Baroque Spain and the Writing of Visual and Material Culture

STUDIES IN VISUAL CULTURE

SERIES EDITORS

Margaret Topping

Queen’s University, Belfast

Rachael Langford

Cardiff University

Giuliana Pieri

Royal Holloway, University of London

EDITORIAL BOARD

Mieke Bal

University of Amsterdam

Paul Cooke

University of Leeds

Anne Freadman

The University of Melbourne

Andrea Noble

University of Durham

María Pilar Rodríguez

Universidad de Deusto

Eric Thau

University of Hawai’i at Manoa

available in series

Aimee Israel-Pelletier,

Rimbaud’s Impressionist Poetics: Vision and Visuality (2012)

Nathalie Aubert (ed.),

Proust and the Visual (2013)

Susan Harrow (ed.),

The Art of the Text: Visuality in nineteenth-and twentieth-century

literary and other media (2013)

STUDIES IN VISUAL CULTURE

BAROQUE SPAIN

and the Writing of Visual and Material Culture

Alicia R. Zuese

© Alicia R. Zuese, 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN978-1-78316-783-8

e-ISBN 978-1-78316-785-2

The right of the Alicia R. Zuese to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Add cover image credit to imprint page:

Cover image: Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas (c.1656), Museo del Prado, Madrid (photograph Scala/Art Resource, New York)

For Victor and Mateo

Contents

Series editors’ preface

Acknowledgements

List of figures

Introduction. Viewing the Tale: Cervantes’s Portrait, Lope’s Hieroglyphics and Methods of Verbal-Visual Cognition

1Image, Text and Memory in Illuminated Manuscripts and Early Print

2Don Quijote and Don Juan: Collectors and the Collection as Models for Critical Inquiry into the Baroque

3Material Representations of the World: Using Physical Texts and Fictional Expression to Create Literary Edifices

4Emblems, Meditation and Memory: Mental Reverberations of the Novella

5Fragmentation of the Protagonist and Society: Emblems, Anamorphosis and Corporeality

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Series editors’ preface

Studies in Visual Culture provides a forum for ground-breaking enquiry into visual-cultural production in its social, historical and cultural contexts. The series places particular emphasis on the exchanges, transactions and displacements that link Europe to wider global contexts across the visual-cultural field. The series seeks to promote critical engagement with visual media as ideological and cultural as well as aesthetic constructs, and foregrounds the relationship of visual cultures to other fields and discourses, including cultural history, literary production and criticism, philosophy, gender and sexuality research, journalism and media studies, migration and mobility studies, social sciences, and politics. The Studies in Visual Culture series thus focuses on exploring synergies and key debates between disciplines, concepts and theoretical approaches, and offers an exciting new arena for testing and extending disciplinary, theoretical and conceptual boundaries.

Acknowledgements

Although this project diverged long ago from my doctoral dissertation that she directed, the generous time, encouragement and guidance of Patricia Grieve at different junctures was essential to its successful realization. I am also grateful for the friendship and advice of Evelina Guzauskyte and Jessica Boon for navigating academia and the publishing process.

At Southern Methodist University, I wish to thank my colleagues in the World Languages and Literatures Department for their support and advice: Libby Russ, Denise DuPont, Olga Colbert, Rubén Sánchez-Godoy, Francisco Morán, Alberto Pastor, Gabriela Vokic, Luis Maldonado, Marlies Gaettens, and my other colleagues for their encouragement. Thanks to members of SMU’s Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute GEMS for companionship and support: Lisa Pons, Kathleen Wellman, Ed Countryman, Gretchen Smith, Rubén Sánchez-Godoy, Sara Kozlowski and Bethany Williamson. Other colleagues at SMU provided help and encouragement, including Pamela Patton and Eric White. So much of this book depends on materials that SMU’s Interlibrary Loan office was able to supply me with, so special thanks to the staff there, especially Billie Stovall. For making the office enjoyable and for moral and technical support, I would like to thank Rosemary Sánchez and Debbie Garland, and student workers Mayra Pratz and Maury Moreno. I am grateful for funding to carry out research, which came from SMU’s University Research Council and The Ministry of Spain’s Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain and US universities. I am also grateful to Dean Thomas DiPiero and Dedman College of SMU for further financial assistance.

Special thanks to the anonymous reviewers of the essays, where some of the ideas began to percolate, and of the proposal and book manuscript. Preliminary portions of chapters three and five appeared in the journals Revista de Estudios Hispánicos and Hispania. Thanks as well to Patricia Manning, Yolanda Gamboa, Anne Cruz and Lisa Vollendorf, who gave generously of their time, advice and encouragement at crucial moments.

