Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age (review)

Abstract

DE ARMAS, FREDRICK A., ED. for Eyes in Spanish Golden Age. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2004. 310 pages.Writing for Eyes in Spanish Golden Age offers an impressive rethinking of mutually illuminating media of text and image in Golden Age Spain, of integral relationship between verbal and visual. Painting was clearly central to Golden Age writers, just as writing was key context for artists of period. To make this point, Frederick de Armas introduces this group of essays by observing that as blind Homer could visualize and represent vividly intricate objects, so too Raphael in his Parnassus can paint art that he has never seen because of his reliance on verbal description.Professor de Armas opens The Painter and Writer are One and Same, first of four units in this collection, with his essay entitled (Mis)placing Muse, offering reading of Cervantes's Galatea from perspective of visual, pointing out that entire work is framed by frescoes: Book 1 offers an ecphrastic presentation of Raphael's Galatea, and Book VI description based on Raphael's Parnassus. Both artists, likewise, focus on Muse of epic poetry, Calliope. De Armas's analysis illuminates reason why Calliope is misplaced (present where Thalia would seem more relevant) as means by which Cervantes boldly figures himself as Spanish Virgil (38).Eric Graf's The Pomegranate of Don Quixote I, provides an original exploration of political and religious significance of pomegranate in transition between chapters 8 and 9, encounter between Don Quijote and Basque. Explaining significance of granada/pomegranate, Graf argues that the geopolitical pomegranate at beginning of chapter 9 is but one of cluster of details that converge to indicate that Cervantes's principal concern while writing Don Quijote was Morisco question (51).The next essay, The Quixotic Art: Cervantes, Vasari, and Michelangelo by Christopher Weimer, is provocative piece that acknowledges Cervantes as reader of Vasari. Reminding us that Don Quijote himself acknowledges need for knight to follow painter's example (72), Weimer then presents Don Quijote as a parody of Renaissance painter, offering numerous parallels between his life and life of Michelangelo.The second section of book, entitled Ut pictura poesis, addresses extensive mutual influence of Golden Age poetry and prose, beginning with Maria Cristina Quintero's contribution, entitled Writing Desire in Early Modem Spanish Poetry: Some Lessons from Painting. This intriguing essay begins with consideration of female body in Renaissance visual and verbal examples, especially ones in which woman looks at herself in mirror: Rubens's Venus Looking in Mirror, Titian's Venus at Her Toilet, and Velazquez's Venus and Cupid. Texts by Gongora, Quevedo, and Zayas are also analyzed, revealing that in male-generated texts the women are merely pretext for opportunistic exhibitionism of an implied male subject (195).Mary Barnard's Inscribing Transgression, Siting Identity: Arguijo's Phaeton and Ganymede in Painting and Text considers case of Juan de Arguijo, poet from Seville, who has commissioned for library of his house two paintings, one of Fall of Phaeton, other Rape of Ganymede. Barnard convincingly reflects on paintings and sonnets written by Arguijo on these two mythological figures, concluding from comparison that the sonnets serve as inscriptions to paintings, at once validating their transgressive figures as emblems of poet and creating within paintings site of memory for his fame (109). Ultimately, however, verbal medium takes precedence, as poet's words result in more powerful celebration of material.With essay of Steven Wagschal, Writing on Fractured T: Gongora's Iconographic Evocations of Vulcan, Venus, and Mars, we encounter thoughtful analysis of Gongora's cancion entitled iQue de invidiosos montes levantados! …