Painting in Spain

Download or read book Painting in Spain written by Jonathan Brown and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: El Greco, Ribera, Velázquez, Murillo--these are but a few of the great sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artists of Spain's golden age of painting. In this authoritative and handsome book, an enlarged, extended, and revised version of his Golden Age of Painting in Spain, eminent Spanish art scholar Jonathan Brown surveys the development of painting in Spain during this fascinating period. Focusing on the interaction between art and the socioeconomic and political conditions that prevailed in Spain's golden age, this book offers information about religious beliefs, social attitudes, the activities of patrons and collectors, and how these were absorbed and interpreted by painters. The author sets the history of Spanish paintings within a European context and explores Spain's contact with artistic centers in Italy and the Netherlands. He discusses not only Spanish artists but also such non-Spanish painters as Titian, Ruben, and Luca Giordano, who either worked in Spain or influenced other artists there. Brown also examines the collections of foreign paintings that Spanish noblemen and prelates assembled and how these collections affected the production of art and the social status of the Spanish artist. In this up-to-date and innovative analysis of two hundred years of Spanish painting, Brown describes a country that brilliantly transformed the artistic impulses it received from abroad to fit the needs of its own society.