Spain: The Centre of the World 1519-1682. By Robert Goodwin. Bloomsbury; 587 pages; $40 and £30.
HABSBURG Spain in the 16th century was the world’s first global superpower, with an empire stretching east across most of Europe to the Philippines and India and west across the Atlantic to the Americas. It was an age of expansion and cultural efflorescence and ended with Spain’s steep decline from which it never fully recovered.
Robert Goodwin’s new book begins with the arrival in Seville in 1519 of the Santa María, the first ship to reach Europe from the newly conquered coast of Mexico, laden with such riches that “there was no other ballast than gold”, and ends in 1682 with Juan Valdés Leal’s gruesome painting “In Ictu Oculi” (“In the Twinkling of an Eye”), an allegory of death—and for the author a perfect symbol for the “end times” of Spanish imperialism.
Mr Goodwin, a research fellow at University College London, has mined deep in the archives and produced a wealth of wonderfully evocative and offbeat detail that is both...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1VAnfh1
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