CHAPTER PETER PAUL RUBENS
XII DIEGO RODRIGUEZ DE
__
SILVA VELASQUEZ
.... ^^/^-^^'^^
1599-1660
Flemish School
Spanish School
student of art, when he reaches the period of the seventeenth century, turns a sharp corner. He has been travehng for three centuries in
THE
Italy, with brief visits at
long intervals to Flanders and
Germany, the second of
his trips to the latter including
a
visit to
England.
But, as he turns the corner of the
seventeenth century, Italy is left behind, Spain attracts his attention to the west, while far to the north Holland and, a second time, Flanders beckon him. For in Italy the last of the great artists passed away The country itself had become the with Tintoretto.
prey of despots who were in the hire of foreign rulers; and the loss of political liberty was accompanied by lower social standards, by intellectual and artistic deThere were still clever painters, but they were cline. little
men, without
manner of
their
originality, content to reproduce the
great predecessors; copying chiefly
their weaknesses; trying
by extravagances
to disguise
the absence of originality in themselves. At this period, to find something vital in art, thing, that
is
to say, that
— some-
grows and ripens because of the
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