Influential Figures in Arts and Letters
Diego Velázquez
Developed a naturalistic style with tenebrist lighting, influenced by Caravaggio and his followers.
Caravaggio
Considered the first great exponent of Baroque painting.
Goya
His work embraces easel and mural painting, printmaking, and drawing. In all these facets, he developed a style that ushered in Romanticism. Goya’s art also marks the beginning of contemporary painting and is considered a precursor to the avant-garde painting of the twentieth century.
Turner
An English Romantic landscape
Read MoreRococo and Neoclassicism: Art and Society (18th-19th Century)
From the mid-eighteenth century until the last third of the nineteenth, society was radically transformed, a period of profound change initiated by the French Revolution.
Liberalism and nationalism became dominant ideologies, giving rise to the so-called bourgeois revolutions. From the mid-nineteenth century, and due to the rise of the new working class, Marxism gained great importance.
The eighteenth century was complex in terms of the diversity of artistic styles produced.
Rococo
In the early eighteenth
Read MoreArt, Music, and Intellectual History: Renaissance to Modernity
Catholic Reformation (Counter-Reformation)
The Church undertook this program of internal reform and reorganization. In an effort to win back to Catholicism those who had strayed to Protestantism, the Church launched the evangelical campaign known as the Counter-Reformation. These two interdependent movements introduced a more militant Catholicism.
Jesuits
Also known as the Society of Jesus, it was founded by Ignatius Loyola. His followers called for a militant return to fundamental Catholic dogma and
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