Special thanks to the encouragement and support of my family: Nancy, Frank, Mike, Jésu, Jesús, Joaquín, María Eugenia, Ito and Victoria. My biggest appreciation goes to Víctor and Mateo for giving me so much to strive for, lots of fun and even more love along the way.

List of Figures

Introduction: Viewing the Tale: Cervantes’s Portrait, Lope’s Hieroglyphics and Methods of Verbal-Visual Cognition

Baroque literary expression is renowned for its painterly attributes, but these visual texts are never static creations.¹ Instead they encapsulate a spirit of contrast, artificiality, ambiguity, sensory immersion and interaction with the audience. One of the best ways to grasp how baroque Spanish writers create pictorial texts, how audiences visualize their words, what consequences these verbal images exert on cognition and what actions this process inspires is through an in-depth study of Cervantes’s verbal portrait in the prologue to his Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Stories) of 1613. Cervantes’s portrait helps to pinpoint the theoretical concerns driving this book: the baroque’s representation of material and visual culture communicated in text and image; tangible and imagined objects; elite and inclusive expression; body and mind; and memory. This scene establishes the pictorial underpinnings to the novella genre and its connection to the prime baroque verbal-visual genre, the emblem. While the episode illustrates how pictorial discourse works in practice, my Introduction also establishes how early modern theories of memory and images, and methodologies of collecting and cognitive cultural studies, provide tools to understand the implications of viewing the tale on audience members’ minds. This book, like Cervantes’s portrait that inspires it, reveals that textual representations of visual and material culture may initially appear to celebrate monolithic baroque culture, but these images multiply into innumerable renderings when they enter the intellect and memories of the audience; they, in turn, relay such images idiosyncratically to an expanding pool of interlocutors.

Countless works of visual art claim to depict Miguel de Cervantes, but the only verifiable likeness contemporary to the writer is the written self-portrait.² All renderings interpret in some way this verbal one, including the portrait attributed to Juan de Jáuregui (Figure 0.1).³ Cervantes presents his portrait:

This friend could easily, in keeping with established practice, have engraved and printed my likeness on the first page of this book, since the famous Don Juan de Jáuregui had given him my portrait. That way my ambition would have been satisfied, together with the curiosity of those people who want to acquaint themselves with the face and figure of the man who dares to display such inventiveness in the marketplace [plaza de nuestra República], and expose it to public scrutiny. Beneath the portrait he could have written: ‘The man you see before you, with aquiline features, chestnut-coloured hair, smooth, unwrinkled brow, bright eyes, and curved though well-proportioned nose; … Is commonly known as Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra …’In short, since that opportunity was lost and I have been left blank and faceless [sin figura], I shall have to rely on my gift of the gab. Although I may speak with a stammer, the truths I have to say will be clear enough, for even when they are conveyed by means of signs, they are usually understood (tr. Lipson 3–4).⁴

This written image opens Cervantes’s novella collection, a popular baroque iteration of the frame-tale genre that he reintroduced to Spain, which inspired over thirty-six other printed collections.⁵ The genre addresses contemporary concerns such as the effects of engaño (deceit) on love, family and community in urban society, creating a fictional space for the seventeenth-century Spanish public to negotiate questions of identity.⁶ The collection assembles multiple novellas and, when there is a fictional frame, its characters generate the stories, modelling how to narrate and explicate them. Audiences could read or listen to the tales; they could also build social bonds and further transmit the novellas by retelling them like frame characters that function as written sketches of interpretive communities. Similarly, Cervantes’s vivid verbal portrayal embellishes the frame of his collection by referencing portraiture. Like the novellas’ rebroadcasting, the portrait reaches beyond the fictional world in inaugurating the ever-multiplying illustrations of the writer that continue being created to this day, autonomous from the initial context, but linked to Cervantes’s words.⁷

Figure 0.1: Juan de Jauregui. Miguel de Cervantes, 1600. Madrid, Language Academy. Album/Art Resource, NY.

Consumer demand for novella collections precluded the printing of costly illustrations, but Cervantes does not refer to these market conditions to account for the missing engraving.⁸ Instead, he faults his friend for failing to make it from the Jáuregui portrait. Recalling the interlocutor in the prologue to Don Quijote, with whose assistance Cervantes establishes literary competition and friendship as two of the novel’s central themes, the Novelas ejemplares’ friend absent from the prologue helps the writer situate material culture (the portrait and its creation) and visualization (its verbal rendering taken into audience members’ minds) at the foundation of the collection’s poetics. Cervantes paradoxically blames his friend’s missing engraving for his need to write the prologue, which, in turn, constitutes the verbal image of the writer: word and image intertwine and become interdependent in this guided visualization.

