Spain

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Palaeolithic painters at Altamira modelled bison in red and black on a cave ceiling. From the 8th century, Muslim rulers built the forest of arches in the Great Mosque of Córdoba and, later, the carved stucco halls of the Alhambra in Granada. Christian Spain answered with Romanesque frescoes in Catalonia and painted wooden sculpture such as Alonso Berruguete's writhing saints.

In the Golden Age, Diego Velázquez painted Las Meninas (1656), a court scene that questions who is looking at whom. Francisco de Goya recorded executions in The Third of May 1808 (1814) and later covered his house walls with the dark Black Paintings. In Barcelona, Antoni Gaudí designed buildings of twisting stone and broken tile, beginning work on the Sagrada Família in 1883. Spain then gave modern art Pablo Picasso, whose Guernica (1937) mourned a bombed town, the Cubist Juan Gris, and the Surrealists Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí.