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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age Marina S. Brownlee De Armas, Fredrick A. , Ed. Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2004. 310 pages. Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age offers an impressive rethinking of the mutually illuminating media of text and image in Golden Age Spain, of the integral relationship between the verbal and the visual. Painting was clearly central to Golden Age writers, just as writing was a key context for artists of the period. To make this point, Frederick de Armas introduces this group of essays by observing that as the 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 the Writer are One and the Same," the first of four units in this collection, with his essay entitled "(Mis)placing the Muse," offering a reading of Cervantes's Galatea from the perspective of the visual, pointing out that the entire work is framed by frescoes: Book I offers an ecphrastic presentation of Raphael's Galatea, and Book VI a description based on Raphael's Parnassus. Both artists, likewise, focus on the Muse of epic poetry, Calliope. De Armas's analysis illuminates the reason why Calliope is misplaced (present where Thalia would seem more relevant) as a means by which Cervantes boldly figures himself as the Spanish Virgil (38). Eric Graf's "The Pomegranate of Don Quixote I, 9" provides an original exploration of the political and religious significance of the pomegranate in the transition between chapters 8 and 9, the encounter between Don Quijote and the Basque. Explaining the significance of the granada/pomegranate, Graf argues that "the geopolitical pomegranate at the beginning of chapter 9 is but one of a cluster of details that converge to indicate that Cervantes's principal concern while writing Don Quijote was the Morisco question" (51). The next essay, "The Quixotic Art: Cervantes, Vasari, and Michelangelo" by Christopher Weimer, is a provocative piece that acknowledges Cervantes as a reader of Vasari. Reminding us that Don Quijote himself acknowledges the need for a knight to follow the painter's example" (72), Weimer then presents Don [End Page 93] Quijote as "a parody of a Renaissance painter," offering numerous parallels between his life and the life of Michelangelo. The second section of the book, entitled "Ut pictura poesis," addresses the extensive mutual influence of Golden Age poetry and prose, beginning with María Cristina Quintero's contribution, entitled "Writing Desire in Early Modern Spanish Poetry: Some Lessons from Painting." This intriguing essay begins with a consideration of the female body in Renaissance visual and verbal examples, especially ones in which a woman looks at herself in a mirror: Rubens's Venus Looking in a Mirror, Titian's Venus at Her Toilet, and Velázquez's Venus and Cupid. Texts by Góngora, Quevedo, and Zayas are also analyzed, revealing that in male-generated texts "the women are merely the pretext for the opportunistic exhibitionism of an implied male subject" (195). Mary Barnard's "Inscribing Transgression, Siting Identity: Arguijo's Phaëton and Ganymede in Painting and Text" considers the case of Juan de Arguijo, a poet from Seville, who has commissioned for the library of his house two paintings, one of the Fall of Phaëton, the other the Rape of Ganymede. Barnard convincingly reflects on the paintings and the sonnets written by Arguijo on these two mythological figures, concluding from the comparison that "the sonnets serve as inscriptions to the paintings, at once validating their transgressive figures as emblems of the poet and creating within the paintings a site of memory for his fame" (109). Ultimately, however, the verbal medium takes precedence, as the poet's words "result in a more powerful celebration" of the material. With the essay of Steven Wagschal, "Writing on the Fractured 'I': Góngora's Iconographic Evocations of Vulcan, Venus, and Mars," we encounter a thoughtful analysis of Góngora's canción entitled "<inverted exclam>Qué de invidiosos montes levantados!," which offers a rich...