Less artist than the Italian spirit, which living from the sources of its own history had reached the fullness of the Renaissance, the Spanish spirit, with its practical and individualistic tendencies, welcomed, adapted, transformed every element of the Italian Renaissance and drew from it an increase of spontaneous vigor and food of perfection. The conquest of artistic sentiment was embodied in a historical tradition and in a historical climate, which conditioned its existence. They allowed the Spanish spirit to develop its literary originality, and preserved it from material imitation. The aesthetics that dominated in Renaissance Spain up to Cervantes, and even after him, and which assured it, compared to other European literatures, an autonomous development of thought and art, it was that of the Platonic-Augustinian and Scholastic tradition, revived but not deformed by the triumphant Platonism. Poetry retained that essentially ontological character which the Middle Ages had recognized. In the mystics it became an impetuous love of supreme beauty (Luis de Granada, Juan de los Ángeles, Alonso de Orozco, Malón de Chaide); in the great lyrics (Luis de León), the divine cosmic harmony was made spiritual joy and it was realized in classical forms of transparent expressive beauty. Spain shied away from any abstract precepts that limited the spontaneity of nature, the very reality of love felt as the word of the living God and the enhancement of human personality (Poetry retained that essentially ontological character which the Middle Ages had recognized. In the mystics it became an impetuous love of supreme beauty (Luis de Granada, Juan de los Ángeles, Alonso de Orozco, Malón de Chaide); in the great lyrics (Luis de León), the divine cosmic harmony was made spiritual joy and it was realized in classical forms of transparent expressive beauty. Spain shied away from any abstract precepts that limited the spontaneity of nature, the very reality of love felt as the word of the living God and the enhancement of human personality (Poetry retained that essentially ontological character which the Middle Ages had recognized. In the mystics it became an impetuous love of supreme beauty (Luis de Granada, Juan de los Ángeles, Alonso de Orozco, Malón de Chaide); in the great lyrics (Luis de León), the divine cosmic harmony was made spiritual joy and it was realized in classical forms of transparent expressive beauty. Spain shied away from any abstract precepts that limited the spontaneity of nature, the very reality of love felt as the word of the living God and the enhancement of human personality (it was made spiritual joy of the divine cosmic harmony and it was realized in classical forms of transparent expressive beauty. Spain shied away from any abstract precepts that limited the spontaneity of nature, the very reality of love felt as the word of the living God and the enhancement of human personality (it became spiritual joy of the divine cosmic harmony and it was realized in classical forms of transparent expressive beauty. Spain shied away from any abstract precepts that limited the spontaneity of nature, the very reality of love felt as the word of the living God and the enhancement of human personality (De imitatione, 1554, by Sebastián Fox Morcillo; Rhetorica, 1569, by Arias Montano). Thus it did not feel alienated from its medieval Christian humanism and its historical tradition. On the contrary, he relied on it to recognize himself, continued it, studied it philologically (Ambrosio de Morales, Jerónimo Zurita); he relived it and projected it in a new light in the theater of Lope de Vega and Calderón. That medieval and chivalrous character which German Romanticism discovered and accentuated in Spanish literature is but a particular aspect of its Christian humanism and its Renaissance.
From his humanism, with an original conception, Spain drew the pastoral novel. Jorge di Montemayor, formally inspired by the Arcadia of Sannazaro, but in the philosophical content following the lyricism of Auzías March and the Diálogos de amor (1568) by Leone Ebreo, placed the drama of love in the bosom of an idyllic nature as the spontaneous desire of beauty that delights, and transformed it into sweet tenderness that weeps (Los sei libros de la Diana, 1559). The work had European resonances and various continuations at home. Among them emerges the Diana enamorada by Gaspar Gil Polo, whose episodic plot is modeled on Byzantine novels and whose poetic motif, musically expressed in verses of liquid sonority, rests on a consoling sovereign reason, which justifies the irrationality of love and soothes it in itself. The motif will be taken up and developed in Cervantes’ Galatea (1585). The aristocratic and gallant Platonism, without any speculative value, became a part of society with the Cortegiano and the Asolanos (1551), informs Pastor de Fílida (1582) by Luis Gálvez de Montalvo and prepares the pastoral novel of the golden age. What is important to note is that the fantastic modules of the Byzantine novel have already penetrated, as a constructive and linear form, in a narrative art that was still held with Juan de Segura at the Cartas de amores (1548) and the medieval novelist models. In short, already with Alonso Núñez de Reinoso (Amores de Clareo y Florisea, 1552), the construction of the novel with a psychological foundation as an organism that finds in itself its justification and its end, and whose constitutive principle is the inspiration and the powerful and dominating force of love as the essential principle of a nature created by God and ordered to good.
