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The Renaissance is a cultural phenomenon that takes up the principles of classical antiquity and updates them through humanism.
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The dome was built between 1420 and 1436 to a plan by Filippo Brunelleschi, and is still the largest masonry vault in the world. Such a structure had been planned since the 1300s, but the admirable innovation of Brunelleschi was to create it without reinforcements in wood, since none could have sustained a cupola of this size. -
The Pietà is a work of Renaissance sculpture by Michelangelo Buonarroti, housed in St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City. It is the first of a number of works of the same theme by the artist. The statue was commissioned for the French Cardinal Jean de Bilhères, who was a representative in Rome. The sculpture, in Carrara marble, was made for the cardinal's funeral monument . -
The School of Athens is a complex allegory of secular knowledge, or philosophy, showing Plato and Aristotle surrounded by philosophers, past and present, in a splendid architectural setting; it illustrates the historical continuity of Platonic thought. -
The War of the Communities of Castile, or the revolt of the comuneros, took place during the reign of Charles I, between 1520-1522. It was an armed uprising led by the so-called comuneros from the cities of the Castilian interior, with Toledo and Valladolid at the head of the uprising.
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The rebellion of the Alpujarras the conflict between the Moriscos and the Old Christians in the Kingdom of Granada between 1568 and 1571, the Alpujarras War, is one of the least known of the reign of Philip II.
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The Eighty years War was the revolt of the Netherlands against Spanish domination. In this long conflict, the Netherlands sought to free themselves both economically and politically from Spain. As a wealthy territory, the Dutch no longer wanted to fund Spain's many European wars.
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In May 1588, a gigantic fleet of 154 ships, the largest ever seen on European coasts, set sail from Lisbon heading for the North Sea. The plan entrusted to its commander, Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, Duke of Medina Sidonia, was to sail to the Flemish coast and there protect the crossing of the channel from hundreds of barges with infantry taken from the Flemish Tercios -
The Baroque was a cultural period of the Modern Age that developed between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in Western Europe and in the Latin American colonies.
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The sculpture was the last of a series of works commissioned by Cardinal Scipione Borghese at the beginning of Bernini’s career. Apollo and Daphne’s sculpture was ordered after Borghese transferred the earlier work of his patronage, Bernini’s Pluto and Persephone, to Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi. -
Saint Peter’s Square was designed by the architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini, at the behest of Pope Alexander VII. It was completed in 1667, after eleven years of intense and onerous work. The square is made up of an “oval space with three centres” (196 x 149 metres), with semicircular colonnades connected to the basilica by “arms” or closed ambulacra, delimiting a large trapezoidal-shaped area, with the largest side consisting of the façade. -
In its composition, the artist looks back to his bodegones, where two different areas and two planes of reality balance each other. The everyday scene in the foreground shows a plainly furnished room where women are at work spinning. Sunlight falling in from above conjures up a complex range of colours. On the left, an elderly woman is at the spinning wheel, while the young woman seated to the right is winding yarn. -
Neoclassicism presents itself as a new, serene and balanced art in the face of the exhaustion of the Rococo forms, with its empty and repetitive language.
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It depicts a scene from a Roman legend about a seventh-century BC dispute between two warring cities, Rome and Alba Longa, and stresses the importance of patriotism and masculine self-sacrifice for one's country -
The family of Charles IV is part of a series of royal portraits begun by Goya in 1799, on the eve of Napoleon's Consulate, which promised to pacify the tumultuous past decade. Goya placed the fourteen figures depicted in an austere interior without carpets, decorating only the back wall.