Spanish painting

The Romanesque art is the first artistic manifestation common to the entire European west, in the correspondence with the Carolingian Empire defeat.

The whole of the mural Romanesque picture preserved in the 'Museu d' Art de Catalunya" of Barcelona is one of the most important collections in the world.

Byzantine and Carolingian elements mix with popular and locals customs and themes, but are evident also the mural cycles influences, Lombard and Piedmonts.

Painting has the function to show Sacred History and to diffuse an iconography of worship and devotion. The compositions are characterized   by rectangular panels and frizzed of superposed colours. The greatest part of the frescos, adorns the Apses, where it dominates the figure of Christ, surrounded by the Apostles and by the Virgin. Neglecting whole centuries of big artistic expressions, we can't forget the influence exercised in Spain by the Italian XVI century.

The first important Spanish painter is Velasquez (1599-1660), who is the country's greatest baroque artist, and who, with Francisco Goya and El Greco, forms the great triumvirate of Spanish painting.

During his student years Velasquez aborted the most popular contemporaneous styles of painting, derived, in part, from both Flemish and Italian realism. Many of his earliest paintings show a strong naturalist bias, as does 'The Meal". The effects of light and shadow make a comparison with the work of the Italian painter Caravaggio. Velasquez' s religious paintings, images of simple piety, portray models drawn from the streets of Seville.

Immediately after him, there is Francisco Goya (1746-1828), an innovative Spanish painter who denounces the mourning and the blood provoked by the Civil war, describing in his paintings the atrocities of the repression, he makes masterpieces with studies and designs about the tauromachy: the struggle between the man and the bull, that represents the exaltation of the manly qualities very appreciated in Spain.

In the 1900 Spanish art reaches the top; the most well known painters than this period are: Pica bio, Joan Mirò, Antonio Tapiez, Salvador Dalì and Pablo Picasso.

About Salvador Dalì (1904-1989), we can say his paintings from his period depict dream imagery and everyday objects in unexpected forms such as the famous 'The persistence of memory". His later paintings often on religious themes are made classical in style. They are also characterized by meticulous draftsman ship and realistic details, with brilliant colours heightened by transparent glazes.

Pablo Picasso is an other Spanish painter and sculptor, generally considered the greatest artist of the 20^th century. He was unique as an inventor of styles and

Techniques, as a master of various media, and as one of the most prolific artists in history, he created more than 20'000 works.

Picasso's Blue Room shows his evolution toward the Blue period, so called because various shades of blue dominated his works between 1900 and 1902.

Expressing human misery, the painting's portraits blind figures, beggars, alcoholics ad prostitutes, their somewhat bodies reminiscent of works the Spanish artist El Greco .The years 1904 and 1905 are thus called The Rose period, when Picasso changed his palette to pinks and reds. Many of his subjects were drawn from the circus, as in 'the family of Saltimbanques". Other his important works are: 'Guernica", 'Harlequin", 'El paseo de Colon", 'The peace dove".