Mediterranean Southwest Europe (1588–1599 CE): Conflicts, Cultural Innovation, and Maritime Influence

The era 1588–1599 CE in Mediterranean Southwest Europe is characterized by significant geopolitical tensions, cultural innovation, and maritime influence. The Iberian Peninsula sees notable conflicts, particularly involving Spain's naval ambitions, while Italy continues to be a vibrant hub of cultural and artistic developments. Concurrently, Malta, under the Knights Hospitaller, solidifies its role as a critical Mediterranean stronghold.

Iberian Geopolitical Tensions and Maritime Conflicts

This period begins dramatically with the Spanish Armada (1588), a fleet dispatched by King Philip II of Spain against England, which ends disastrously, severely impacting Spain’s maritime supremacy. Despite this setback, Spain remains an influential power, deeply involved in European politics and maintaining control over its Mediterranean territories, including Sicily, Sardinia, and the Balearic Islands. The failed Armada expedition reshapes naval strategies and alliances across Europe, prompting greater attention to maritime defenses throughout the Mediterranean region.

Cultural Flourishing and Literary Golden Age in Spain

In Spain, despite political and military setbacks, the cultural environment remains vibrant. This era sees the continued rise of the Spanish Golden Age, with significant literary contributions by prominent authors like Miguel de Cervantes, whose early literary works set the stage for his masterpiece, Don Quixote, in subsequent years. Spanish theater flourishes under playwrights such as Lope de Vega, who becomes known for his prolific output and innovations in dramatic form and character complexity, further enriching the Spanish cultural landscape.

Artistic and Scientific Advancements in Italy

In Italy, cultural innovation continues unabated, particularly in the arts and sciences. This era sees notable advancements in both visual arts and music, with developments influenced by the late Renaissance and early Baroque transitions. Artists like Caravaggio begin to rise in prominence with their innovative use of chiaroscuro and realistic portrayal of human figures. In music, Italian composers continue to refine vocal and instrumental forms, laying foundations that will soon blossom into the Baroque style.

The scientific community, inspired by Renaissance humanism, sees continued growth. The University of Padua remains a leading institution for scientific inquiry, notably in medicine and anatomy, attracting scholars from across Europe and reinforcing Italy’s central role in the European scientific community.

Malta’s Strategic Importance and Fortification Efforts

Malta under the Knights Hospitaller continues to strengthen its strategic importance in the Mediterranean. The fortified city of Valletta, completed earlier in 1571, now fully operational, becomes increasingly vital for maritime defense. The Knights significantly enhance the island’s military capabilities, constructing additional fortifications and watchtowers along the coastline. Malta’s reputation as a cultural and scientific center grows, particularly with the expansion of the Sacra Infermeria, renowned across Europe for its medical advancements and sophisticated healthcare.

Trans-Mediterranean Cultural and Commercial Exchanges

Venice maintains its role as a critical commercial and cultural hub, sustaining vibrant trade links with the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. This trade continues to introduce new goods and ideas into Europe, influencing tastes and habits, particularly through the spread of coffee and other exotic commodities. Such exchanges further entrench Venice’s position as a center for cultural fusion, diplomacy, and commerce in the Mediterranean.

Legacy of the Era

The period 1588–1599 CE encapsulates a dynamic era of political tensions, cultural vibrancy, and maritime strategy. Despite setbacks like the failure of the Spanish Armada, Iberia’s cultural influence grows, while Italy and Malta continue to innovate and solidify their significance within the broader European context. These developments profoundly influence the Mediterranean’s cultural and geopolitical landscape, setting the stage for the complexities of the seventeenth century.

The Counter-Reformation Church is building huge new churches in Rome and paintings are needed to fill them, and likewise the enormous new palazzi.

The artificial conventions of Mannerism, which have ruled art for almost a century, seem inadequate to the task of countering the threat of Protestantism, and the search is on for authentic religious art.

Caravaggio's radical naturalism combines close physical observation with a theatrical shift from light to dark with little intermediate value.

This is tenebrism, a very pronounced chiaroscuro style that Caravaggio is generally credited with inventing, although his predecessors Tintoretto and El Greco are sometimes described as tenebrists.

Tintoretto's dramatic use of perspectival space and special lighting effects make him a precursor of Baroque art.

A notable exponent of the Venetian Renaissance school, Tintoretto’s heyday had been the previous era: the last picture of any considerable importance which he executes, the vast Paradise, at seventy-four feet by thirty reputed to be the largest painting ever done upon canvas, is commissioned in 1588.

He sets up his canvas in the Scuola della Misericordia and works indefatigably at the task, making many alterations and doing various heads and costumes direct from nature.

When the picture has been nearly completed he takes it to its proper place and there finishes it, assisted by his son Domenico for details of drapery, etc.

All Venice applauds the superb achievement: it is the crowning production of Tintoretto's life, the last picture of any considerable importance that he executes.

The Mannerist style begins to wane in Italy as a new generation of artists, including the Carracci brothers, Caravaggio and Cigoli, reemphasize naturalism.

Walter Friedlaender identified this period as "anti-Mannerism", just as the early Mannerists were "anti-classical" in their reaction to the High Renaissance.

Annibale Carracci’s The Beaneater (Italian: Mangiafagioli) is connected to the contemporary Butcher's Shop (now at Oxford), for it shares the same popularesque style.

Carracci has been influenced in the depiction of everyday life subjects by Vincenzo Campi and Bartolomeo Passarotti.

