Soledades ilustradas: Retablo emblemático de Góngora by Rafael Bonilla Cerezo and Paolo Tanganelli (review)

BOOK REVIEWS CALÍOPE Vol. 19, No. 2, 2014: 107-118 Bonilla Cerezo, Rafael and PaoloTanganelli. Soledades ilustradas: Retablo emblemático de Góngora. Madrid: Editorial Delirio, 2013. 169 pp. ISBN: 978-84-15739-04-3 In this slim, densely erudite and handsomely illustrated volume, Rafael Bonilla (U. Córdoba) and PaoloTanganelli (U. Ferrara), perform a meticulous reading of the dedication and vv. 1-320 of Góngora’s Soledad primera (handily included in a second appendix) through the lens of emblems found in Alciato, Orozco, Covarrubias and their followers. The insignia in this “atrio de las Soledades” (12) are a complex structuring device and craft an allegorical tapestry that exalts the poet’s patron in an act of carefully plotted political expediency. Expanding upon the work of Antonio Carreira, Robert Jammes, Marsha Collins, Mercedes Blanco, Jesús Ponce and numerous other authoritative Góngora scholars, their reading is both political-ideological and profoundly philological, incorporating both textual and the visual arts. In this regard, the authors’ familiarity with and incorporation of, on the one hand, Góngora’s other poetic works, and on the other, previous scholarship produced on both sides of the Atlantic on these works, is insightful and refreshingly thorough. Three brief preliminary sections, “Aguja de navegar emblemas,” “Inscriptio” and “Una cuestión de géneros” set up the authors’ interpretative protocol and prepares the reader for what is to come. They contextualize the current political situation and the poet’s problematic relationship with the nobility, as well as the fact that “en la España del duque de Lerma […] las emblemas se habían convertido en el código ineludible del poder” (13). Moreover, the Soledades’s challenging and protean mixture of models, genres and artistic forms serves to “revitalizar el legado neopetrarquista, a la vez que ensayan la (suponemos dolorosa) respuesta ideológica y existencial del poeta ante la crisis del reinado de Felipe II” (14). REVIEWS 108 Following this foregrounding of the “abanico de emblemas que nos mueve a buscar otros más o menos ocultos” (26), the remaining chapters are organized into “paneles.” The first, “El tapiz del duque,” analyzes in minute and convincing detail the series of emblems utilized in the dedication to the Duke of Béjar to characterize and exalt him, transmuting the patron into Jupiter seated on Olympus. As the authors explain with respect to insignia such as roble, jabalina, águila, and dosel, “un repaso del tapiz emblemático contenido en la Dedicatoria refuerza la silueta moral de este mecenas que, de otra forma, se antojaría, en efecto, un tanto desvaída” (40). While the first panel masks Béjar as Jupiter, the second, “Arión,” concentrates on the poet, identifying him first with the poem’s pilgrimprotagonist , then with the gods’ cupbearer Ganymede, and finally with the legendary musician-poet Arion whose mythical rescuer from the sea—a dolphin—becomes in the Soledad “la breve tabla” that transports the pilgrim across the “Libia de ondas” (68). The ultimate meaning of these poetic emblems-within-emblems, according to Bonilla and Tanganelli, is that Góngora, “envuelto en el tráfico de la ambición” (69), is rescued by the duke (dolphin). The third panel, “Retrato de un cortesano en doce empresas,” examines the atrium to this Soledad as a sort of cautionary tale that rails against the courtiers who constitute the duke’s dominion: the false, envious and ignorant sycophants who inhabit the court and their vain political ambitions: “Góngora advierte de la rápida caída y postrera extinción que implican la vida cortesana y el culto al oro” (77). Particularly noteworthy in this chapter is the authors’ discussion of the multiple signifiers of the mythological sphinx—the lioness with the face of a woman—to condemn the pomp and circumstance, and the arrogance, of a fatuous nobility (81). Normally associated with silence, Góngora’s “esfinge bachillera” (Soledad v. 114) is portrayed as a chatterbox at a time when a loose tongue was associated with loose virtue in women. Thus Góngora injects the connotations of whoredom as well as monstrous hybridity into his pictorial representation of courtly life (83-84). The forth and...