Spanish Golden Age Research Articles

Unveiling the Artistry of Juan Martínez Montañés: Carving and Polychromy in the Santa Clara Church Altarpiece

Juan Martínez Montañés was one of the most important sculptors and altarpiece architects of the Spanish Golden Age. The restoration of the Santa Clara church in Seville has presented a unique opportunity to study the main altarpiece, crafted by Montañés between 1621 and 1623. He was also in charge of the polychromy and gilding, believing that delegating these procedures to others would diminish the quality of his work. This conviction led to a well-known lawsuit with the renowned contemporary Spanish painter Francisco Pacheco. Ultimately, the painter and sculptor Baltasar Quintero performed the polychromy of this altarpiece, but under the strict conditions of Montañés. Various non-invasive analytical techniques, such as CT, UVF, XRF, and digital microscopy, were employed to study wood treatment and polychromy. Additionally, three samples were prepared as cross-sections and analysed by SEM-EDX. The results revealed Montañés’ meticulous woodwork, anticipating its long-term preservation. Consistent with Montañés’ commitment to maintaining the superior quality of his work, the analysis showed an absence of a ground layer in the flesh areas, while the gilding was executed with high-quality gold. The pigment palette corresponds to the treaties and documents of his time, and the extensive areas of later retouches were accurately located. These new data provide a deeper understanding of both the technique and the high standards of one of the most important and globally recognised sculptors.

The rogue in African literature: trickster or pícaro?

A lot of African fiction has developed characters that have been often classified by scholars as trickster figures, linking them to the widespread seminal characters of the oral traditions of numerous societies. This often tends to be an oversimplification and this study looks to consider a more specific set of characteristics of literary tricksters by comparing them to the related figure of the pícaro, as it originates in Spanish Golden Age literature.

Тирсо де Молина: театральность жизни и волшебная сила театра

Tirso de Molina is a pseudonym of Gabriel Téllez (1573–1648). A great Mannerist playwright, he created a range of images and masks in his works and hid behind the mask in his own life, appearing in different guises. Gabriel Téllez was an outstanding theologian, a major religious figure, an exemplary monk, whereas Tirso de Molina boldly castigated the prevailing mores in comedies where some explicitly erotic scenes were present, took the audience into the worlds of exquisite beauty, and highlighted the ills of reality. This article focuses on the vicissitudes of the intriguing fate of Tirso de Molina, a doctor of theology and rebel, highly appreciated by the Pope and arousing the wrath of the secular authorities, the only outstanding writer of the Spanish Golden Age condemned for his works for the theatre. The author of the article discusses anti‐despotism dramas and comedies in which ingenious games violating taboos allow achieving exceptional freedom.

Dog Eat Dog: Staging Female Rivalry in David Johnston’s Translation of Lope’s The Dog in the Manger

Abstract: Staging female rivalry for today’s audiences presents a multiplicity of problems in producing Golden Age Spanish plays. In Lope de Vega’s El perro del hortelano, the lady Diana, Countess of Belflor, eventually wins out against her rival, her own lady-in-waiting, Marcela. A further complication arises since the love interest is the Countess’s low-born secretary, Teodoro. Stage action from Marcela’s perspective informs the main plot, the love game between Diana and Teodoro. Marcela questions: “When can honor and love ever meet” (112), a line recalling Donald Larson’s notion of feminine vergüenza that involves the Countess’s social status. I discuss David Johnston’s translation as an effort to unravel comedic enredos with contemporary language, along with the performance at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC, in 2009. The bonds of matrimony serve to bring order out of delightful theatrical chaos that in the hands of this translator becomes witty comedic action.

