Quixotic Frescoes: Cervantes and Italian Renaissance Art (review)

Spanish literature and Italian art merge in Quixotic Frescoes, Frederick A. De Armas's recent book. This work highlights Cervantes's desire for Italy and his textualization of Italian art in texts such as La Numancia and La Galatea. The bulk of De Armas's book focuses on Don Quixote, Part One. The chapters are divided into discussions of individual Italian painters and their direct influences on specific scenes within Don Quixote, thereby allowing the reader to easily determine the connections between the two areas of study. The fact that critics have previously ignored the frescoes De Armas points out within Cervantes's text shows the great need for more scholarship on this subject. De Armas writes Quixotic Frescoes in an attempt to illustrate examples of these Italian frescoes, along with Italian paintings and buildings found in Cervantes's works.

De Armas discusses Cervantes's time serving the future Cardinal Acquaviva in the Vatican and the influence of this exposure to Italian art and culture on the writer. Cervantes would have been well aware of the paintings of Raphael and Michelangelo, and these artists "would become part of the images and structures of his plays, stories, and novels" (8). The author argues that Cervantes uses ekphrasis as a device in order to include images from Italian art in his texts. He points to various forms of ekphrasis: notional (based on an imagined work of art), combinatory (combining two or more works of art in one description), and metadescriptive (based on a textual description of art which may or may not exist), among others. The prologue to Don Quixote, Part One, for example, ". . . carefully conceals an extended commentary on the earliest of the Stanze decorated by Raphael, the Stanza della Segnatura" (33). Don Quixote's library as described in chapter six of Don Quixote, Part One reflects that of the philosophers in Raphael's The School of Athens. De Armas's book is filled with similar descriptions as he takes the reader through an analysis of the most important examples of Italian art within the first part of Cervantes's masterpiece.

The first two chapters of Quixotic Frescoes describe Cervantes's love of Italy and his use of ekphrasis in La Numancia and La Galatea. I feel, however, that we find the most important contribution of De Armas's work in the remainder of his book, which focuses on Don Quixote itself. Chapter four is a long discussion of numerological structure in Cervantes's work and his repeated use of the tetrad, or set of four. To highlight this structure, De Armas focuses on the most famous fresco in the Vatican's Stanza della Segnatura, The School of Athens. Each wall of the Stanza is devoted to one of the four elements, and it is one of four rooms that Raphael painted. Cervantes likewise divides Don Quixote into four parts; his main character needs four days to name his horse; there are four major objects which the knight needs in order to serve; four people live in his house; and the list goes on throughout the text. De Armas continues his discussion, highlighting Michelangelo's influence on the writer by demonstrating the prevalence of giants in the sculptor's works as well as Cervantes's text. Michelangelo's work appears in Don Quixote as a way of distorting Raphael's tetrad structure. Positioning the two Italian artists against one another, De Armas uses the rivalry between the Vatican painters to reveal the failures of Cervantes's knight due to his inability to establish a proper tetrad foundation. De Armas then continues his discussion of Cervantes's text by illustrating traces of various other Italian artists within it such as Luca Cambiaso, Titian, Jacopo Pontormo, and Parmigianino.

Quixotic Frescoes makes for a very interesting study of Don Quixote. De Armas's breadth of knowledge in both Hispanic and Italian studies is truly impressive, allowing him to successfully span both disciplines in this book. Quixotic Frescoes is an important addition...