Revealing Beauty/Revealing History in El sueño de Venecia

Paloma Díaz-Mas's El suenõ de Venecia is a historical novel that traces not only important eras of Spanish history between the seventeenth century and 1992, but also Spain's literary history, since each chapter is written in a style imitative of that corresponding to the time in which the action takes place. What holds together such a literary mosaic is the wedding portrait that appears in each chapter as an ancestral treasure for the descendents of the Jewish courtesan Gracia de Mendoza. The conclusion, titled "Memoria," parodies the discourses of the art historian whose task it is to decipher the mystery of the lady in the portrait. Thus, Díaz-Mas, a historian herself, has produced a novel that blends a critique of modern Spanish historiography with a portrait of the Spain of 1992 that is revealed as a liminal space where modernity and the past coexist uneasily. The present essay posits that the novel is structured as a female picaresque in which through her self-fashioning, Gracia invites the modern reader to recover a past that imperial Spain banished. In keeping with the novel's invitation to uncover hidden truths, I argue that the character Gracia has precedents in historical women, mainly the Sephardic heroine Gracia Nasi Mendes. Finally, through a study of the novel's last chapter, we turn to the use of a child narrator who functions as the cultural critic who through the innocence of her gaze, bids the reader to embrace the complexities of the past for a nation that is still resisting the seductive beauty of a legacy that is both Semitic and feminine.