Picturing Decadence: The Female Aristocratic Subject in Manuel Machado’s Ekphrastic Portrait Poems

For decades, critics of Spanish poetry have spoken of the need to “revalorize” Manuel Machado’s work, which dwelled for years in the shadow of his brother Antonio’s more famous poetic collections, or had been marginalized due to Manuel’s Fascist leanings during and after the Spanish Civil War. Thanks to the efforts of critics such as Margaret Persin and Rafael Alarcón Sierra, as we enter into the second decade of the twenty-first century Manuel Machado’s poetic capabilities are finally recognized as different than those of his brother, but no less worthy of study. Machado’s Apolo: Teatro pictórico (1911), a compendium of ekphrastic sonnets, is not one of the collections that has benefitted greatly from this renewed critical interest in the poet’s work. This slender volume contains Machado’s musings and personal reflections, rendered in lyrical form, on twenty-five European paintings that span from the Italian Quattrocento to the final years of the nineteenth century. It must be noted, however, that the sonnets are not simply faithful ekphrastic descriptions of painted models. Rather, Machado imagines himself as an artist who paints with words and produces his own unique works of art inspired by the paintings. In an oft-quoted passage from his essay “Génesis de un libro,” the poet explains the way his own subjective interpretation colors his poetic representation of the paintings he observes: “pinto esos cuadros tal como se dan y con todo lo que evocan en mi espíritu” (120). This deeply personal interpretation produces what Machado himself has called “ciertas inexatitudes” in the transcription of the poems that make his verbal representations deviate from their visual referents.¹ It is through these “inexatitudes” that we are able to see how Machado’s contemporary sensibility impinges on the paintings he describes.

While Apolo: Teatro pictórico has not been the subject of as much scholarly inquiry as Machado’s more famous collections, a sociopolitical reading tends to predominate among those critics who have dedicated essays to the poems in this collection. Scholars such as Alarcón Sierra, Enric Bou and Peter Standish have been eager to discuss the portrait poems that feature historical figures related to decline of the Hapsburg Empire. They posit that these sonnets are veiled commentaries on the contemporary “Desastre de 98” that Spain had suffered in Machado’s lifetime. Standish asserts that “desde su mirador a principios de siglo, a la luz del crepúsculo imperial tras la pérdida de Cuba, … Manuel Machado imparte un sentido doble al decadentismo tal y como se manifiesta en sus retratos poéticos de la corte de los siglos XVI y XVII” (437). Bou also underscores that, though the collection features many images of royalty, there is an emphasis on decay rather than a spirit of imperial conquest, noting that the poetic voice does not present “éxitos fulgurantes, sino situaciones [y] personajes que representan las antípodas del triunfo” (135). In this attempt to show how Machado relates his work to the contemporary political situation, critics have tended to pay a disproportionate amount of attention only to specific poems, notably those that depict male political figures like “Felipe IV” and “Carlos V,” after the celebrated paintings by Velázquez and Titian, respectively. Though important scholarship has been generated through the study of these poems, we can learn much from the other portraits Machado chooses for his private poetic gallery.²

While critically neglected, other poems in Machado’s fin-de-siècle gallery are just as capable of revealing the poet’s cultural, social, and literary milieu. More concretely, I will concentrate on the handful of poems inspired by paintings of royal female subjects, among them, Juana I of Castile, la Infanta Margarita, and the Queen María Luisa de Borbón. Like the aforementioned scholars’ work, my study is also a selective one. Like them, I also underscore Machado’s subjective interpretation of the paintings and the way he relates them to his contemporary political and literary experience. However, I will demonstrate how Machado’s use...