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

Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age provides an insightful (no pun intended) approach to the study of Golden Age literature and its strong connection to the visual arts. Or, as de Armas writes in the introduction, "This volume attempts to offer a vision of possibilities to those who wish to study the fascinating and intricate relations between the verbal and the visual during the Spanish Golden Age" (16). The collection of thirteen essays is divided into the following four sections. The Painter and the Writer Are One and the Same, whose main focus is the visual imagery in works by Cervantes, includes essays about ekphrasis (F. A. de Armas); the pomegranate as a moral and geopolitical signifier (E. C. Graf); and the effect of Vasari's work on Cervantes (C. B. Weimer). Ut Pictura Poesis studies mythological and erotic themes included in art and poetry. Here we find essaysof a more theoretical nature such as: "Mirroring Desire" (M. C. Quintero);"Inscribing Transgression" (M. E. Barnard); the "Fractured 'I'" (S. Wagschal); and "Optics and Vocabularies of the Visual" (E. L. Bergmann). Painting the Feminine focuses on female representation in plays by Lope de Vega (T. Ambrose), Calderón de la Barca (L. Bass) and María de Zayas (L. Voigt), while Visual Rhetoric includes essays about emblems (J. T. Cull), topos (J. Vélez-Sainz), and conceits(L. Schwartz), followed by a detailed index.

The collection includes a wide variety of styles and topics which appeal to readers on many different levels; however, I would like to note two minor negatives: the lengthy endnotes would have been more useful as footnotes, and the English translations tended to interrupt the flow of the essays. In general, all of the articles are important as they shed new light on the strong relationship that existed between art and literature, yet several articles stand out due to their unique perspective and/or insight. For example, Graf's "The Pomegranate of Don Quixote 1.9" (an in-depth study of the historical and cultural significance of the pomegranate), demonstrates how the seemingly unimportant inclusion of the pomegranate in the middle of "one of the novel's most structurally complex moments is actually the outgrowth of the author's humanistic approach to the social tensions of his own historical moment" (44). Also in part 1, Weimer's "The Quixotic Art: Cervantes, Vasari, and Michelangelo" concludes convincingly that Cervantes may have utilized some of the biographical information from the Lives of the Artists to elaborate the character of Don Quixote: "Vasari's biography of Uccello, who devoted himself so much to the subtleties of perspective to the exclusion of all else that he would 'stay in his study all night' working out vanishing points. . . ." (68). In part 2, Quintero's "Mirroring Desire in Early Modern Spanish Poetry: Some Lessons from Painting" is incredibly valuable, not only for her admirable approach to deciphering the meaning of some lesser-known poems, but also for bringing to the forefront the importance of studying erotic poetry from the Golden Age: "the use of dialogue allows for the appearance of a feminine voice expressing a sexual desire that is auto-erotic or narcissistic on the one hand, and seductively directed toward the male observer/interlocutor on the other. Needless to say, this frank expression of feminine lust is rare in the literature of early modern Spain" (92). Is it so rare, or could it be that these texts have remained undiscovered in the scores of unedited manuscripts housed in libraries around the world? And finally, in part 3, Voigt's "Visual and Oral Art(ifice) in María de Zayas's Desengaños amorosos" is a delightful study of the visual and oral aspects of Amar sólo por vencer and La esclava de su amante: "These two tales treat the senses of hearing and sight in opposing yet complementary ways, with...