political tragedies El esclavo en grillos de oro and La piedra filosofal.

Another important theatrical genre, sometimes neglected by critics, is the entremés, in which Spanish society during the Golden Age can best and most objectively be studied. It is a comic piece in one act, written in prose or verse, which was inserted between the first and second acts (jornadas) of the comedies. It corresponds to the European farce, and authors such as Luis Quiñones de Benavente and Miguel de Cervantes, among others, excelled in it.

Prose

Portrait of the writer Mateo Alemán, known for his novel Guzmán de Alfarache. Engraving from the editio princeps of that work (1599).

Prose in the Golden Age boasts genres and authors that have passed into the history of world literature. The conquest of America gave rise to the genre of the Chronicles, among which some masterpieces can be found, such as those of Bartolomé de las Casas, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas and Antonio de Solís. Also splendid are some soldiers' autobiographies, such as those of Alonso de Contreras and Diego Duque de Estrada. The first masterpiece was undoubtedly La Celestina, an unstageable play and highly original work by an unknown author and by Fernando de Rojas, which, together with its continuations by other authors (the so-called Celestinesque genre) or its free imitations (among them the prodigious La Lozana andaluza (1528), masterpiece of Francisco Delicado), forever stamped Realism on an essential part of Spanish literature, whose richness also nourishes chivalric fictions as marvelous and fantastic as the books of chivalry, less read today than they deserve, considering that among their most outstanding pieces are novels such as Tirante el Blanco, written in Valencian, Amadís de Gaula or Palmerín de Inglaterra; a characteristic author of the genre was Feliciano de Silva.

Baltasar Gracián, a Jesuit and writer associated with conceptismo, stood out for his work El Criticón, an allegory of human life.

The sentimental novel opens and closes within half a century with two masterpieces: Cárcel de amor (1492) by Diego de San Pedro and Proceso de cartas de amores (1548), an epistolary novel by Juan de Segura (1548). Alongside these, mention must also be made of two other masterpieces of the genre of the Moorish novel: the Historia del Abencerraje y de la hermosa Jarifa (1565) and Ozmín y Daraja by Mateo Alemán (1599).

The picaresque novel counts among its greatest creations masterpieces such as the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), an anticlerical and unsparing satire of the pretensions to nobility and the sense of honor of the upper class; Vida del pícaro Guzmán de Alfarache (1599 and 1604) by Mateo Alemán, a pessimistic reflection on human destiny; the Vida del escudero Marcos de Obregón (1618) by Vicente Espinel, full, on the contrary, of the joy of life; La vida del Buscón (1604–1620) by Francisco de Quevedo, a masterpiece of humor and of conceptista language; the anticlerical Segunda parte de la vida de Lazarillo (1620) by the Protestant Juan de Luna; and the work of enigmatic authorship Estebanillo González (1646), which offers a splendid view of the decline of Spain on the European stage, and of the Thirty Years' War. The courtly novel supplied the masterpieces that make up the Novelas ejemplares (1613) by Miguel de Cervantes, each in itself a narrative experiment; his immortal Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605 and 1615), which would deserve a separate chapter because of the richness of the contents and questions it raises, is in effect the first polyphonic novel of European literature. The pastoral novel has masterpieces such as the Dianas of Jorge de Montemayor (1559 and 1604) and of Gaspar Gil Polo (1564), La constante Amarilis (1607) by Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa or Siglo de Oro en las selvas de Erifile (1608) by Bernardo de Balbuena. The Byzantine novel has examples such as El peregrino en su patria (1634) by Lope de Vega, who achieves the feat of setting all its adventures in the Peninsula, Cervantes's Persiles (1617) and León prodigioso (1634) by Cosme Gómez Tejada de los Reyes.

A philosophical novel related to this genre is the Criticón (1651, 1653 and 1657) by Baltasar Gracián, an allegory of human life. Doctrinal prose, an incipient form of the essay, has as model authors Pero Mexía, Luis Zapata, Antonio de Guevara (Epístolas familiares, 1539; Relox de príncipes, 1539), Luis de León (De los nombres de Cristo), Saint John of the Cross (Comentarios on the Cántico espiritual and other poems), Francisco de Quevedo (Marco Bruto and Providencia de Dios) and Diego Saavedra Fajardo (República literaria and Corona gótica).

