The Form of Beauty: Lyric Lovers in the Mediterranean World

Abstract

Chapter 4 resituates Cervantes’ poetics within the erotic philosophy of the sixteenth century, particularly in Judah Abravanel’s Dialoghi d’Amore ([Leone Ebreo], Rome, 1535). By 1569, Cervantes was serving in the court of the young Neapolitan nobleman Giulio Acquaviva in Rome, where Vicenzo Orsini’s gardens at Bomarzo were one of many private pastoral courts cultivated by various Italian noblemen throughout the region. Within pastoral poetics, the beloved, as embodiment of beauty, was often conceived of as the summa belleza or summum bonum in the natural world. In light of Abravanel’s influence on early modern poetics, this chapter studies Cervantes’ octavas for the Sicilian poet and fellow captive Antonio Veneziano that Cervantes wrote from Algiers and sent to Veneziano in 1579 in response to Veneziano’s own songbook, the Celia. They survive in Veneziano’s autograph manuscript (Biblioteca Centrale Regione Siciliana, Palermo) along with Veneziano’s sonnet response. This chapter concludes with Cervantes’ earliest dramaturgical work, the Trato de Argel (likely composed in Algiers or shortly upon his return to Madrid, ca. 1575–1582), in which he developed the concept of “love as faith” as transposing the religious within the confluence of Islamic and Christian beliefs. The Trato evidences figurations of intersubjectivity and female desire necessary for character formation in Cervantes’ subsequent fiction.