The Monument to Fray Luis de León, is located in Trabuco Street, next to the Provincial Historical Archive of Cuenca.
It is made of bronze on a stone pedestal.
It shows the monk with his habit and particular hairstyle, holding something to write and looking sideways. In the pedestal we can reads "
FRAY
LUIS DE LEÓN
1527 - 1591"
aunque se haya perdido alguna letra.
FRAY LUIS DE LEÓN
"(Belmonte, Spain, 1527 - Madrigal de las Altas Torres, id., 1591) Spanish writer in Castilian and Latin languages. He is considered the greatest exponent of ascetic literature of the Renaissance, and, along with Saint John of the Cross , one of the main figures of religious poetry of the Golden Age.
Of Jewish descent, Fray Luis de León entered the Augustinian order at a very young age. He studied at the universities of Alcalá de Henares and Salamanca, where he obtained two professorships: the first of moral philosophy and the second of Holy Scriptures, which he later abandoned to dedicate himself to his order. He was arrested by the Inquisition and imprisoned for almost four years (1573-1576) because of his Commentary on the Song of Songs (1561), a Spanish translation of the biblical text, then prohibited.
Fray Luis de León was a great humanist with a Christian spirit and a very good connoisseur of Latin classics. He stood out above all as a prose writer in Spanish: his stylistic awareness, which is manifested in the rhythmic effects that he introduced into his prose, and his determination to achieve a careful and natural language make him a fundamental writer for the consolidation of prose. Castilian.
In this sense, The Perfect Married (1583) stands out, on the virtues of the Christian woman, and, above all, On the Names of Christ (1574-1575), a set of scholarly comments on the names with which Jesus Christ is designated in the Holy Scripture, which undoubtedly constitutes his most stylistically accomplished work. However, his literary fame is due to his poetic compositions, twenty-three poems published for the first time by Quevedo in 1637 in an attempt to offer countermodels to the cult current led by Góngora .
As rigorous as his prose, his poetry demonstrates great mastery of rhythm and tone. He followed the metric innovations introduced by Boscán and Garcilaso , but opted exclusively for the lyre as a strophic form. An eminent example of the fruitful influence of Horace on the Renaissance, he achieved a poetic expression of great formal perfection and expressive force, of exemplary simplicity. On the basis of his Platonic-Augustinian thought, he sang of the ideal of retired life and the longing for plenitude that prefigures the heavenly life."
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