Influence

Portrait of Friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who in 1550 took the leading role in a debate before a junta of theologians and jurists at the Colegio de San Gregorio in Valladolid on the morality of the conquest and dominion of America, together with other intellectuals such as Domingo de Soto, Melchor Cano, Pedro de la Gasca and Archbishop Carranza. He is considered a precursor of Human Rights.

Portrait of the Jesuit Juan de Mariana, author of De rege et regis institutione (1599), an essay in which he defends the legitimacy of a revolution or of the execution of a king if he acts tyrannically and contrary to the interest of the people, which made it one of the most scandalous works of 17th-century Europe. It was linked to the assassination of King Henry IV of France (1610) and to the French Revolution (1789).

First banknote issued by the Bank of Spain (1878), dedicated to Miguel de Cervantes.

Jean Rotrou (1609–1650) and Paul Scarron (1610–1660) achieved great success by translating or imitating Spanish authors, and these influenced the greatest French playwrights, such as Pierre Corneille and Molière, not to mention others of lesser importance, such as Thomas Corneille, Alain René Lesage, John Vanbrugh, etc. Spanish plays extended their influence by being translated, for example, in Holland (by Theodore Rodenburg) and England (John Webster, Fletcher, Dryden, etc.).

Philosophy

The philosophy of the Spanish Golden Age encompasses all the thought ranging from early humanism to the establishment of rationalism in the 18th century, and its immense core is the School of Salamanca, from Francisco de Vitoria to Francisco Suárez, who are its greatest geniuses.

In Golden Age Spain, where two religions, Judaism and Christianity, coexisted, a philosophy developed that culminates in the Baroque period. Thus, the philosophy of the Golden Age could be divided into two eras: that of the Renaissance and that of the Baroque.

Juan Luis Vives stood out as a moralist and educational reformer, with publications such as De subventione pauperum and De disciplinis libri XX.

The Renaissance produced the first great philologist humanist of Spain, Antonio de Nebrija, above all thanks to his Spanish grammar. Nebrija succeeded in identifying the first rules of the language, which would later be so widely disseminated with the subsequent founding of the Royal Spanish Academy (1713). On the other hand, the great patron during humanism was Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, who strove to reform clerical customs. In 1499 he founded the University of Alcalá de Henares, which surpassed all the others in prestige and influence except that of Salamanca, its greatest rival.

Charles I defended the new theories of Erasmus of Rotterdam and the new humanist current. A faithful follower of Erasmianism was Juan Luis Vives. He became a reformer of European education and a moral philosopher of universal stature, proposing the study of the works of Aristotle in their original language and adapting his books for the study of Latin to students; he replaced medieval texts with new ones, with a vocabulary suited to his era and to the way of speaking of the time, and made the first contributions to a nascent science, psychology.

The new discoveries in the New World and the Spanish colonization of the Indies led some thinkers to reflect on the treatment that the natives deserved. The controversy was sparked by the Dominican Friar Bartolomé de las Casas in his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, in which he described the Spanish colonization of America in horrifying tones and defended jusnaturalism. The content of the writing led to the convening of a dispute between 1550 and 1551 in Valladolid against his main opponent, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who defended customary law, the goodness of Spanish colonization and the right of war. This dispute came to be called the "Junta de Valladolid".

The religious Bartolomé de las Casas, known above all for his defense of the American natives in the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias.

The Jesuit theologian and philosopher Francisco Suárez, member of the School of Salamanca and a Scholastic authority.

The University of Salamanca contributed decisively to universal political, economic and moral thought. The resurgence of the new spirit is embodied in its principal figure, Francisco de Vitoria, a Dominican theologian and professor at Salamanca, who rejected all argumentation based on purely metaphysical considerations in favor of studying the real problems posed by contemporary political and social life. He was the first to establish the basic concepts of modern international law, basing himself on the rule of natural law. He thus affirmed fundamental freedoms such as those of speech, communication, trade and passage across the seas, provided that nations and races did not harm one another.

