Ekphrasis in the Age of Cervantes (review)

de Tormes (1554) tells the story of a “subverter of the system” exploited first “materially” and then “spiritually” by abusive masters (229). While his point is well taken, it must be noted that here, as elsewhere in the book, there is a tendency to downplay the complicity or participation of “ordinary people” in systems of oppression. By admittedly casting out “the ghost of the complexity of society thrown at us by institutional history,” the author neglects to consider theorists who have constructively problematized and amended Bakhtin’s hypothesis that “the culture of laughter, unlike the elite culture of sobriety and intimidation, is free, open, tolerant, and nonrestrictive . . . it does not use verbal or material violence” (29). Many will argue that these more recent theories could help to explain why, for instance, Lazarillo’s brutalization at the hands of a blind beggar should inspire hilarity as opposed to “solidarity” on the part of “ordinary people” (tratado 1). In spite of these theoretical oversights and occasional overstatements, Pérez -Romero’s book gives a compelling account of the popular struggle against oppression in early modern Spain. RYAN GILES The University of Chicago De Armas, Frederick A., ed. Ekphrasis in the Age of Cervantes. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2005. 241 pp. This new collection of illuminating essays edited by Frederick de Armas is a fitting companion to his earlier edition, Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age (2004), which addresses the complex interconnections between the verbal and the visual in early modern Spain. This volume, which grew out of a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar held at the University of Chicago in the summer of 2003 – “Recapturing the Renaissance: Cervantes and Italian Art” – focuses on one such interconnection, ekphrasis, in the period roughly between the 1530s to the 1650s in poetry, drama, and prose fiction. The volume highlights how Spain’s political and cultural ties with Italy and the Low Countries continually nourished Spanish writers and opened to them new ways of exploring visual writing. In his intelligent prefatory essay, “Simple Magic: Ekphrasis from Antiquity to the Age of Cervantes,” de Armas defines the various types of ekphrases, distinguishing actual ekphrasis from other forms, notably notional ekphrasis (a description of an imagined work of art) and the more esoteric collectionist ekphrasis, which constitutes a “gallery or museum within a text” (23). In an imaginative move, he pauses on what he calls “Ur-ekphrasis,” the moment when don Quixote, in transforming windmills into giants, configures stones Reseñas 159 into “statues” to create an instant of “simple magic” in which the knight, like an artist, reinvents and reconfigures the reality around him. De Armas proposes the “Age of Cervantes” for the period in question in recognition of the author’s vital innovations within the novelistic enterprise, including his masterful use of ekphrasis. In the second prefatory essay, “Ekphrastic Treatments of Salviati’s Paintings and Imprese,” Deborah Cibelli engages Francesco Salviati’s frescoes and imprese in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, which privilege paintings of unearthed antique statuary at Roman sites that were interpreted allegorically in ekphrastic renditions in Vasari’s Lives, in Paolo Giovio’s emblems, and in Torquato Tasso’s epic poetry. A learned reading links Salviati’s art to the political aspirations of his patrons, the Medici in Florence and the Farnese in Rome. Cibelli’s analysis of an impresa of the moth and flame in a sonnet by Góngora, recalling Salviati and Tasso, leads into the essays dealing directly with Spain. The second part of the volume opens with Kathleen Bollard’s “Ekphrasis and the Renaissance Student: Classical versus Biblical Authority in Villalón’s El Scholástico.” Bollard studies actual and notional ekphrases of paintings and sculptures inspired by Old Testament narratives and classical texts in Cristóbal de Villalón’s dialogic work. Her careful analysis shows how Villalón’s privileging of classical sculptures in the gardens of the duke of Alba’s palace exposes an academician’s pedagogical objectives. In his original “Eucharistic Conjunction: Emblems, Illustrations, and Calderón’s Autos,” John Slater connects the symbolism of botanical imagery in Calderón’s sacramental plays to emblems and illustrations. In effect, the coupling...