Saint Serapion (1628) by Francisco de Zurbarán A new show at the National Gallery of Art is bringing long-overdue attention to seventeenth-century Spanish painting and sculpture.  Xavier Bray, who curated The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture, 1600-1700, explains in an NGA podcast that historically, American collectors avoided these stark pieces due to their [...]

This article is filed under After Image, Art, Spain.

For English-speaking peoples, 1066 and 1776 still evoke powerful recollections of liberty lost and freedom won. For most people in the West, however, 711 hardly strikes a note of any significance. But it should, for that was the year when a small force of Muslim Arabs and Berbers from Morocco crossed over from North Africa to Spain. Islam reached Europe in 711 and the world has never been the same.

This article is filed under History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Religion, Spain.

“The issue that animated his life and his thought was that of religious intolerance. The Jews who excommunicated him at the tender age of 23 had themselves been victims of a prolonged, horrific exercise in both religious (as well as racial) intolerance. Spinoza uses this history of suffering to reason his way into uncompromising universalism, an outlook that reduces all the contingencies of birth–our religion and race and, by extension, our nationality, gender, sexual orientation–to details of no significance whatsoever in the real process of self-fulfillment.”

This article is filed under Biography, History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Philosophy, Religion, Spain.

With camp, hedonistic and sexually vulgar films, notable for their strong, flamboyant women and their comic, melodramatic treatment of everything from necrophilia to the need to keep your eye on the gazpacho, Almodóvar has risen to the top of the Spanish film industry. But now…

This article is filed under Movies, Movies & TV, Spain.