Christianity in Spain produced its own thinkers and theologians, most of them orthodox through the Counter-Reformation, but also heterodox ones in a Reformation that could only take hold abroad. As for the orthodox, Saint Ignatius of Loyola stands out; he wrote his Spiritual Exercises and founded the Society of Jesus, with which religious unity was sought and which, with its network of colleges, renewed the teaching of the classical languages. In poetry, very profound and personal movements of asceticism and mysticism developed. The lyric poetry of the Renaissance is characterized by a group of religious who transmitted their philosophy through poetry. Worth highlighting are Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa of Jesus and F as eminent figures among a large group of important figures.

The arrival of the Baroque completely changed the Renaissance mentality of humanism. The view of life became pessimistic and all perspectives ended in disillusionment. Philosophical prose shines with Luis de Molina, an illuminist established in Rome. His doctrine, nicknamed Molinism, had great repercussions and influence on the Baroque thinkers and writers who came after him. His thought blends the principles of religion with an elaborate moral philosophy. Molina combated determinism with free will. His works on freedom were widely followed by the thinkers of the following century.

The philosopher and physician Gómez Pereira rejected medieval concepts in order to defend the empirical methods on which the science of the following two centuries would be based. He is considered, together with the skeptic Francisco Sánchez, one of the precursors of René Descartes and influenced his later works, being the first to suggest the automatism of beasts, the theory of human knowledge and the immortality of the soul.

The University of Salamanca also contributed a good deal to the thought of the early Baroque. Melchor Cano wrote De Locis Theologicis, a work in which he established the ten sources for theological demonstration: Sacred Scripture, apostolic tradition, the authority of the Catholic Church, the authority of the ecumenical councils, the authority of the Supreme Pontiff, the doctrine of the Fathers of the Church, the doctrine of the Scholastic doctors and canonists, human rational truth, the doctrine of the philosophers, and history.

At the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque stands Francisco Suárez, a man of extraordinary culture and learned in classical matters. He continued the Thomist doctrine in a versatile way. In his great philosophical and juridical work De legibus ac Deo legislatore, very fruitful for the doctrine of jusnaturalism and international law, the idea of the social pact is already found. Suárez is one of the summits of European philosophy.

Great advances were made in anthropology. The principal figure was José de Acosta, who anticipated Darwin's theory of evolution by three centuries.

Visual arts

Painting

The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586–1588), by El Greco, a work depicting the miracle in which, according to popular tradition, Saint Stephen and Saint Augustine came down from Heaven to bury Gonzalo Ruiz de Toledo, Count of Orgaz, with their own hands.

Las Meninas (1656), considered the masterpiece of Diego Velázquez, depicting several members of the court and of the family of King Philip IV of Spain, as well as the author himself. It is held in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

Assassination of the Inquisitor Pedro de Arbués (1664), by Murillo (originally in the Chapel of the Inquisition in Seville, now in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg). The work depicts the attack perpetrated by a group of Jewish converts against the Inquisitor of Aragon in 1485, while he was praying in the Cathedral of Zaragoza (Spain).

In the visual arts, painting stands out. To a first phase belong Pedro Berruguete, Pedro Machuca, Luis de Morales, and the Leonardesque Juan de Juanes and Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina. To the second, Juan Fernández de Navarrete, Alonso Sánchez Coello and El Greco, the principal exponent of pictorial Mannerism in Castile.

To the Baroque belong Diego Velázquez, a painter of complex intellectualized compositions who delves into the mystery of raw, intense light and aerial perspective; the Caravaggesque tenebrists Francisco de Zurbarán (a great painter of friars and still lifes), Francisco Ribalta and José de Ribera; in Seville, Francisco Herrera the Elder and Francisco Herrera the Younger, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and Juan de Valdés Leal deserve mention; while in Córdoba Antonio del Castillo stands out, and in Granada Alonso Cano.

