In this class, we will study the great Spanish Baroque painters who created Profane art that had aesthetic appeal in a non-religious context. We will look at paintings that neither denied or affirmed the existence of God, but focused on human agency.
The term comes from the Latin compound profanum, literally meaning before or outside the temple. Profane is also called Secular art because it can be defined as art that has no religious reference points.
In its most general sense, it means that which is not holy, or that which does not pertain to a place marked off or an object related to religious practice.
Through the study of the art, poetry, philosophy, and science of ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance humanists revived the notion that man, rather than God, is the measure of all things. The dependence on the Church gave away to the confidence that humans can shape their own individual destinies and the future of the world.
As the whole of European society was moving away from the dominance of the church, 17th c. Spanish artists started turning towards the profane, depicting ordinary mundane scenes and objects to sell to merchants and enlightened patrons, as another source of revenue.
We will explore the 17th c Spanish paintings and painters who made money from their profane art by looking and analyzing Mythological themes, Oddities of Nature, Philosophers and Bodegón still life themes in this class and Historical themes, Portraits and Landscapes in another.
Fill your mind and your senses...
ABOUT THIS CLASS
The History and Architecture of Toledo before the Catholic Monarchs is rich and expressive.
Toledo was an important city center to the Celtic Carpetanian tribes until the conquest of the Romans in 193 bc. After the Germanic invasions who expelled the Romans, Toledo would become the capital and main ecclesiastical seat of the Visigothic Kingdom.
In the year 711, Toledo was conquered by the Muslims, whose rule ended with the taking of the city in 1085 by Alfonso VI. The Middle Ages is when the Jewish community of Toledo was the most populous and rich of the Kingdom of Castile.
They coexisted for centuries, more or less peacefully, with Muslims and Christians, until the Catholic Monarchs reformations of 1492.
