Introduction

Summary

This book analyzes various ways in which sixteenth-century Spanish cultural elites constructed a pre-national collective identity – an autochthonous Renaissance – by reinventing those cultural principles which, in Italy, had originally created the concept of the Renaissance as a selfexplanatory category.

Those of us who study the Spanish early modern period – whether we look at its literary and artistic production or analyze and interpret its social, economical and political landscape – are familiar with the tensions embedded in the competitive relationship that the Spaniards, seeking to shape national models for their culture, instituted with the Italian Renaissance. This competition permeated numerous facets of cultural definition in Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the private display of riches that conferred social status to the construction of the image of imperial Spain. My study is largely concerned with describing, analyzing and assessing those cultural mechanisms which, in early modern Spain, led to the translation, imitation and selective adoption of the values that made the Italian Renaissance come to symbolize the very definition and, to a lesser extent, the origin of culture. These cultural mechanisms served to delineate an autochthonous tradition that would address the needs of a distinct society, and gave to the Italian interpretation of knowledge and its practices a “Spanish” physiognomy that ultimately contributed to the construction of a category in many aspects as productive as the Italian Renaissance: the Golden Age.