Word: spain
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Caliphs in Cairo, Cordoba and Baghdad rend the unity of Islam, but not the prosperity. Gold from Nubia and the Caucasus is mined into dinars, the common currency from Spain to Lahore; and slaves from Asia, Europe and Africa labor in mines, cities, armies and harems from Cadiz to Samarkand. Meanwhile, Europe is still limping out of the Dark Ages...
...richest empires are Ming dynasty China and the realm of the Ottomans, which blocks western Europe's old land routes to the east. Portugal and Spain seek oceanic alternatives; Lisbon rounds the Cape of Good Hope to reach India; Madrid crosses the Atlantic in hopes of landing in Marco Polo's Cathay but finds the Americas instead. Two continents are suddenly open to conquest...
...colossal claim. Very rarely, an artist gets to transform the conditions of his culture--not just add to them or jog their evolution, but alter them decisively. This is what Picasso did for America and Europe in the 20th century. Perhaps less obviously, Velazquez did the same for Spain in the 17th century. He showed that the nation's painting need not be provincial, that it could be open to Europe and, especially, to such Venetian masters as Titian. Titian had made masterpieces for Philip II of Spain; now Velazquez would work on the same scale for Philip IV, grandson...
Velazquez's achievement was unique in the Spain of his day. He soon grew out of painting religious pictures. Instead he created a secular and courtly art--mainly portraits--in which a meticulous realism was conjoined with an extraordinary sense of the mechanics of painting. Velazquez gives you the physical marks of the brush, declares in advance that they are special effects, and yet defies you to shake free from their illusion...
...Madrid nurse (Cecilia Roth), luxuriating in grief, goes to Barcelona, where she learns to live again by tending to creatures even more wounded than she. Pedro Almodovar's screwball melodrama has all the kooky verve of his early comedies, but with a depth and life-enhancing warmth that proves Spain's bad boy has reached a vibrant maturity. If this movie doesn't touch your heart, consult a cardiologist. You may be missing something...