Garcilaso Goes to the Met: Fine Arts and the Hypertext Sonnet

Abstract

O ne of the major challenges of teaching Golden Age literature to contemporary North American college students is that of bridging a literary culture with today’s predominantly audio and visual culture. When introducing the sonnets, the instructor must strive to lure the students in, because most of these will not have an inherent interest in deciphering the complex and subtle images for the sheer plaisir of the text. My approach to teaching the famous carpe diem sonnet of Garcilaso, along with the imitations by Gongora and Sor Juana, relies on engaging the students with the visual arts. By relating the poetry to cultural production in another medium, students see the metaphors as more than words on a page, that is, as engaging in a societal code that is larger than literature. And in the process of engagement, they also learn something about the relationship between the arts in the Golden Age, and about Renaissance and Baroque culture more generally. Granted that Spain’s Golden Age was a much more literary period than our own, nevertheless, a growing body of criticism is revealing the deep relations between texts and images in that culture. Indeed, in Southern Europe visual and textual media were “inextricably” interconnected (Barkan 330). The first of the two most palpable varieties of interconnectedness consists of texts which are ekphrases of paintings, such as Juan de Arguijo’s sonnets on the Phaeton and Ganymede frescoes in his home (on which both Frederick de Armas and Mary Barnard have recently written, making reference to Michaelangelo’s