Risky Collaboration in Fifteenth-Century Printing and Cárcel de Amor

The paradox of ekphrasis is predicated on its manner of depicting an object in words, yet, somehow, representing through the description something other or more than an observer could discern by actually viewing the object. Diego de San Pedro’s ekphrasis of the Prison of Love, of which the following is excerpted, is not exempt from this paradox:

[Q]uando ya la lumbre del día descubrió los canpos, vi cerca de mí … una torre de altura tan grande que me parecía llegar al cielo; era hecha por tal artificio que de la estraneza della comencé a maravillarme … aunque el tienpo se me ofrecía más para temer que para notar, miré la novedad de su lavor y de su edificio.

(6)¹

Positioned significantly at dawn, a poetic moment of revelation, San Pedro’s ekphrasis describes the tower to readers and, at the same time, obliquely reveals something else, something more than mere architecture. While the ekphrastic passage linguistically depicts a structure that allegorizes unrequited courtly love, in its description it further represents not only an allegory of fifteenth-century printing, but also insight into the risky collaboration between authors and printers that characterized incunabular print culture and yielded printed books such as San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor (first edition in Sevilla 1492).

For Murray Krieger, the paradox of ekphrasis centers not on the description itself, but on its referent:

What is being described in ekphrasis is both a miracle and a mirage: a miracle because a sequence of actions filled with befores and afters such as language alone can trace seems frozen into an instant’s vision, but a mirage because only the illusion of such an impossible picture can be suggested from the poem’s words.

(xvi-xvii, emphasis original)

W. J. T. Mitchell, in addition to recognizing ekphrasis as a literary genre and a poetic device, “the verbal representation of visual representation”, emphasizes that ekphrasis “cannot represent–that is, make present–its object in the same way a visual representation can. … Words can ‘cite,’ but never ‘sight’ their objects” (152). In this way, ekphrasis constitutes an encounter of the visual with the verbal, the spatiality of art with the temporality of words, while always insisting on a strictly figurative encounter (158). Ekphrasis, by its nature, annuls the possibility of literally evoking the object described; to see it physically would imply a departure from the ekphrastic genre. In this way, in the very absence of a concrete referent, in the tension between the effort to represent and the impossibility of representation, ekphrasis resides.

Given the non-literal nature of ekphrasis’s verbal-visual encounter, a more figurative interpretation of the Prison of Love allegory may offer new ways of understanding San Pedro’s text and his cultural milieu. By replacing the passage’s accepted referent with a printing press, an account of fifteenth-century printing practices may be detected in the ekphrasis of the prison. Because of this, the allegory becomes one not only of unrequited love, but also of the precarious balance between the writer’s authority and the collaborative processes of authorship that transformed his text into a printed book. Certainly, the printing press did not change fundamentally since its inception in the mid-1400s, given that the technology was not novel but rather an adaptation of an apparatus that already had been in use. In this way, despite a lack of information regarding incunabular-period book printing techniques, the facts we have related to printing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries permit an extrapolation of the first fifty years’ practices as well.²

A frontispiece illustration was added first by Pablo Hurus in the Zaragoza edition (1493). It subsequently appeared in the Barcelona edition (1493) printed by Johan Rosenbach and later in the Burgos edition (1496) by Fadrique de Basilea. The function of the ekphrasis and the illustrated frontispiece’s two referents – the prison and the press–is to invite an examination of the interplay among the ways in which the Auctor perceived, the fifteenth-century author inscribed and the...