The Spanish Renaissance refers to a movement in Spain, emerging from the Italian Renaissance in Italy during the 14th century, that spread to Spain during the 15th and 16th centuries. The year 1492 is commonly accepted as the beginning of the influence of the Renaissance in Spain.
This new focus in art, literature and science, inspired by Classical antiquity and especially the Greco-Roman tradition, receives the transcendental impulse in this year by various successive historical events:
- Unification of the longed-for Christian kingdom with the definitive taking of Granada, last city of Islamic Spain and the successive expulsions of thousands of Muslim and Jewish believers,
- The official discovery of the western hemisphere, the Americas,
- The publication of the first grammar of a vernacular European language, the Gramática (Grammar) by Antonio de Nebrija.
Read more about Spanish Renaissance: Historic Antecedents, Literature, Architecture, Music, Science
Famous quotes containing the words spanish and/or renaissance:
“It’s like a jumble of huts in a jungle somewhere. I don’t understand how you can live there. It’s really, completely dead. Walk along the street, there’s nothing moving. I’ve lived in small Spanish fishing villages which were literally sunny all day long everyday of the week, but they weren’t as boring as Los Angeles.”
—Truman Capote (1924–1984)
“People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It’s a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it’s the togetherness of modern technology.”
—J.G. (James Graham)