Cervantes’s portrait elicits the questions that focus my inquiry into fictional representations of baroque material and visual culture. How do writers create images in fiction? How do audiences interact with and internalize them? What is their relation to the visual culture existing outside the text? How can we grasp these mental activities using tools that the baroque inherited (such as memory technique and spiritual visualization) and recent scholarship has developed (such as cognitive cultural studies)?⁹ To seek answers to these questions, I identify how writers embed episodes into their novellas that signal the penetration of visual and material culture into their characters’ everyday experience.¹⁰ Material objects like garments and tapestries that surround the noble characters provide access to accoutrements of prestige. Characters often play out dramatic scenes that resonate with portraits, still lifes, and emblems. Cervantes’s portrait in the prologue underscores how all of these items come alive in the transit between word and mental image; it is a taste of what is to come in the stories, which multiply such scenes throughout plot-based narratives. When other scholars investigate visual culture in baroque texts, they tend to identify specific images that underlie the descriptions.¹¹ In contrast, I acknowledge the intersections of visual and material culture by highlighting writers’ textual commemoration of the multi-layered procedures of creating material forms: here, works of art and illustrations help illuminate the writers’ techniques without downplaying verbal communication.

Baroque writers’ depictions of visual and material culture reveal them grappling with questions of representation across the arts (textual, visual, performative). For instance, Cervantes pictures the object but denies its existence beyond the page: ‘that opportunity was lost and I have been left blank and faceless.’ This statement is ironic because Cervantes has indeed created an image that his audience envisions mentally and some create materially, even if no printed engraving accompanies the text. Furthermore, he distinguishes his written portrait from an ekphrasis by identifying it as the engraving’s caption, a text that collaborates with the material image to produce meaning.¹² Cervantes’s production of the verbal vignette nevertheless prepares us to view the tales enclosed in the collection and engages us in a multi-sensory cognitive process. Indeed, his inscription of the portrait and our acknowledgement of its text-bound existence – even when it solidifies as a visualized object in our minds – facilitate an understanding of how fiction transmits visual and material culture and makes mental impressions.

It is enlightening to consider why Cervantes chooses a portrait, usually surrounded by a frame, to envelop his novella collection. The portrait highlights the relation between the frame and what it encloses; thus, it helps us reflect on the dynamic structure of collections (including novellas, paintings or objects). Portraits depict the subject and, often, emblematic objects around the figure, creating a web of relations that contribute to its meaning.¹³ Novellas follow a linear sequence of action, but framing configurations (the story within the story) complicate straightforward accounts. The association comes full circle when writers adapt principles from rhetorical and religious models, such as mnemotechnics (art of memory) and compositio loci (composition of place) from Jesuit spiritual exercises.¹⁴ They involve audience members in arranging discrete visual episodes into conceptual spaces in the mind that resemble visual compositions and correspond to each novella. They produce a dynamic composite that allows each person to review it, meditate on it and potentially enact it through retelling. In following this process, the effect on the audience’s cognition of assimilating this imagery approximates that of envisioning a picture – viewing the tale – to which Cervantes alerts us through the position of the verbal portrait as his collection’s frame.

The art of memory was familiar to writers who studied rhetorical treatises, including the classical Rhetorica ad Herennium and Peter of Ravenna’s Phoenix (1491). Specifically, practitioners of mnemotechnics evoke a familiar space – such as a cathedral or palace – to serve as a container. Then, they strategically place striking objects meant to arouse their recollection of a portion of a speech or text when they reconsider them later. Jesuit spiritual exercises afforded another opportunity to enhance Spaniards’ knowledge of memory and visualization in a context more germane to post-Counter-Reformation society. That practice entails a religious guide overseeing exercitants’ meditations on sensorial visions of Christ’s Passion or Hell, which prepare them for virtuous action.¹⁵

Scholars have noted the connections between memory technique and spiritual visualization: Michael Gerli proposes that Teresa of Ávila’s Inner Castle echoes with the role of memory receptacle (‘El Castillo’); María Mercedes Carrión extends that idea to suggest that Teresa challenges socio-political power structures by modelling how to access restricted locations like a castle through visualization (151–2). Mental spaces could serve as sites of resistance to dominant views: like Teresa’s use of the castle, the novella writers relate the intimate environs of the nobility and other social groups (a criminal mafia’s headquarters, for instance), outside seventeenth-century audiences’ purview. The writers position these settings, described in striking detail in the frame tale or individual novella, as possible repositories for memory.

