HISTORICAL DICTIONARY A–Z - Spain and Portugal: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present - page 221

Guevara, Antonio de (1480-1545)
Spanish clergyman and writer
Born of an aristocratic family, Guevara was
a page at the court of I SABELLA I and F ERDI -
NAND V. Subsequently ordained as a Fran-
ciscan priest, he served as a court preacher,
as chaplain to C HARLES I (Emperor Charles
V), whom he accompanied on his expedi-
tion against Tunis, and as royal chronicler.
Although later appointed bishop of two
Spanish sees, he was not primarily inter-
ested in religious affairs and his designation
as an inquisitor was largely nominal. Gue-
vara was in fact obsessed by language, and
many of his numerous works are intended
to display his elaborate prose style rather
than to convey serious ideas. His most
important publication was the Reloj de prín-
cipes o libro áureo del emperador Marco Aurelio
(1529), published in mid-16th-century
England as The Golden Boke of Marcus Aure-
lius or The Diall of Princes. This volume was
presented as a philosophical study of the
proper role and conduct of monarchs based
on the newly recovered meditations of the
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Like sev-
eral other contemporary authors, including
Machiavelli, Guevara was admired by his
contemporaries for his sophisticated analy-
sis of a ruler's duties. After it was subse-
quently discovered that much of what he
had attributed to the emperor was in fact
invented by Guevara himself, his reputa-
tion faded and his Reloj became little more
than a historical curiosity.

again attracting favorable comment for the
discipline of his structures and the sober
tone of his coloring. During the early 1920s,
as his work expanded to include a number
of sculptures, critics continued to pay atten-
tion to his control of material and struc-
tures. In addition to further exhibitions of
painting and sculpture he accepted design
commissions from the Ballets Russes and
returned to his early career as an illustrator
for topics by important authors.
Gris is generally esteemed to be one of
the great cubists, not perhaps ranked with
Picasso and Braque, but having his own dis-
tinctive understanding of geometric forms
and possibilities offered by the intersections
of art and science.

Guatemala
One of the earliest offshoots of the conquest
of the Aztec Empire by H ERNÁN C ORTÉS , the
area of present-day Guatemala was occupied
by his lieutenant, P EDRO DE A LVARADO , in
1524, and the administrative center, known
as Ciudad de Guatemala, was established. By
1527 Guatemala City had become the seat of
the Captaincy General of Guatemala, which
included within its jurisdiction all of the mod-
ern Central American republics. Guatemala
renounced Spanish rule in 1821 and subordi-
nated itself to the empire of A GUSTÍN I TURBIDE
until 1823. Subsequently it was part of the
short-lived United Provinces of Central Amer-
ica, which broke up in 1839, and thereafter
remained an independent republic.