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The
long Francoist sleep put in quarantine a decadent and decayed country
that at the end of the eighteenth century lost its last colonies and
entered the new century bringing along military coups and a civil war
among the most terrible it is reminded. The democratic transition and
the long socialist dominion put it in the scent and now the impression
is that it has been opened a third, definitive phase to which it concurs
a renewed trust, a countenance of great power in defending one's own
interests in the continent, a expansion strategy related to the Latino
American potential.
The
exhibition that at the Real Hospital of Granada is hold these days,
entitled 'Carlos V Las Armas y las Letras ', in the frame of the celebration
of the fifth centenary of a sovereign in whose reign the sun never set,
is the extraordinary representation of an 'hispanidad' taken in its
essence: grandeur and miseries of Spain come from there.
The new world sweeps away the Middle Age and its codifications, the
war as a ritual, the courtly love, and the noblesse that helps and conditions
the royalty. State establishes then, as armies, the discovering of the
Americas launches on unknown lands squads of 'conquistadores' moved
by the hunger for glory and richness, leaders of troops of mercenaries,
uneasy in the coils of a society ruled by iron laws according to which
birth was more than talent.
The
impact is terrible, the fire and sword hurricane along with it, leaves
breathless. The Duke of Alburquerque's portrait, Marquise of Cuéllar,
governor of Navarra and Milan at the time of Cardinal Borromeo, represents
the new figure of 'caballero': red tights, black jerking and beret,
embroiled and starched collar highlight the civil virtues, the golden-handle
sword points out the military virtues, the wording “Acqui esto sin temor
Y de la muerte no he pavor” (I don't fear death) underlines a way of
life. Weapons and words symbolize the passing from the warrior to the
courtier, the end of cavalry as a weapon and a symbol, the entrance
of the caballero, the exemplary man who must be the symbol of the past
and the protagonist of the present.
If
the middle age highlighted the transitoriness of life one earth, the
renaissance is under the shield of the survival over death, the ostentation
of heraldic emblems, titles, haughtiness and behaviour. Hispanicism
comes from there.
Still in the seventeenth century Cervantes in the Don Quijote tells
about the detachment between reality and ideals he's called to represent,
but Felipe I, that took the place of Carlos V, and than Felipe II, allowed
nonetheless the illusion of actions by which extolling models with which
identify oneself.
In the 800 square metres of the Real Hospital, in front of some hundreds
of pictures, weapons, suits of armours, tapestries, architectonic miniatures,
funerary monuments, the Spanish can see today plastically the way and
the reasons why they were so great, when and how they decay started.
Looking at past helps to better the present.
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