Spanish age

Spanish people in Sardinia

Pietro Cavaro trained in Barcelona, passed through Naples and then returned to Sardinia, where in 1518 he signed the Villamar Altarpiece, his masterpiece, in which he showed himself up to date with the news of Italian Renaissance painting.

In the north of Sardinia, on the other hand, the personality, still anonymous, of the Master of Ozieri emerges, who around the middle of the 16th century introduced into his painting the same mannerist ways found in the altarpieces of the Cagliari school of Stampace, painted at the same time.
Also important, between the 16th and 17th centuries, is the wooden sculpture enriched by the technique of “gold padding”, which involves leaf gilding, the superimposition of colors that are then scratched to make gold emerge, highlighting geometric or floral patterns in imitation of precious fabrics.

Religious orders born in the Counter-Reformation era played a leading role in the dissemination of Baroque art in the seventeenth century, among all the Jesuits who introduced the new language in their churches.
During the seventeenth century, Sardinian cathedrals were modernized, renewing the interior decorative equipment in precious polychrome marbles inlaid with the help of Genoese workers first and then Lombard workers. However, the production of sumptuous gilded wooden altars of Iberian tradition lasted a long time, made by Sicilian workers, bells and Sardinian workers to replace pictorial altarpieces.

With a few exceptions, it can be said that the island did not experience the expressions of the Italian Renaissance in architecture, if not mediated and combined with the Gothic-Catalan language in original ways, which become the tradition of Sardinian stonemasons both in religious construction, characterized by adherence to mannerism, and in civil construction.
Finally, from the end of the sixteenth century onwards, the effort to defend Sardinian villages from barbarian incursions was significant, which materialized in the construction of an effective system of coastal towers.

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