Quixotic Frescoes: Cervantes and Italian Renaissance Art (review)

The most riveting of the dozen epigraphs in Quixotic Frescoes—an erudite, stately, and illuminating quest for traces of Italian art in the 1605 Don Quixote—opens chapter 4. Iamblicus, the biographer of Pythagorus, answers his own question: “What is the oracle at Delphi? The tetractys” (52). Having visited the oracle in total ignorance of this defining quality, I took special pleasure in this chapter’s instruction. At the very center of Raphael’s School of Athens, De Armas reminds us, stands the figure of Plato holding a copy of the Timaeus, a dialogue that foregrounds the Pythagorean connotations of the number four. Raphael’s fresco becomes, in this study, a pictorial lesson for the tetractys, the revered numerology of the Renaissance, that props up Cervantes’s novel.

Readers scornful of Pythagorean numerology will be relieved to learn that Cervantes uses “the fourfold way” in order to surpass it. Far from “sacramental,” his imitation of Raphael uses tetrads as the basic structuring of the 1605 Quixote: divided into four parts, the novel opens with a series of foursomes describing the hero’s diet, clothing, income, the members of his household, and even his four considered surnames. Noting that these tetrads contrast with the recurrent love triangles in the interpolated tales, De Armas rightly observes that Dulcinea is “not part of the fourfold foundation of the novel” (62).

The above is one of two chapters on Raphael. The earlier chapter—“At School with the Ancients”—argues that the Prologue to the 1605 Quixote “carefully conceals an extended commentary on Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura (33). De Armas sees the Vatican as “a school for Cervantes’ future fiction” (9), including his famous Prologue, which mocks the servile use of ancient and biblical texts. Where Raphael foregrounds Plato and Aristotle at the center of his School of Athens, Cervantes’s Prologue alludes to them as part of “a herd of philosophers.” Raphael’s neighboring fresco, the Disputa, points to the Prologue’s mockery of would-be Church doctors. De Armas has prepared readers to appreciate Cervantes’s cunning uses of ekphrasis in his opening chapter on “The Exhilaration of Italy.” Here the technique is defined (“the description in words of a work of art”) and then theorized in many expanded and re-envisioned forms, including “metaekphrasis” and “ur-ekphrasis” (9–11).

Raphael is the first of a series of almost a dozen artists that De Armas explores in his quest “for traces of Italian art” in Don Quixote. Chapter 5 (“Textual Terribilitá”) argues for links between Michelangelo and Cervantine narrative that break with the measured and orderly classicism of Raphael. In this break with the literary techniques of his age, Cervantes will emulate the terribilitá [awfulness, formidableness] of the contortions in Michelangelo’s revolutionary sculpture, St. Matthew, and his famous fresco, The Last Judgment. A meditation here on Cervantes’s flogged farm boy Andrés illustrates this break. Michelangelo’s 1504 David triggers some vivid political questions on the Medicis and the Habsburgs.

Chapter 6 on “The Merchants of Trebizond” focuses on two Genoese painters—Luca Cambiaso and Giulio Romano (“Luchetto”). This chapter also includes a fascinating foray into the history of the Genoese in the ancient empire of Trebizond (“Trapisonda”), where the mad Don Quixote aspires to rule. Anne J. Cruz’s studies of the Spanish resentment against the Genoese as “hated foreign bankers enriching themselves from Spanish spoils” is usefully cited here (110). This section shows how the subjects and styles of Luca Cambiaso—the leading painter in Genoa when Cervantes first arrived there in 1569—not only prepared him to view Italy’s more famous artists but also provided him with pictorial models for Don Quixote. Giulio Romano’s masterpiece, The Stoning of St. Stephen, may have inspired the repetitive stonings experienced by Don Quixote.

The following chapter, especially gratifying to those of us working along imperial lines, uses Titian’s 1548 portrait of Charles V at Mühlberg “as a...