THE HAPSBURG ERA: TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY 51
Quevedo, “that seem to exist and have their being,
and yet they are nothing more than a name and an
appearance.”
By contrast, drama of the Golden Age only
faintly refl ected the national crisis. The plays of
Lope de Vega (1562–1645) were rich in inven-
tion, sparkling dialogue, and melodious verse; his
gallant hidalgos, courageous and clever heroines,
and dignifi ed peasants evoked the best traditions
of Castile’s past with a curious disregard for the
dismal present. However, the defeatism of late-
seventeenth-century Castile was refl ected in the
dramas of Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681), who
stressed tragedy and the illusory nature of reality:
“La vida es sueño, y los sueños sueño son” (“Life is a
dream, and our dreams are part of a dream”).
Painting during the Golden Age, like its lit-
erature, mirrored the transition from the confi dent
and exalted mood of the early sixteenth century
to the disillusioned spirit of the late seventeenth
century. The great age of painting began with El
Greco (1541–1616), whose work blends natural-
ism, de liberate distortion, and intense emotion to
convey the somber religious passion of Castile dur-
ing the age of Philip II. Yet some of El Greco’s por-
traits were done with a magnifi cent realism. The
mysticism of El Greco was completely absent from
the canvases of Diego Velázquez (1599–1660).
With a sovereign mastery of light, coloring, and
movement, Velázquez captured for all time the pal-
ace life of two Spanish kings, presenting with the
same detachment the princes and princesses and
the dwarfs and buffoons of the court.
As we shall see in Chapter 5, the seventeenth-
century decadencia profoundly infl uenced the re-
lations between Castile and its American colonies.
The loosening of economic and political ties be-
tween the mother country and the colonies, along
with growing colonial self-suffi ciency and self-
consciousness, produced a shift in the balance of
forces in favor of the colonists—a change that the
empire’s best efforts could not reverse.
The death of the wretched Charles II in 1700
brought the Hapsburg era to its end. Even before
that symbolic death, signs appeared of a Spanish
demographic and economic revival, notably in Cat-
alonia, which by the 1670s had made a strong
recovery from the depths of the great depression.
Under a new foreign dynasty, the Bourbons, who
were supported by all the progressive elements in
the kingdom, Spain was about to begin a remark-
able, many-sided effort at imperial reconstruction.Go online for additional
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