Quixotic Frescoes: Cervantes and Italian Renaissance Art (review)

The very title of this most provocative and learned book announces the intention to engage the reader in an interdisciplinary inquiry into the work of Cervantes, whose 400^th anniversary of its publication was celebrated in 2005. Some sections have already appeared in print but, as de Armas declares in the preface, they have been revised and expanded and revisit some of the themes that he studied in his successful Cervantes, Raphael and the Classics.

De Armas's interdisciplinary approach is based on a methodology that derives from comparative literature. Thus, he privileges an analogical approach to interpret the artistic creations of the second half of the sixteenth century and the beginnings of the seventeenth. In its twelve chapters this book proposes new relationships between narrative segments of Cervantes' works and paintings and frescoes in Italy's palaces, villas, churches, and the Vatican halls. In a society where museums did not yet exist and where private collections were not readily accessible to the average viewer, any conclusions about possible visits remain on the level of conjecture. Thus, chapter 3 considers the possibility of turning "specifically to Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura" (34) in order to explain the structure of the prologue of the 1605 Quijote. In chapter 4 de Armas discusses once more the influence of Raphael frescoes for the Stanza de la Segnatura. This time he focuses upon The School of Athens and the quaternary structure of Quixote's first part. De Armas sees a tetradic organization in Cervantes's narrative that implies a creative connection with Raphael's frescoes. Chapter 5 multiplies the references to Renaissance paintings and textual segments in a rhizome-like structure, so that Cacus, Hercules, David, Goliath, the Hapsburgs, and the episode of Juan Haldudo and André s, as well as the prologue, are linked through abundant quotations of classical and Renaissance sources, textual as well as pictorial. Possible direct knowledge of paintings by Luca Cambiaso and Cervantes' visit to Genoa, possible knowledge of Vasari's Lives, Giulio Romano's Stoning of St. Stephan and the "stoning" of Don Quixote, and other paintings by Luca Cambiaso are central in the commentary that occupies chapter 6.

The episode of the windmills, probably the one that attracted the most interest to the illustrators of Cervantes' book, is also the subject of a very complex discussion on many topics, among them Charles V, Julius Caesar's Commentarii, Dürer, and Charlemagne. De Armas discusses Cervantes' "pseudoekphrastic" literary technique and the technology of windmills; Ferdinand I, Pope Paul III, Francis I; frescoes and paintings of Titian, Raphael, and Giulio Romano; Virgil, rhetorical devices like the mythological description of dawn, the figure of the giant Briareus, Philostratus's Imagines, and the symbolic meaning of the spear.

Chapter 9 relates epic devices such as theophany and teichoskopia to what Professor de Armas considers the pictorial nature of Cervantes' fiction. The episode of Marcela and Grisóstomo, from an epic perspective, can be then related to paintings by Pontorno and Parmigianino. Other unexpected parallels encompass the relation between Grisóstomo and Aeneas; Marcela and Helen; Dido; and, from a teichoscopic posture and the fusion of a number of other perspectives, to the Madonna, as visualized by Pontormo's The Entombment.

In chapter 10 our author reconsiders the possibility of textual anamorphosis by exploring Dulcinea's composite nature by means of an anecdote transmitted by Pliny on the characteristics of a painting of Helen by Zeuxis. Dulcinea shares physical and psychological elements derived from Oriana, Angelica, Helen (through Giulio Romano), Lucretia (through Titian), and Aldonza Lorenzo. Chapter 11 deals with the interpolated florentine "novela del Curioso impertinente" and with G. Romano's frescoes in the Palazzo del té in Mantua, as well as Apuleius's also interpolated story of Cupid and Psyche in his Metamorphoseon.

It is difficult to comment on such a complex and idiosyncratic text in the short space assigned to this...