Cervantes and Italian Renaissance Art

2008

Hispanic Review, 2006

reviews j 93 la Mancha (xv). Shelton did not translate Part II of Don Quixote into English (xv), although this has been discovered only recently. In sum, the volume is an uneven collection of essays, but not much of a companion. daniel eisenberg Clifton Park, NY de armas, fredrick a., ed. Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2004. 310 pages. Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age offers an impressive rethinking of the mutually illuminating media of text and image in Golden Age Spain, of the integral relationship between the verbal and the visual. Painting was clearly central to Golden Age writers, just as writing was a key context for artists of the period. To make this point, Frederick de Armas introduces this group of essays by observing that as the blind Homer could visualize and represent vividly intricate objects, so too Raphael in his Parnassus can paint art that he has never seen because of his reliance on verbal description. Professor de Armas opens ''The Painter and the Writer are One and the Same,'' the first of four units in this collection, with his essay entitled ''(Mis)placing the Muse,'' offering a reading of Cervantes's Galatea from the perspective of the visual, pointing out that the entire work is framed by frescoes: Book I offers an ecphrastic presentation of Raphael's Galatea, and Book VI a description based on Raphael's Parnassus. Both artists, likewise, focus on the Muse of epic poetry, Calliope. De Armas's analysis illuminates the reason why Calliope is misplaced (present where Thalia would seem more relevant) as a means by which Cervantes boldly figures himself as the Spanish Virgil (38). Eric Graf's ''The Pomegranate of Don Quixote I, 9'' provides an original exploration of the political and religious significance of the pomegranate in the transition between chapters 8 and 9, the encounter between Don Quijote and the Basque. Explaining the significance of the granada/pomegranate, Graf argues that ''the geopolitical pomegranate at the beginning of chapter 9 is but one of a cluster of details that converge to indicate that Cervantes's principal concern while writing Don Quijote was the Morisco question'' (51). The next essay, ''The Quixotic Art: Cervantes, Vasari, and Michelangelo'' by Christopher Weimer, is a provocative piece that acknowledges Cervantes as a reader of Vasari. Reminding us that Don Quijote himself acknowledges the need for a knight to follow the painter's example'' (72), Weimer then presents Don

ARHIVELE OLTENIEI

MLN 122.2 (2007): 216-32.

Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2008

2008

Cervantine Excesses and Eccentricities, 2022

2018