Reading Las Meninas: An Ekphrastic Approach to Teaching Don Quijote

Reading and teaching Don Quijote present multiple challenges to twenty-first century students and instructors who are culturally and historically distanced from the seventeenth century. With Las Meninas serving as a visual lexicon for cuing correlative themes and events in Don Quijote, the instructor, through an ekphrastic, interdisciplinary approach, can help students gain intellectual access to Cervantes's text by showing how one art form elucidates another. Furthermore, focusing on the fractured perspectives characteristic of both the painting and the novel reveals how artist and author point to an extra-pictorial reality beyond immediate sense perception, one that calls into question the accuracy of visual perception itself.