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  • Cervantes and the Pictorial Imagination: A Study on the Power of Images and Images of Power in Works by Cervantes
  • Pablo Fabián Baler
Laguna, Ana María G. Cervantes and the Pictorial Imagination: A Study on the Power of Images and Images of Power in Works by Cervantes. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2009. Pp. 175. ISBN 978-0-8387-5727-7.

The complex relationship between visual arts and literature in the time (and works) of Cervantes is a topos of Cervantine criticism. Some critics have studied the interaction between specific paintings and literary passages, others were interested in underlying issues of representation, yet others have focused on the aesthetic debates surrounding the expressive scope of painting in relation to writing. Ana María Laguna contends that her book, Cervantes and the Pictorial Imagination, "differentiates itself from these preceding efforts by exploring Cervantes's pictorial imagination within the context in which it was forged. [Exploring] the author's relationship to his surrounding visual culture" (14).

Thus, the main thrust of this book is to supersede the pervasive scholarly approach to Cervantes as an exclusive result of High Italian Renaissance, exploring the ways in which his writing connects to the singular world of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain as influenced by both Flemish and Italian art.

To be sure, Laguna explores this unique combination of Flemish "realist" and Italian "idealist" influences that constituted the artistic horizon of Cervantes, in the hopes of articulating a more nuanced understanding of three aesthetic and iconographic anxieties of the period: the construction of Dulcinea's beauty in connection with Cinquecento aesthetics, the dismantling of the Neoplatonic pairing of virtue with beauty as found in El coloquio de los perros, and the overlapping of history with fiction in Don Quijote as a parody of the artistic and historical ambitions of the Habsburgs.

The extent to which Laguna's investigation is, in fact, a fundamental departure from over three centuries of multitudinous scholarship could be a point worth arguing. What is more interesting, however, is to assess whether Laguna manages to formulate meaningful questions as a result of this interdisciplinary approach that brings together aesthetic, historical, and literary investigations.

As it relates to the first "anxiety," Laguna explores the dyad Dulcinea/Aldonza in the context of the aesthetic debates of the sixteenth century surrounding the concept and "practice" [End Page 763] of beauty. Although the conflict between conventions and reality may very well be one of the backgrounds against which Dulcinea and Aldonza play their complicated metaphorical roles, I think the paradox relates to a broader issue of baroque aesthetics that is not quite developed in this book: the most consistent and far-reaching deconstruction operated by the novel in its double thrust to dismantle any illusions of transparency in language and to construct a grammar of the ineffable.

Laguna makes a similar point in regards to the second "anxiety," the "deconstruction" of the Neoplatonic episteme. Even though Cervantes's approach to "beauty" has been traditionally linked to the idealized archetypes of Italian, Neoplatonic sources, Laguna reads El coloquio and El casamiento engañoso from a perspective that reveals the grotesque undercurrent connected to Northern aesthetics and its "distrust of the outward idealization of beauty" (68).

In contrast to these previous studies on the power of images, the last chapter of the book (chapter 4) is clearly a study on images of power, since Laguna reads Don Quijote not only as a parody of a genre but also of the very representational apparatus of the Spanish empire. Here, Laguna tries to decipher a comparison, allegedly coded in Cervantes's novel, between the self-glorifying Emperor Carlos V and the pseudo knight Don Quixote. This comparison, however, although deftly articulated, can be seen more as an accumulation of poetic licenses and coincidental echoes than a scientific record of historical or literary lineage. Yet, if we suspend academic disbelief, Cervantes's novel does emerge through these associations, as "a multifaceted critique of imperial ideals and representational paradigms that 'telescope together nearly 150 years of Spanish history'" (102).

Indeed, the interdisciplinary perspective of this book offers, in the final analysis, a wider and deeper perspective on two fundamental works...

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