Manifest is Carracci's capability to adapt his style, making it "lower" when concerning "lower" subjects like the Mangiafagioli, while in his more academic works (such as the grossly contemporary Assumption of the Virgin) he is able to use a more classicist composure with the same easiness.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was born in Milan, where his father, Fermo Merisi, was a household administrator and architect-decorator to the Marchese of Caravaggio.

His mother, Lucia Aratori, came from a propertied family of the same district.

The family moved in 1576 to Caravaggio in Lombardy to escape a plague which ravaged Milan.

Caravaggio's father died there in 1577 and his mother in 1584.

It is assumed that the artist grew up in Caravaggio, but his family kept up connections with the Sforza and with the powerful Colonna family, who were allied by marriage with the Sforzas, and destined to play a major role later in Caravaggio's life.

Apprenticed in 1584 for four years to the Lombard painter Simone Peterzano, described in the contract of apprenticeship as a pupil of Titian, Caravaggio appears to have stayed in the Milan-Caravaggio area after his apprenticeship ended, but it is possible that he visited Venice and saw the works of Giorgione, whom Federico Zuccari later accused him of imitating, and Titian.

He would also have become familiar with the art treasures of Milan, including Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, and with the regional Lombard art, a style which valued simplicity and attention to naturalistic detail and was closer to the naturalism of Germany than to the stylized formality and grandeur of Roman Mannerism.

Caravaggio had fled Milan for Rome in mid-1592 after "certain quarrels" and the wounding of a police officer.

He had arrived in Rome "naked and extremely needy ... without fixed address and without provision ... short of money.” A few months later he was performing hackwork for the highly successful Giuseppe Cesari, Pope Clement VIII's favorite painter, "painting flowers and fruit" in his factory-like workshop.

Boy Peeling Fruit, the earliest known work by the young Caravaggio, is painted circa 1592-1593, soon after his arrival in Rome.

Seen as a simple genre painting, it differs from most in that the boy is not 'rusticated,' that is, he is depicted as clean and well-dressed instead of as a 'cute' ragamuffin.

Caravaggio’s known works from this period, besides Boy Peeling a Fruit, his earliest known painting, include a Boy with a Basket of Fruit, and the Young Sick Bacchus, supposedly a self-portrait done during convalescence from a serious illness that ended his employment with Cesari.

All three demonstrate the physical particularity—one aspect of his realism—for which Caravaggio is to become renowned: the fruit-basket-boy's produce has been analyzed by a professor of horticulture, who was able to identify individual cultivars right down to "... a large fig leaf with a prominent fungal scorch lesion resembling anthracnose (Glomerella cingulata)."

Caravaggio leaves Cesari in January 1594, determined to make his own way.

His fortunes are at their lowest ebb, yet it is now that he forges some extremely important friendships, with the painter Prospero Orsi, the architect Onorio Longhi, and the sixteen year old Sicilian artist Mario Minniti.

Orsi, established in the profession, introduces him to influential collectors; Longhi, more balefully, introduces him to the world of Roman street-brawls; and Minniti serves as a model and, years later, will be instrumental in helping Caravaggio to important commissions in Sicily.

The Fortune Teller, his first composition with more than one figure, shows Mario being cheated by a gypsy girl.

The theme is quite new for Rome, and is to prove immensely influential over the next century and beyond.

This, however, is in the future: at the time, Caravaggio sells it for practically nothing.

The Cardsharps—showing another unsophisticated boy falling the victim of card cheats—is even more psychologically complex, and perhaps Caravaggio's first true masterpiece.

Like The Fortune Teller, it is immensely popular, and over fifty copies survive.

More importantly, it attracts the patronage of Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, one of the leading connoisseurs in Rome.

Annibale, on the basis of the prolific and masterful frescoes by the Carracci in Bologna, has been recommended by the Duke of Parma, Ranuccio I Farnese, to his brother, the Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, who wishes to decorate the piano nobile of the cavernous Roman Palazzo Farnese.

Annibale and Agostino travel in November-December of 1595 to Rome to begin decorating the Camerino with stories of Hercules, appropriate since the room houses the famous Greco-Roman antique sculpture of the hypermuscular Farnese Hercules.

Meanwhile, Caravaggio executes a number of intimate chamber-pieces for Del Monte and his wealthy art-loving circle.

These include The Musicians, The Lute Player, and a tipsy Bacchus, all probably painted in 1595.

The château of Fontainebleau had been abandoned from 1584 to 1594 during the Wars of Religion.

Upon the ascension of Henry IV to the throne, he undertakes a renovation of the Fontainebleau buildings using a group of artists: the Flemish born Ambroise Dubois (from Antwerp) and the Parisians Toussaint Dubreuil and Martin Fréminet.

They are sometimes referred to as the "second school of Fontainebleau".

Their late mannerist works, many of which have been lost, continue in the use of elongated and undulating forms and crowded compositions.

Many of their subjects include mythological scenes and scenes from works of fiction by the Italian Torquato Tasso and the ancient Greek novelist Heliodorus of Emesa.

Their style will continue to have an influence on artists through the first decades of the seventeenth century, but other artistic currents (Peter Paul Rubens, Caravaggio, the Dutch and Flemish naturalist schools) will soon eclipse them.

Caravaggio's realism returns with his first paintings on religious themes, and the emergence of remarkable spirituality.

One of the first of these is the Penitent Magdalene, showing Mary Magdalene at the moment when she has turned from her life as a courtesan and sits weeping on the floor, her jewels scattered around her.

It is understated, in the Lombard manner, not histrionic in the Roman manner of the time.

It is followed by others in the same style, including a Rest on the Flight into Egypt, painted around 1597.