Centenary Paper: Juan Lorenzo Palmireno and the Practical Application of Humanistic Study

In the sixteenth century in Valencia, Spain, Juan Lorenzo Palmireno wrote self-help manuals aimed at the ‘literate country lad of slender means and few connections who plans to better his lot by moving to the city’, in the words of Richard Preto-Rodas. In Estudioso de aldea (1571) and its sequel El estudioso cortesano (1573), Palmireno guides his rustic reader in the art of self-fashioning and the presentation of a polished image, in speaking well to prosper in his urban milieu. The success of his books provides a historical, real-life connection to the struggles of many literary characters of the period, including Sancho Panza’s social-climbing ambitions, pícaros and pseudo-pícaros, courtiers and would-be courtiers. Today, the pragmatic objective to articulate clearly and project an image of culture, sophistication and clear thinking dovetails with students’ aims with their university education. At a time of crisis in the humanities, with student debt making US academia increasingly vocational, convincing students of the importance of studying Early Modern Spanish literature can be challenging. Palmireno’s manuals are immediately relatable given the parallels to students’ educational goals and views on the purpose of a liberal arts education, and they give historical context to the ‘great works’ of Golden Age Spanish literature.

The Moderniſa Project: Orthographic Modernization of Spanish Golden Age Dramas with Language Models

The increasing application of computational methods to the literature of the Spanish Golden Age has revealed the necessity of automating the modernization of its texts to facilitate seamless comparison and analysis. This study pioneers the employment of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for the transformation of Spanish Golden Age texts (circa 1590-1680) into modern, normalized Spanish (RAE 2010). The research employs the transformer architecture to train and evaluate models using a corpus of Golden Age dramas. The models show promise in handling tricky typographical marks and context-sensitive words, but also struggle with proper nouns and orthographic variations. Evaluated using different metrics common in the specialized literature, the tool demonstrates potential as a valuable resource for historians, philologists, and digital humanists. Limitations include the specificity of the training corpus and observed inconsistencies in punctuation and spelling even in modernized texts. This research offers a novel, scalable solution to the manual modernization of Golden Age Spanish literature, enabling further computational studies in the field.

ТЕХНИКА ДОПОЛНЕННОЙ РЕАЛЬНОСТИ НА ОСНОВЕ ПРОЕКЦИЙ В ФИЛЬМЕ Х. ВАЛЬ ДЕЛЬ ОМАРА "ВАРИАЦИИ НА ГРАНАТЕ" (1975)

The article analyzes the film “Variations on a Pomegranate” (1975) by Spanish film director and a pioneer of media art J. Val del Omar. It is shown how film images are created using augmented reality technology based on projections (with help of analog-mechanical tools without computer technologies). The film director projected anthropomorphic images onto pomegranate fruits and increased the dramatic impact of the film with lighting effects. Thereby he created a critical mass of historical and mythological associations connected with the city of Granada, and also visualized the folklore character “duende”. It is substantiated that the specific mystical materialism of images in the film by J. Val del Omar is due to the film director’s use of visual and conceptual dominants of the artistic tradition in the still life genre of the Spanish Golden Age.

Children Portrait in Golden Age Spanish Painting: Iconographic Types, the Artistic Image Specificity, Development Stages

The article is devoted to children court portraits in the Spanish Art Golden Age. The Spanish children portrait has been unfairly overlooked by researchers. Meanwhile, its development visibly and vividly reveals the specifics of the Spanish art evolution. It also has a number of specific features that are absent in an adult portrait. The study of Philip II letters to his daughters reveals the closeness and warmth of relations in the Spanish royal family, and also shows the richness and diversity of the infantas activities. The images of fine art and the world of Philip letters to his daughters are “not congruent”, what clearly demonstrates the conventionality and canonicity of children representative images. The canon of representation helps to understand the modern didactic works of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Luis Vives, Baldassare Castiglione. Children, and especially royal children, were trained from an early age for their adult roles. Accordingly, there was a rigid canon of representation. It turns out to be the strictest in the era of Philip II. It was then that the first children portraits of infantes appeared. Subsequently, the iconography of children portraits is diversified. Italian Sofonisba Anguissola brought a sense of transience and emotionality to the strict Spanish canon, what would be adopted by Diego Velazquez. In the XVII century second half, the feeling of the variability of life was replaced by baroque bravura, enriched with allegorical figures and royal attributes in the portrait of Carlos II child by Sebastián de Herrera Barnuevo. And in the 18th century first half under the Bourbons the strict Spanish iconography was complemented by bright rocaille colors and glorification in encrypted emblems.

