View of Toledo by El Greco.

Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts

BOSTON, Mass. Domenicos Theotokopoulos, better known as El Greco, and his younger contemporary Diego Velazquez are two of Spain’s most famous artists. Yet the era in which they worked, a period that also produced the great Spanish playwright Lope de Vega and one of the world’s most celebrated literary masterpieces, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, remains relatively unexplored.

“El Greco to Velazquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III,” a sumptuous, if somewhat disjointed exhibition opening today at the Museum of Fine Arts, aims to remedy the situation.

Armed with more than 60 paintings, including 11 works by El Greco and seven by Velazquez, the show highlights the sudden burst of creative energy that began under the 16th-century Spanish king Philip II (1527-1598) and continued under his two successors, Philip III and Philip IV. Considered Spain’s “Golden Age,” the period witnessed the country’s emergence as a major cultural, economic and military power.

Fueled by the actual gold and silver pouring in from Spain’s New World colonies, the era also produced a bumper crop of notable artists and writers. Some, like Velazquez and Cervantes, were homegrown talents whose fame eventually spread far beyond Spain’s borders. Others, like El Greco (literally “the Greek”; he was born on the island of Crete), came hoping to grab a piece of the action.

In addition to A-list talents like Velazquez and El Greco, hundreds of lesser known artists and artisans flocked to Spain’s cities — especially the country’s newly anointed capital, Madrid — in search of work. The MFA show, which was co-organized with Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art, promises to introduce American audiences to some of the best and brightest of these artists. Among them:

Luis Tristan, a friend and one-time apprentice of El Greco’s who was one of the few to carry on the older master’s daringly expressionistic style after his death in 1614; Juan Bautista Maino, who helped popularize the naturalistic style of painting that would eventually find its greatest expression in the works of Velazquez; and Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, a Madrid-born court painter whose stiffly conservative, almost doll-like portraits were a favorite of Philip II’s. (By contrast, Philip II couldn’t abide the work of El Greco, whose visionary scenes of Catholic saints writhing in religious ecstasy he considered crude and unfinished.)

Other surprises include the wonderful still life painter Juan Sanchez Cotan, whose gem-like studies of fruits and vegetables are among the stars of the show (and whose hyper-realistic style looks forward to the work of another Spanish artist: Salvador Dali), and Gregorio Fernandez, a sculptor and wood-carver whose handiwork illustrates the great Spanish tradition of painted, or polychromed, wood sculpture.

The show also features a number of cameo appearances by famous artists — among them the great Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens and Jusepe De Ribera, a brilliant yet often overlooked Spanish artist who spent much of his career in Italy — who aren’t normally associated with Spain’s Golden Age.

To help make sense of this material, the show’s curators — Sarah Schroth of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and Ronni Baer of the MFA — have organized the exhibit into a series of smaller sections, each covering a different theme or topic.

A section called “Religious Institutions and Private Patrons,” for example, examines the social, economic and artistic ties between Spanish artists and their clients. Highlights include a dramatic Annunciation by El Greco, as well as several paintings based on the story of the Adoration of the Magi. (The one by Velazquez is typically earthy, with a scrum of peasant-faced onlookers gathered around a demure but decidedly earthbound Virgin. The two other Adorations — one by Tristan, the other by Maino — are more conventional.)

Other sections cover specific genres, including the popular devotional portraits known as “apostalados” and the more secular still lifes and peasant scenes known as “bodegones.”

Schroth and Baer also get the show off to a rousing start.

As you enter, the first thing you see is a trove of El Grecos, including the artist’s famous View of Toledo and two religious works: Saint Jerome as a Scholar and the hallucinatory The Vision of Saint John. All three works, together with a late mythological painting (Laocoon), date from the last decades of El Greco’s life when he gave full rein to the visionary, non-rational side of his art.

(The gaunt-cheeked Saint Jerome, for example, harks back to El Greco’s early training as a painter of traditional Byzantine-style religious icons. The Vision of Saint John, meanwhile, remains one of the strangest paintings in Western art — a kind of pre-Cubist fantasy, complete with buxom nudes, flying cherubs and a Saint John who looks as if he’s wrapped in several boxes’ worth of tin foil.