In sum, the analysis I carry out in this book depends on the proposition that pictorial episodes in novellas suggest interior visual trajectories for audiences that flow from text to mental image to memory composition and, finally, to action. Individual novellas present a variety of objects, verbal-visual sequences and emblematic moments that alert the audience to their capacity to function as memory devices. Because the plots were often complicated, these memory cues could help audiences break novellas into manageable parts, which Jessica Boon explains also occurred in sermons (115).¹⁶ The novella collection – a genre that thematizes the recollection of stories, their redistribution and the mental processes that characters undergo in the course of the action – allows unparalleled access to how writers conveyed cognition in action in baroque fiction. In the context of the Counter-Reformation’s defence of Catholic ethics, the characters’ solutions to civic problems suggest that novellas appeal to memory and collective identity in order to arm the audience with cognitive mechanisms to confront situations challenging baroque society, such as marriage and frauds of identity.

Cervantes’s inscription of a visual object alerts us to activities familiar to baroque audiences such as how to read art and visualize text, reminding us that baroque literacy hinged on visual and aural comprehension as well as on deciphering text.¹⁷ Related to the notion of access, representations of material culture in fiction also facilitate contact with objects like portraits that only select audiences could possess in the seventeenth century. Additionally, the oral dimension of the novella genre means that illiteracy is not a barrier to gaining entry to these texts and the material culture they portray. The reference to the absent engraving contributes to Cervantes’s posing of alternative literacies involving texts and tools of communication, wherein fiction frees the imagination from the constraints of other art forms.¹⁸ For instance, Cervantes’s portrait exceeds the representative capabilities of engravings from his day by incorporating colour (‘chestnut-coloured hair’, ‘silver beard’) and biographical details that are not visually perceptible (literary and military career, actions in the Battle of Lepanto that had incapacitated his hand) (16–17; Boyd 62–3). Thus he throws the mental image into deeper relief than a printed one. Since baroque audiences were versed in iconography and the way that the visual arts communicate meaning, Cervantes’s explicit reference to the absent portrait asserts that words communicate – and potentially surpass – messages traditionally embedded in illustrations.

Although I have emphasized mental activities of memory and visualization, the body in fact plays a crucial role in these processes. Indeed, Cervantes’s verbal portrait – a depiction of his body – as the collection’s inaugural image also confirms this by expressing the convergence of visual, textual, imagined and corporeal experiences. The portrait’s conveyance of Cervantes’s physical attributes and biography suggests that the collected novellas similarly represent Spanish society with an emphasis on the visual. Further, Cervantes’s frank declaration of his imperfect attributes (like his six crooked teeth) contrasts with the image of a refined portrait-sitter and, by extension, the novellas’ genteel characters. In other words, Cervantes challenges the stock mental images his audience would associate with the portrait and novella, opening them to new views and broadened perspectives.

In addition to describing in detail his body parts through a realistic blazon, Cervantes accentuates his mouth, not the pen as he does at the conclusion of Don Quijote, as the tool that communicates with the audience; the ‘beak’ highlights the oral dimension of the novella collection (17). Cervantes’s bodily idiosyncrasies such as the speech impediment and disabled arm still allow for unencumbered communication. Thus, it is no coincidence that at the end of the description, Cervantes refers to sight, memory and insignia alongside a review of his battle wounds: ‘He lost his left hand in the naval battle of Lepanto to a blunderbuss shot, and although the injury is ugly he considers it beautiful because he incurred it at the most noble and memorable event that past centuries have seen or future generations can ever hope to witness, fighting beneath the victorious banners of the son of that thunderbolt of war, Charles V of happy memory.’ (3)¹⁹ Memory treatises underscore that surprising details help retain information, and Cervantes’s portrait incorporates various examples.²⁰ Similarly, Covarrubias’s definition of the portrait substantiates its purpose to commemorate the subject.²¹ Thus, the verbal image points to another aspect of the material: it invites contemplation of the writer’s physical body by emphasizing the maladies Cervantes suffered from his military career, confirming the connections between the mental and somatic dimensions of visualization.²²