Ícaros y Luciferes: referencias mitológicas y bíblicas en la sátira política del siglo XVII

Abstract This article aims to analyze the allusive nature of the references in the political satire of the Spanish Golden Age. The identification of some historical figures with episodes from classical mythology or from the Bible is a usual device in the satire about historic characters.

Elementos de intertextualidad en la poesía de sátira política y clandestina del Siglo de Oro

Abstract The Spanish Golden Age poetry of clandestine and political satire uses different structural elements and expressive motifs: compositional paradigms, symbolic use of elements from the Antiquity, the emblematic tradition and other classic motifs, such as “life is a dream” or “the great theater of the world.” This article will focus on the intertextual elements of strictly literary type present in this corpus and their functions in each text.

The Canonization of St Francis Xavier in Spanish Habsburg Lands: A Poetry Challenge in Madrid, Sacristy Paintings by André Reinoso in Lisbon and an Altarpiece by Pieter Pawel Rubens in Antwerp

This article examines Jesuit representation of the exploits of Francis Xavier, ‘the Apostle of the East’, in celebration of his canonization in 1622 and in the Jesuit campaign to have him canonized prior to that. Pageants in Madrid, Lisbon and Antwerp are examined, along with prior pictorial depictions of Francis’ miracles and activities, taking into account the gulf between the political realities of proselytization in the Portuguese territories of influence in the East and the hagiography of 1622. The work of Rubens, the Portuguese painter André Reinoso and three Spanish Golden Age poet/playwrights are analyzed, exploring variance in the application of a universal Jesuit aesthetic founded on the melding of the Classical and the Catholic in response to the local conditions for which each ephemeral event and work of art were produced.

Incantations, Comedias , and Epigenetics: The Ruiz de Alarcón Brothers Cast an Eye on Magic in the Seventeenth-century Spanish Empire

Abstract: In 1623, Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, a parish priest in Atenango, Mexico, was commissioned by his archbishop to record Nahua beliefs and healing practices for the purpose of denouncing their superstitions and demonic magic. His Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions That Today Live Among the Indians Native to This New Spain, 1629 underscores Spanish prejudice against diversity in religion, preserves the idolatrous and magical practices it discredits, and reveals the author's colonial mindset. Raised in the same restrictive Spanish colonial environment, Hernando's brother Juan was classically trained in Civil and Canon law. He became one of the major authors of the Spanish Golden Age, writing comedias that focused on loyalty, friendship, and honesty. His work often reveals a disparate view of magical practice. This article explores how applying epigenetics, the study of environmental influences on gene activation and its effects on physical and emotional behavior, to their circumstances can provide a tool for exploring their sibling differences in relation to magic. Colonial Mexico, Spain, the Catholic religion, the university, and personal physical challenges acted on genetic factors to form the essential nature and works of Hernando and Juan Ruiz de Alarcón.

Translation of Spanish Classics of Spanish Golden Age period to Hindi in last 20 years: An Overview

Translation of Spanish Classics of Spanish Golden Age period to Hindi in last 20 years: An Overview

“Me Has Visto el Alma en los Ojos”: Hidden Passions in Spanish Golden Age Tragedy

The Spanish Golden Age tragedy is assembled around the conflict of passions, which does not find an adequate channel of expression in words because there are feelings that cannot be confessed if one wants to preserve life. However, such intense emotions cannot be hidden for a long time, either. The characters discover that the eyes speak in silence and cannot lie, so they appeal to their sincerity at crucial moments. Such examples can be found in the declarations of love addressed to inaccessible or forbidden women or in the narratives of women who report sexual assault or husbands who believe they have been dishonored. In this article, we will analyze all these circumstances to demonstrate that, if they contradict the lips, the eyes are the windows of the soul, and they speak a language that is as expressive as it is eloquent.