Also to be mentioned are Juan Bautista Maíno (a painter of political allegories), Claudio Coello, Juan Carreño de Miranda, the Florentine Vicente Carducho, the portraitist Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, Luis Tristán (one of El Greco's few disciples, who adds naturalistic elements to the master's style), Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, Pedro Orrente, Bartolomé González y Serrano, the Carthusian Juan Sánchez Cotán (famous for his mystical still lifes), Eugenio Cajés, Antonio Pereda, Mateo Cerezo, the landscape painter Francisco Collantes, Juan Antonio Frías y Escalante, José Antolínez, the Aragonese Jusepe Martínez and many others.

Sculpture

Our Lady of the Choir (1515) by Damián Forment. Polychromed and gilded alabaster. It comes from the Convent of Las Fecetas in Zaragoza.

Processional monstrance of the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba (Spain), a piece made in gold and silver by the goldsmith Enrique de Arfe in the 16th century, with contributions by Juan Ruiz el Vandalino and Bernabé García de los Reyes.

As regards sculpture, in the Pre-Renaissance and the first years of the 16th century we already have the foreign figures who worked in Spain: Domenico Fancelli, Pietro Torrigiano and Jacopo Florentino. The first generation of Spanish sculptors of the Renaissance in Castile was made up of Vasco de la Zarza (retrochoir of Ávila Cathedral), Felipe Vigarny (main altarpiece of Toledo Cathedral), Bartolomé Ordóñez (choir stalls of Barcelona Cathedral) and Diego de Siloé (tomb of Don Alonso de Fonseca y Acevedo in the Convent of the Úrsulas in Salamanca); in the Crown of Aragon the work of Damián Forment stands out (main altarpiece of the Basilica of the Pillar, 1509, and of the Poblet Monastery, 1527), as does that of Gil Morlanes the Elder (portal of the church of Santa Engracia in Zaragoza) and Gabriel Yoly, who carved the main altarpiece of Teruel Cathedral in unpolychromed wood in 1536.

Reliefs on the seats of the choir of the Cathedral of Córdoba, built during the Renaissance inside the former caliphal Mosque.

In Mannerism one must of course name the counterpart of the asceticism and mysticism of the second half of the 16th century. The great Alonso Berruguete; the Galician Gregorio Fernández; the Italian classicist sculptors Leone Leoni and his son Pompeyo Leoni (who worked for the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial); the Baroque sculptors Francisco del Rincón and Pedro Vicálvaro, of the Castilian School, and Juan de Juni; of the Andalusian School, Jerónimo Hernández, Andrés de Ocampo, Juan Martínez Montañés, Juan de Mesa, Francisco de Ocampo y Felguera and Alonso Cano. They then led into the full Baroque with sculptors such as Pedro de Mena, Pedro Roldán, his daughter Luisa Roldán and his grandson Pedro Duque y Cornejo; Francisco Ruiz Gijón, José Risueño, Bernardo de Mora and his son José de Mora. From Gipuzkoa came Juan de Ancheta, of Roman classicist style, whose work was carried out mainly in Navarre, La Rioja and Aragon. The subject matter treated is almost exclusively religious, and only within the sphere of the Court is there monumental sculpture; mythological and secular themes are absent. Altarpieces were made, in which freestanding figures and figures in bas-relief appear. Wooden imagery of Hispanic tradition stands out by far. In these works the technique of estofado is lost, and later polychromy would be used. The figures are isolated: for churches, convents and Holy Week processions.

Music

Score of the Missa alma redemptoris mater by Tomás Luis de Victoria (Madrid, 1600).

Orpheus playing the vihuela. Illustration from El Maestro by Luys de Milán (1536).

