The seventeenth century was a time of political and economic crisis for Spain but also the Golden Age of its arts and letters (see literature). Spanish painting, deeply religious yet realistic, influenced by Caravaggio and Venetian painting, produced some of Europe's greatest masters.
Velázquez
Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), born in Seville, trained in the workshop of Francisco Pacheco, whose daughter he married. His early works are kitchen and tavern scenes of astonishing realism, such as the Old Woman Frying Eggs. In 1623 he became court painter to Philip IV in Madrid, where he portrayed the king, the princes and the court jesters with rare respect and humanity. He travelled twice to Italy, where he painted Pope Innocent X (now in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome). His masterpieces include The Surrender of Breda, The Forge of Vulcan, The Spinners and above all Las Meninas (1656), the portrait of the Infanta Margarita with her maids of honour and the painter himself at the easel, a play of gazes and mirrors that has fascinated painters and philosophers from Picasso to Foucault. The Prado holds most of his works.
The other masters
- Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652), known as Lo Spagnoletto, born in Xàtiva, worked all his life in Naples, then Spanish: martyrs, saints and philosophers painted with strong Caravaggesque chiaroscuro.
- Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664), the painter of monks: figures in white habits, silent and solemn, and still lifes of simple objects of almost mystical intensity. His works are in Seville, the Prado and the monastery of Guadalupe.
- Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-1682), from Seville, much loved for his Immaculate Conceptions and street children, with soft, luminous painting.
- Juan de Valdés Leal, author of the macabre allegories of death in Seville's Hospital de la Caridad; Alonso Cano, painter, sculptor and architect in Granada; Juan Sánchez Cotán, master of the austere still life (bodegón).
Polychrome sculpture
The seventeenth century was the great age of polychrome wooden sculpture, made for altars and Holy Week processions: statues of Christ and the Virgin of dramatic realism, with glass eyes and resin tears. Gregorio Fernández worked in Valladolid, Juan Martínez Montañés and Juan de Mesa in Seville, Pedro de Mena in Granada. Many of these works are still carried in procession today.
Architecture
After Herrerian austerity, seventeenth-century Baroque architecture grew progressively richer: the Plaza Mayor of Madrid (1619), Alonso Cano's façade of Granada cathedral, the basilica of El Pilar in Zaragoza and the Obradoiro façade in Santiago, already in the eighteenth century. For the next century see eighteenth-century art.