Bawds, Midwifery, and the Evil Eye in Golden Age Spanish Literature and Medicine

This article explores the relationship between the alcahueta or bawd, the evil eye, and midwifery in the early modern Spanish cultural imaginary. The evil eye, though an ancient belief, received renewed attention in theological and medical texts, including midwifery manuals, from the late fifteenth until the mid-sixteenth century, coinciding with the popularity of texts such as La Celestina featuring bawds. This article explores cultural debates regarding whether the evil eye was a natural phenomenon caused by corrupted bodily fluids emanating from post-menopausal women, or a result of witchcraft. Midwifery manuals list the evil eye as one of the principal dangers to newborns and give advice regarding how to prevent it, perhaps implicitly providing another justification for women’s gradual exclusion from midwifery in the early modern period. Fictional texts portray the bawd as engaging in women’s healing practices such as midwifery and newborn care, and as casting and curing the evil eye. I argue that the literary archetype of the bawd-midwife reflects academic disagreements that alternatively portray the evil eye as a physical illness, superstitious nonsense, or the result of witchcraft. As such, the bawd becomes a focal point for expressing anxiety over perceived decadence and decline, often tied to witchcraft. By tracing the evil eye through the characterization of bawds, we can perceive subtle indications of ambiguity regarding women’s magical and medical practices that question whether their influence comes from the devil or from women’s inherently malevolent nature.

The Eye as a Symbol of Ill-Fatedness in Two Canonical Picaresque Works: Lazarillo de Tormes and Guzmán de Alfarache

It seemed unimaginable that the eye, denoting visuality and deemed accurate and reliable in accordance with Aristotelian theories in circulation during the Spanish Golden Age could be considered as anything other than a revered hallmark of guidance and intellect. Nevertheless, the literary phenomenon) of the picaresque emerged at the onset of the seventeenth century to defy the chivalric and pastoral fantasies that were masking the real anxieties faced by an era of decline. The picaresque genre brought warning that turning a blind eye to Spain’s already-waning fortunes could not last forever. Yet, by doing so, it lent favour to such blindness, underlining how the eye, both symbolically and substantially, actually evoked a sense of ill-fatedness and misfortune. This paper calls for an exploration of how an ominous utilisation of the eye is presented in the most canonical picaresque works: Lazarillo de Tormes and Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache. From the imperative role of the blind man in opening the eyes of the young protagonist, to the doomed interpolated cosplay of seeing and unseeing throughout Lazarillo’s trajectory, and from Guzmán’s receptivity to appearances and Alemán’s lending of visual lexicon to his picaro protagonist, one must ask: how and why does the bodily organ of the eye, through both notion and function, serve as a depiction of hardship and disaster within these picaresque texts, and how does it reflect the overarching societal views towards intellect and religion during this epoch of “ocularcentrism”?

The Spanish Golden Age and beyond

The Spanish Golden Age and beyond

Social Justice in Spanish Golden Age Theater ed. by Erin Alice Cowling et al. (review)

Social Justice in Spanish Golden Age Theater ed. by Erin Alice Cowling et al. (review)

Same people, different outcomes: the sociolinguistic profile of three language changes in the history of Spanish. A corpus-based approach

Abstract Within the framework of Historical Sociolinguistics and using a corpus of ego-documents written by Spaniards from different social backgrounds, this study analyses the sociolinguistic profiles of three phenomena of variation and change that took place in two critical periods in the history of Spanish: the Golden Age and the Early Modern Spanish. The study focuses on three standard variants that would end up displacing several vernacular forms whose use was much more widespread in Golden Age Spanish: (a) the use of the complementiser que in doxastic predicates depending on the verb creer [’believe, think’], to the detriment of the variant creer + Ø; (b) the analogical pronoun quienes in relative clauses with an explicit human antecedent (’estos son los niños a quienes me dirigí’ [‘these are the children I spoke to’]), as opposed to the traditional relative quien; (c) the diffusion of the demonstrative pronoun allí [‘there’] at the expense of allá. Despite the success of the standard variants in the eighteenth century, the three cases of variation show different sociolinguistic conditioning, which in turn is closely related to several parameters, such as the speed and robustness of the respective changes, the typology of the variables and the linguistic constraints at work in each case.