This was also the golden age of Spanish music. The work of court composers, who combined their work as musicians with that of playwrights and poets, is well exemplified by Juan del Encina in the 15th and 16th centuries; or, in the 17th century, by Juan Hidalgo, who set to music the zarzuelas of Calderón de la Barca, as Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco would also do. In the time of Charles V, Mateo Flecha the Elder composed; he was the author of the Ensaladas (Prague, 1581), a genre that mixes verses in various languages. Cristóbal de Morales studied in Rome, where he published some masses in 1544. Other musicians were Pedro de Pastrana, Juan Vázquez and Diego Ortiz.

To the era of Philip II belong Francisco Gabriel Gálvez, Andrés de Torrentes, Juan Navarro and Rodrigo de Ceballos. In Seville worked Francisco Guerrero, who traveled to Italy and published his work between 1555 and 1589.

But even more important was the work of composers or, as they were called at the time, maestros de capilla and organists who, starting from the motet and the Italian madrigal of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, developed a great polyphony above all in the service of religious offices, with a great emotional charge that distinguished it from the other three great polyphonic schools of the 15th to 17th centuries, namely the Flemish, Venetian and Roman schools, and which has been linked to the mystical fervor of writers such as Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross. Outstanding are the already mentioned figures of Cristóbal de Morales and Francisco Guerrero, earlier ones such as Francisco de Peñalosa, teacher of Morales, and later ones such as Alonso Lobo, but above all that of the great Tomás Luis de Victoria, majestic, inspired and mystical. His music has been compared in its depth and ascetic emotion to the painting of El Greco, and today, thanks to the work of scholars and promoters of his music such as Jordi Savall, he is recognized as one of the greatest composers of all time. In Rome, where he mainly worked, he published some 170 works —65 motets, 34 masses, 37 offices for Holy Week, Magnificat and Psalms— from 1572 onward. From 1587 he worked for the Empress, on whose death he composed a famous Officium Defunctorum (1605) for six voices. His polychoralism (compositions for two choirs) and his care for harmony, in the writing of flats and sharps, mark him as a precursor of the Baroque.

The school of the Spanish vihuela of the 16th century stands out. Great figures appeared, such as Esteban Daza, Luys de Milán (author of El Maestro, 1536, which includes fantasias, pavanes, tientos, villancicos, romances and original works in which the vihuela accompanies song), Alonso Mudarra (with his Tres libros de música en cifra para vihuela, Seville, 1546), Luis de Narváez (El Delphín, 1538), Enríquez de Valderrábano (Silva de Sirenas, 1547), Diego Pisador (Libro de música de vihuela, 1552), Miguel de Fuenllana (Orphénica Lyra) and, already in the last quarter of the 17th century, Gaspar Sanz, who gave a definitive impetus to the guitar with his work Instrucción de música sobre la guitarra española.

For their keyboard works, Antonio de Cabezón of Burgos in the 16th century, and Juan Bautista Cabanilles and Francisco Correa de Arauxo in the 17th century, gained fame. The classic works in this respect are the Obras de música para tecla, harpa y vihuela (1578) by Antonio de Cabezón, prepared by his son, and El Libro de Cifra Nueva para tecla, harpa y vihuela (Alcalá de Henares, 1557) by Luis Venegas de Henestrosa: both show the versatility of these compositions in adapting to instruments or to human voices.

Together they formed a period of splendor for Spanish music which, except for isolated figures, never again reached the heights attained in this era. However, a large part of this musical heritage has been lost; for example, of the work of Francisco de Salinas, who so delighted Friar Luis de León, not a single score has survived, but only a theoretical treatise.

Architecture

Palace of Charles V in Granada.

In the 16th century there was a shift from the Plateresque style of the Renaissance under the Catholic Monarchs to a more fully Renaissance style during the reign of Charles I; later, during that of his son Philip II, the Mannerism of Juan de Herrera emerged, creator of the Herrerian style, of the monumental Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial and of the unfinished Valladolid Cathedral; and during the 17th century the Baroque and Churrigueresque dominated.

In Spain, the Renaissance began joined to Gothic forms in the last decades of the 15th century. The style began to spread above all at the hands of local architects: this is the reason for a specifically Spanish Renaissance style, which brought together the influence of southern Italian architecture, sometimes drawn from illustrated books and paintings, with the Gothic tradition and local idiosyncrasy. The new style is called Plateresque, because of the excessively decorated façades, which recall the intricate work of silversmiths. Classical orders and candelabra motifs (candelieri) are freely combined in symmetrical ensembles.

