Painting Counterfeit Canvases: American Memory Lienzos and European Imaginings of the Barbarian in Cervantes's Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda

Abstract

I propose a new reading of the intersection of image and text as a site for reworkings of barbarian identity in Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's last work, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda: Historia setentrional (1617). Through narrative manipulations of the half–barbarian character Antonio el mozo's relation to painting, Cervantes crafts complex interrelations among American pictographic language, European alphabetism, and colonial models of barbarian identity to demonstrate the adaptability and ingenuity of indigenous people. I analyze the function of ekphrastic passages that reflect American pictographic language and demonstrate the influence of Mexican painting on the literature of the Spanish golden age. Descriptions of paintings in the Persiles ultimately provide a metafictional critique of European paradigms of graphic representation and challenge the authority of European colonial rationalizations of power dynamics in the New World. (EB)