The writer is not a disembodied mind, signalling to audience members that they need not disavow their corporeality in their imaginative interaction with the textual world. In this vein, this book introduces developments in early modern embodied cognition and memory into baroque literary studies.²³ In a parallel manner to what occurs in Catholic spiritual practice, the perceptive acts modelled in the novellas’ communal storytelling offer the audience membership in the mental spaces that this virtual interpretive community occupies, known as ‘intermental thought’ and ‘social intelligence’ in cognitive cultural studies.²⁴ Envisioning Christ’s Passion occupies the minds of the mystics and practitioners of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, but novella writers provoke audiences to imagine material and visual culture alongside scenes of social disorder, which broadens the scope of visualization beyond what occurred in spiritual meditation.²⁵ The audience accesses characters’ ruminations on social problems; the frame-tale narrators’ assessments of the behaviour, decisions and morals of the characters; and, as we have seen, a set of embedded markers to help visualize and promulgate the text. Because the mystics’ conceptual techniques resisted mandates that religious experience should be mediated in Counter-Reformation Spain, other intellectuals may have perceived them as modelling mental action that could offer escape or refuge from absolute control.

Cervantes’s portrait emphasizes collaboration in the creation of material art by showcasing the links that bind the object (pictorial or verbal product) to the creators (writer, artist, artisan) and the audience that takes it to mind and also, potentially, disseminates it. Related to the cooperative production of material objects like books and engravings, Cervantes’s fiction draws on visual and material culture to engage the audience in appreciating how texts may preserve creative procedures that the autonomous material object typically erases. Although his verbal portrait replaces the engraving, Cervantes calls attention to the way that multiple visions typically intersect in creating it, mentioning the artist (Jáuregui) and engraver (his unnamed friend). In addition to them, in the production of illustrated texts we must factor the printer, the writer of the text and the autor who commissioned the illustrations and dictated the iconography (Matilla 4).²⁶

Clearly, the baroque context informs many of the attributes that I have observed in the prologue’s portrait, but it takes the pictorial passage to bring them all together. However, another contribution of this book is the grounding of Spanish novella writers’ visual language in the genre’s features inherited from medieval exempla collections. Because some of these texts were illustrated, we can study explicitly the relation between the text and verbal and real images in manuscripts and early printed editions of exempla (chapter 1). Whereas these earlier collections often had patrons to impose a stronger vision on the iconographical design of the texts and succinct morals often prevailed, the baroque novella writers controlled the verbal iconography and wrote intricate plots.

Confronting a rich tradition of illustrated frame-tale collections, then, Cervantes revives the genre by effecting a baroque twist on its pictorial feature, erasing its material presence but conserving signs of it in language. His portrait also evokes the novella’s privileged status as a reflection of noble life only to undercut it through his unconventional figure, revealing that the seemingly elitist orientation of the baroque novella belies the variety of voices and experiences it actually contains. In the following chapters, I identify and account for similar communicative practices conserved in the novella collection that are recoverable through traces left in fiction. Indeed, the baroque novella is a virtually untapped resource for exposing fascinating expressions of visual and material culture, because it depicts the nobility’s private and public life embedded in baroque spectacle.²⁷ Exquisitely adorned nobles exchange stories, songs, dances and love letters in refined quarters and on city streets. Storytellers circulate titillating private tales of amorous intrigue that become public property in the ripples of retellings that the collective format models. The Spanish novella collection hinges on spatial and material concerns: accumulated novellas occupy an encompassing text, and layered stories (told and retold) and verbal formats (oral, written, envisioned) concretize discourse through its multiplication and dissemination. Novella writers assemble narrators and stories into groups and trace out the circulation routes of tales and physical texts within and among fictional worlds (Rinconete y Cortadillo moves as a manuscript between Cervantes’s texts but writers also rework stories from across the frame-tale tradition). In sum, the novella genre enfolds materiality (print, manuscript, verbal objects) and intangible practices (oral transmission, visualization) in spatio-temporally invasive texts.

Consequently, my work entails uncovering and analysing remnants in baroque fiction of ephemeral acts of expression – oral tales, missing engravings, pictorial captions and inscriptions on elusive spaces like the mind, flesh and the city. I investigate literary expressions in the novella that mix modes of communication such as manuscripts, linguistic registers and inscription, cross boundaries like the verbal-visual, and apply baroque visual strategies like anamorphosis, a pictorial distortion that requires the viewer to move in order to comprehend the image. From there I consider their effects on the cognitive experiences and actions of fictional characters and audiences. The perceptual and sensory practices of reading, viewing, listening, inscribing and collecting (mentally and physically), reflected potently in the novella genre, illuminate how diverse members of society intersect with each other through cognitive acts that surpass the solitary endeavour of tracing one’s eyes over a page. The writers who engage in these procedures do so to provoke the creative impulse in their audience, and to multiply their literary fruits beyond the limits of the printed text, whether in the audience’s imagination or in oral or written retellings. The writers