Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of Renaissance Europe by Mary E. Barnard (review)

Mary Barnard’s book on the poet Garcilaso de la Vega and material culture comes amid growing interest in the role of objects in Early Modern culture in general, and in Early Modern literature in particular. While the early research on the topic concentrated on Renaissance Italy and England, excellent work is now being done in the Hispanic field, as shown by an earlier collection edited by Barnard and Frederick A. de Armas (Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2013), and now, the book under review.

Students of Spanish poetry are familiar with Garcilaso’s role, along with his friend Juan Boscán, in importing poetic forms and themes from Italy and initiating the Renaissance in Castilian poetry. But Barnard sees Garcilaso as the forerunner in engaging with the material culture of his time as well, a product of his travels in Italy with Emperor Charles V, and especially his stay in Naples, where he was allowed to reside after briefly falling into the Emperor’s disfavor, from 1532 till his death in 1536. As Barnard states in her introduction, Garcilaso’s stay in Italy was an “invitation to admire and dialogue directly with its material culture” (7). Barnard’s study traces how the poet accepted that invitation, and how he used those objects to structure his poetry and represent himself as a poet. She examines poems written during the poet’s Neapolitan period, and her six chapters are organized around objects found in the poems, moving from objects with a public function to those with a more intimate, interpersonal role.

The first chapter, a version of which was previously published in the Objects of Culture collection, concerns Garcilaso’s third Eclogue. After a dedication to a woman named simply “María,” the Eclogue depicts four tapestries as they are woven by nymphs of the Tagus River. The ekphrasis of the tapestries gives the Eclogue a highly complex structure, especially with regards to the fourth tapestry, as it refers to Garcilaso’s own poetry (namely, the first Eclogue). Commentators have spent many pages trying to elucidate the different levels of representation that result—the poem, the tapestries within the poem, and the events narrated in the tapestries. Barnard follows this tradition in discussing the mix of voice and writing in the Eclogue, but her most important contribution is to place the tapestries of the Eclogue in the context of real tapestries that were woven and displayed in the courts of sixteenth-century Europe. This allows her to interpret the tapestries of the Eclogue as gifts given by Garcilaso to María Osorio Pimentel, wife of the viceroy of Naples, don Pedro de Toledo and most likely the “María” of the Eclogue’s dedication. There was a biographical reason for the giving of such a gift: Pedro de Toledo had been responsible for bringing Garcilaso to Naples and saving him from exile on an island in the Danube, his original punishment for having crossed Charles V. Barnard goes beyond this biographical context to explore the culture of tapestries in the Early Modern period, from their importance for Spanish monarchs such as Isabel la Católica and Charles V, to their appearance later in, for example, Velázquez’s Las hilanderas. This context allows Barnard to interpret the collection of the four tapestries as designs in the tradition of verdures or millefleurs—tapestries with floral and other nature motifs—which adorned the rooms of many contemporary monarchs and nobles.

The second chapter continues the focus on tapestries by taking as its object the series of tapestries designed by the Flemish artist Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen to record and commemorate Charles V’s conquest of Tunis in 1535. Garcilaso participated in the campaign, which provided the occasion for several of his poems, which Barnard analyzes in relation to Vermeyen’s tapestries. Barnard’s conclusion is that Garcilaso, through his poetry...