De antiguo a clásico: Calderón y la génesis del campo teatral (1715–1926) by Sergio Adillo Rufo

Reviewed by: De antiguo a clásico: Calderón y la génesis del campo teatral (1715–1926) by Sergio Adillo Rufo Susan Paun de García De antiguo a clásico: Calderón y la génesis del campo teatral (1715–1926). By Sergio Adillo Rufo. Kassel: Reichenberger. 2021. viii+176 pp. €48. ISBN 978–3–967280–06–7. One of the brightest stars of the Spanish Golden Age dramatic constellation, Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681) is said to have written around 120 plays, a modest number compared to the 600–800 attributed to Lope de Vega (1562–1635). Yet, at the beginning of the eighteenth century Calderón's plays accounted for [End Page 267] 25 per cent of all performances in Spain. In the present, he may be a canonical figure but only a handful of his comedias are regularly staged: La vida es sueño, El alcalde de Zalamea, La dama duende. Contextualizing and charting the changing fortunes of Calderón was the subject of Sergio Adillo Rufo's Ph.D. thesis, which he has mined for the publication of no fewer than three books. In the publication under consideration here, Adillo analyses the presence (or absence) of the dramatist on commercial stages in Spain between 1715 and 1926 in relation to how the theatrical profession was progressively articulating itself around Calderón as a field of cultural production. Adillo surveys the nature and evolution of the Calderonian canon and the factors that influenced its configuration. He applies the theories of Pierre Bourdieu to examine how productions of Calderón's plays evolved from being entertainment to symbols of identity, gradually departing from the commercial repertoire to form part of the elite canon. Considering important factors of influence (prevailing cultural trends and tastes as well as reforms and regulations of governmental and cultural institutions, including performance spaces), he seeks to answer an overarching question: why were certain texts performed at certain times? Structured chronologically, the book is divided into two main sections (each comprising three chapters) that discuss performances of Calderón plays within the commercial, political, cultural, and historical currents of the periods in question. In the first section—covering the years between the end of the Spanish War of Succession (1715) and the bicentenary of Calderón's death (1881)—Adillo traces the prehistory of the field of theatre, using performances of Calderón as a case study. The second section surveys the years between 1881 and 1927, a date that gave name to the Generación del 1927, a group of writers who rose to prominence in the late 1920s, many of whom produced important commemorative editions of the poetry of Luis de Góngora to mark the tercentenary of his death. Chapter 1 focuses on late baroque productions, contrasting what survived from the previous century and what was new in the first half of the eighteenth century, or to be precise, until 1765, when autos sacramentales were prohibited. Chapter 2 reviews the effects on the repertoire of successive (attempted) reforms of theatre from 1765 until the beginning of the nineteenth century. In Chapter 3 Adillo turns to the period from the War of Independence until the liberalization of commercial theatre in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, noting that with the beginnings of a 'teatro nacional' and the incipient field of theatre (seen as art, not an industry subject to the market rules of supply and demand), Calderón was becoming a figure around whom national identity could be articulated. Chapter 4 concentrates exclusively on the celebrations of the bicentenary of Calderón's death and the importance they had in officially consolidating his canonical status. Chapter 5, covering the reign of Alfonso XII and the first years of the regency of María Cristina, reviews how famous actors (Rafael Calvo, Antonio Vico, and María Guerrero) kept 'classic' Spanish theatre on the stage at the end of the century as a cornerstone of the relationship they established with the dominant class that constituted their audience. Adillo observes that Calderón was by this time [End Page 268] an emblem of national identity and sign...