In the sixteenth century Spain became Europe's leading power, and its kings, nobles and bishops called in Italian and Flemish artists and sent their own to Italy. The meeting of late Gothic, the Mudéjar tradition and the Italian Renaissance produced an original art.
Plateresque
The early Spanish Renaissance is called Plateresque, because its façades, covered in fine decoration, grotesques, medallions and coats of arms, recall silversmiths' work (plateros). Its masterpiece is the façade of the University of Salamanca, where visitors look for the famous frog carved on a skull; also in Salamanca are the Plateresque façade of San Esteban and the shell-covered Casa de las Conchas. Other examples are in Alcalá de Henares, León and Burgos.
The classical Renaissance
In Granada, within the Alhambra, Charles V commissioned in 1527 a palace of strictly classical forms designed by Pedro Machuca, who had trained in Italy: a square with a circular colonnaded courtyard, one of the purest Renaissance works outside Italy. The great Andalusian architect Andrés de Vandelvira built Jaén cathedral and the palaces and churches of Úbeda and Baeza, two Renaissance towns listed by UNESCO. Diego de Siloé designed Granada cathedral.
El Escorial
Philip II wanted a severe art suited to the Counter-Reformation and the majesty of the monarchy. The Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, near Madrid, built between 1563 and 1584 by Juan Bautista de Toledo and above all Juan de Herrera, is at once palace, monastery, basilica, royal pantheon and library: a huge granite building almost without decoration that gave its name to the Herrerian style. Italian painters such as Pellegrino Tibaldi and Luca Cambiaso worked inside, and Philip II collected paintings by Titian and Bosch.
Sculpture and painting
Spanish sixteenth-century sculpture found its main expression in great altarpieces and polychrome wooden statues: Alonso Berruguete, an ideal pupil of Michelangelo, and Juan de Juni in Valladolid, whose National Museum of Sculpture holds their masterpieces. Among painters stand out Pedro Berruguete, Luis de Morales, called "the Divine" for his Madonnas, and Alonso Sánchez Coello, the court portraitist.
El Greco
Domenikos Theotokopoulos, called El Greco, born in Crete in 1541, trained in Venice and Rome and came to Spain in 1577. Disappointed by Philip II's reception at El Escorial, he settled in Toledo, where he painted until his death in 1614. His elongated figures, acid colours and spiritual light make him unique: his masterpiece, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586), is in the church of Santo Tomé in Toledo; other works are in the El Greco Museum, the cathedral and the Prado. For the next century see seventeenth-century art.