Escenarios de poder en la edad moderna

Abstract

This thesis analyses the relationships between art and power in the Modern Age. It is, therefore, a study on power, on the mechanisms implemented by the ruling classes to demonstrate or reinforce their positions of power. More specifically, it examines the role played by the arts in the realisation and the maintenance of such a privileged situation. This work is confined to specific time and space: what came to be called Baroque and the spaces of power in Spain. Its major scenes of representation are the theatre and the festival, the palace and the temple, spaces that were sumptuously transformed, artfully idealised and converted, by the action of the arts, into the most effective instrument for the transmission of an explicit rhetoric of power.