Monastery of El Escorial.

Façade of the Colegio Mayor Santa Cruz in Valladolid.

In this context, the Palace of Charles V built by Pedro Machuca in Granada represented an unexpected achievement within the most advanced Renaissance of the time. The palace can be defined as an anticipation of Mannerism, owing to its mastery of the classical language and its groundbreaking aesthetic achievements. It was built before the principal works of Michelangelo and Andrea Palladio. Its influence was very limited and poorly understood; Plateresque forms prevailed in the general panorama.

As the decades passed, the Gothic influence disappeared and the pursuit of an orthodox classicism reached very high levels. Although Plateresque is a term commonly used to define most of the architectural production of the late 15th century and the first half of the 16th century, some architects acquired a more sober taste, such as Diego de Siloé, Rodrigo Gil de Hontañón and Gaspar de Vega. Examples of Plateresque are the façades of the University of Salamanca, of the Colegio Mayor Santa Cruz in Valladolid and of the Hostal San Marcos de León.

The summit of the Spanish Renaissance is represented by the Royal Monastery of El Escorial, built by Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera, in which an excessive adherence to the art of ancient Rome was overcome by an extremely sober style. The influence of Flemish roofs, the symbolism of the sparse decoration and the precise cutting of the granite laid the foundation for a new style, the Herrerian.

In a style closer to Mannerism, the century closes with architects such as Andrés de Vandelvira (Jaén Cathedral).

When Italian Baroque influences reached Spain, they gradually replaced in popular taste the sober classicist taste that had been in fashion since the 16th century. As early as 1667, the façades of Granada Cathedral by Alonso Cano and of Jaén by Eufrasio López de Rojas show the ease with which the traditional motifs of Spanish cathedrals were interpreted in the Baroque manner.

The local Baroque retains roots in Herrera and in traditional brick construction, developed in Madrid throughout the 17th century (Plaza Mayor and Madrid City Hall).

See also

• Golden Age Spanish
• History of science and technology in Spain
• Poetic joust
• Spanish Golden Age theater
• Spanish universities in the Golden Age

Bibliography

• García Cueto, D. (2007). Seicento boloñés y Siglo de Oro español. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica. ISBN 978-84-934643-6-8.
• Velázquez de Velasco, L. J. (1754). Orígenes de la poesía castellana (in español). Málaga.
• Zorita Bayón, M. (2010). Breve historia del Siglo de Oro (in español). Madrid: Ediciones Nowtilus. ISBN 978-84-9763-820-3.

External links

• Spanish authors of the Golden Age on Spanish Wikisource
• History of Spanish art, literature, architecture and music. Archived 2019-01-29 at the Wayback Machine (in Spanish and English)
• List of web links on the Golden Age
• Siglo de Oro Español journal (edited by Carlos Dimeo)
• "El Barroco y el Siglo de Oro", in El Liceo Digital
• "El Siglo de Oro", at the University of Puget Sound
• CD edition of Golden Age theater. Archived 2021-04-21 at the Wayback Machine
• Grupo de Investigación Siglo de Oro (GRISO)
• Flores de Poetas Antequerano-Granadinos
• Seminario Interdisciplinar para el estudio de la Literatura Áurea Española. Archived 2011-09-22 at the Wayback Machine
• "El tema de la naturaleza en la poesía del Siglo de Oro", by Marta Martínez Valls (in French)
• Links on Golden Age theater. Archived 2016-05-13 at the Wayback Machine
• Digitized collection of Golden Age theater, in the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica of the National Library of Spain
• Text search engine for the images of the BNE's digitized collection of Golden Age theater
• GRISO. Grupo de Investigación del Siglo de Oro, at the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library.
• Cátedra Extraordinaria de Literatura y Arte Sacro del Siglo de Oro, at the San Dámaso University.