Even View of Toledo, painted in the university town where El Greco found refuge after his rejection by Philip II, has a roiling energy that’s startling in a 17th-century painting. Not until Vincent Van Gogh, more than 200 years later, would anyone paint a landscape that looks so strangely alive.)

Why start the exhibit with a volley of El Grecos?

My guess is that Schroth and Baer have a couple of things in mind. One is simply to dazzle viewers as they enter the MFA’s Gund Gallery, the big West Wing space that houses most of the museum’s blockbuster exhibits. (Musically, it’s akin to starting a song with a flurry of Pete Townsend power chords.)

Secondly, the emotional drama and religious fervor of El Greco’s later years provide the perfect foil for the show’s other star: the young Diego Velazquez. Indeed, the interplay between the emotion of El Greco and the cooler realism of Velazquez and his followers is one of the show’s central themes.

Schroth and Baer don’t waste much time here either.

As you turn the corner out of the first, El Greco-filled, gallery, you come across a small portrait by Velazaquez. Painted in 1622, it depicts the great Spanish poet Luis Gongora. At the time, Gongora was one of Spain’s most famous living writers and a longtime favorite of the Spanish court. Velazquez, on the other hand, was still in his early 20s.

Yet contrary to what you might expect, Velazquez doesn’t idealize the old poet. Instead, with poignant honesty and insight, he presents him just as he is — a proud man embittered by too many years of catering to the whims of kings and courtiers.

Yet another stylistic trend can be found in the work of court painters such as Juan Pantoja and Bartolome Gonzalez. Designed to project an aura of wealth and power, paintings such as Pantoja’s 1602 portrait of Philip III and Gonzalez’s stiff but charming Portrait of Alfonso “el Caro” and Ana Margarita (1613-14) revel in small, yet expensive details — the gold inlay on Philip’s armor, for example, and the lace ruffs worn by Alonso and his sister. In place of emotional depth, Pantoja and Gonzalez offer glittering surfaces.

A more impressive example of courtly portraiture is the Rubens portrait of the Duke of Lerma.

At the time the painting was commissioned, about 1603, Lerma was one of the richest and most powerful men in Spain, a close friend and adviser to both Philip II and Philip III. Rubens, who came to Spain in the early 1600s on a diplomatic mission, literally gives Lerma the royal treatment, showing him astride a magnificent white horse and dressed in his best ceremonial armor. (Ironically, Rubens never met Lerma face to face; instead, he based the painting on another portrait in the duke’s collection.)

Lerma also figures in one of the show’s more unusual displays.

About halfway through the exhibit, Schroth and Baer have recreated part of the duke’s camarin, a collection of rare pottery, shells, glass and other precious objects. Though none of the pieces in the MFA camarin actually belonged to Lerma — and though the MFA display is considerably smaller than the duke’s collection of more than 2,000 objects — the mix of pieces is based on actual historical sources.

According to Schroth and Baer, the richness of the duke’s camarin proves that Lerma — and by extension Philip III — were more cultured and worldly than is sometimes thought. It’s an odd argument to make, especially since the great paintings that surround the camarin have already made the same point many times over.

An even bigger problem is the lack of a coherent timeline or chronology. As it turns out, Spain’s “Golden Age” was a turbulent period, during which the country fought several wars, weathered the religious storms of Catholic Reformation and Protestant Counter-Reformation and saw much of its wealth squandered on huge building projects such as the Escorial, the sprawling palace complex Philip II built outside Madrid.

Since both the show itself and the accompanying catalog are organized by themes rather than dates, relating these momentous events to the artworks can be difficult.

Still, “El Greco to Velazquez” is a magnificent show. Indeed, by the time you reach the last gallery, which boasts about a half-dozen of Cotan’s sparkling still lifes and wonderful group of interiors and peasant scenes by the teenaged Velazquez, you’ll know why they call it Spain’s Golden Age.

“El Greco to Velazquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III” runs through July 27 at the Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston. Museum hours: Sat.-Tues. 10-4:45 and Wed.-Fri. 10-9:45. (Note: Admission to the exhibit is by reserved ticket only.) Tickets, including general admission, are adults $23, seniors and students $21, children 7-17 $7.50 and under 7 free. For tickets, call 800-440-6975 or visit www.mfa.org. For information, call 617-267-9300.