This beautifully illustrated book opens up the great age of Spanish and Portuguese sculpture, painting, architecture, and the decorative arts. A dazzling array of arts from the Peninsula and Hispanic America of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the time of the Reconquest of Granada to the decline of the Hapsburg dynasty in Spain, is presented here. The book also discusses Spains cultural relationships with the rest of Europe, particularly Britain, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and explores the ambivalent ways in which Spanish art was viewed and received. Often prejudiced ideas about Spanish Catholicism and culture led to a biased understanding of Iberian arts. This view also sometimes affected the Spaniards own view of their arts and traditions, as well as the way in which the art of Spain is perceived today by others.