The corrida as we know it was born on foot in the stone ring of Ronda in the eighteenth century, where the Romero dynasty replaced the mounted lance with the muleta and the sword. From this Rondeño school, sober and classical, and from its livelier Sevillian rival, the art took its enduring forms.
The late nineteenth century — the Edad de Oro — saw the great Córdoba caliphs, Lagartijo and Guerrita, raise toreo to a national passion. Then, in the years before the Great War, Joselito and Juan Belmonte transformed it once more: Belmonte fixing his feet and bringing the bull perilously close, inventing the modern templed pass that every torero since has studied.
After the Civil War came the austere genius of Manolete, and in the 1950s the celebrated rivalry of Dominguín and Ordóñez. The archive follows these lines from their founders to the contemporary ring.