Empire and Renaissance
An empire on which the sun never set built El Escorial, collected Titian and welcomed a Greek painter to Toledo.
In the years after 1492 Spain became a world power. Silver from America poured in through Seville, and through inheritance King Charles I also became Holy Roman Emperor as Charles V. Art followed power. At first late Gothic and Italian Renaissance forms were blended in a richly ornamented style called Plateresque, after the fine work of silversmiths. The University of Salamanca has one of the best-known Plateresque façades, covered with medallions, coats of arms and grotesque ornament.
Charles V and his son Philip II were two of Europe’s greatest art collectors. They commissioned portraits and mythological paintings from the Venetian Titian, and Philip II bought works by Hieronymus Bosch and other Netherlandish masters. Philip had the monastery-palace of El Escorial built outside Madrid, an austere and immense building in granite. It became the model for a sparsely ornamented Spanish architecture, called Herrerian after the architect Juan de Herrera.
Native painters and sculptors worked mostly for the Church. They created large altarpieces, retablos, with painted and gilded wooden sculpture. Alonso Berruguete gave his figures a nervous, dramatic movement that he had learned in Italy. In 1577 the Greek painter Domenikos Theotokopoulos settled in Toledo. The Spaniards called him El Greco. His elongated figures and flaming colours made him one of the most idiosyncratic artists in all of Europe.