History as an Ekphrastic Genre in Early Modern Spain

Abstract

As a rhetorical figure, ekphrasis creates both aesthetic immediacy--by appealing explicitly to our sense of sight-and remove, by suggesting a description not of life but of art. It is at the same time vivid and a copy of a copy. In practice, ekphrasis tends to play games with temporal distance, too; Aeneas' shield is itself ancient, but the scenes Virgil describes, worked on the shield's surface, are contemporary for its Roman audience. It was in part the ability to modulate distance that made ekphrasis a favored rhetorical device for early modern Spanish historians; the pomp of courtly life could be made suitably impressive yet decorously far off through the description of works of art that, under the Hapsburgs, increasingly became the preferred means to express regal power. In his biography of Philip II, Luis Cabrera de C6rdoba suggests a further reason for describing works of art in historical accounts. After mentioning the sculptures of Pompeo Leoni and Juan Bautista Monegro at the Escorial-works that enviaban al que las miraba muda voz, ciega vista, sangre fria-Cabrera explains that royal patronage of the arts is worthwhile because it teaches the powerful to rule and subjects to obey (792).' Art seems to be, as Cabrera describes it, the perfection of Quintilian's idea of history; it delights, it teaches, and