Painting Words

Aesthetics and the Relationship between Image and Text

Beatriz Gonzalez Moreno, Fernando González-Moreno, Beatriz Dr Gonzalez Moreno, Fernando González-Moreno

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429515781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Painting Words: Aesthetics and the Relationship between Image and Text addresses the importance of dialogue between art and literature, text and image in our image-saturated era. In a globalized world, isolation and compartmentalization hinder us back, whereas the Romantic idea of belonging urges us to look beyond and to build bridges. Bearing this Romantic spirit in mind, rather than focusing on a traditional paragonal approach, this book puts forward the benefits of alliance by offering an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspective. Illustrations are included to guide the reader into comparativism and intermedial encounters, while providing an inspiring overview of the literary and visual department both in Europe and America from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. The different essays lead us through an aesthetic exploratory journey by the hand of Cervantes, Shakespeare, Felicia Hemans, Emily Eden, William Wordsworth, Edgar A. Poe, Flannery O'Connor, N. Scott Momaday, José Joaquín de Mora, Wallace Stevens and José Ángel Valente, among others.

Editors, Beatriz González Moreno and Fernando González Moreno have brought together an international group of scholars around the idea of "painting words, " which they define as the pictorial ability of language to stir the reader's imagination and the way illustrators have "read" literary works over the course of centuries. Many traditional comparative studies examine literature belonging to specific time periods or movements, far less frequently do they bridge visual culture with text-- Painting Words: Aesthetics and the Relationship between Image and Text aims to do just that.

Part I
Old Concepts in New Garments

Ut Pictura Poesis and Ekphrasis

1
Cervantes, Painter of Allegories of Folly, Love and Prudence

Fernando González-Moreno

Poets and painters competed amongst themselves to create the most complex and obscure emblems and allegories as part of Renaissance humanism, becoming an essential part of its culture not only in the sixteenth century but also in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although they were created by the intellectual and humanist elite, these elaborate pieces of hermetic knowledge were widely known by the whole society. Theatre was one of the most important ways by which common people could learn the meaning of these symbolical images. In the Spanish Siglo de Oro theatre, the presence of allegorical or emblematical characters with which the playwright could express his moral ideas was common. Miguel de Cervantes’s theatre is a good example. His Tragedy of Numancia (1582) displays several historical characters, including the allegory of Spain. Cervantes “paints” her as a maiden with a mural crown holding a tower. He also “depicts” the allegories of the river Ebro and its three main tributaries; the allegory of War as a woman armed with a shield and a lance; Sickness like a woman with a yellow mask, a bandage around her head and a crutch; Famine dressed as a woman with a mask and yellow clothes; and, finally, the allegory of Fame.¹

Cervantes knew and used the emblematical and allegorical culture – a common place for both writers and painters – in his works, and, of course, his universally known masterpiece Don Quixote (Madrid: Juan de la Cuesta, 1605 and 1615) was not alien to it. If we read Chapter XX in Part II, there, once again in a theatrical performance, we discover a poetical, elaborate and ingenious allegorical scene. In this chapter, during Camacho’s wedding, we witness the staging of the allegorical confrontation of Love, represented as Cupid, and his retinue (Poetry, Discretion, Good Lineage and Valour) against Wealth and his retinue (Liberality, Largesse, Treasure and Peaceful Possession) – a scene that I will discuss later.

However, it is not in the text but in Don Quixote’s illustrations where we find the most extensive connection between Cervantes’s book and the emblematical tradition. These illustrations show us Cervantes’s capacity to inspire allegorical images. When Don Quixote began to be illustrated in the 1640s and 1650s outside Spain (the first extensively illustrated edition was published by Savery in Dordrecht, 1657),² the illustrators preferred scenes with obvious amusing actions. Don Quixote was mainly read as a comical and entertaining book, so the illustrations should reflect such a reading. However, since the beginning of the eighteenth century, Don Quixote started to be read in different ways, not only as a popular and funny book but also almost as a moral one.³ Don Quixote became a renewed literature masterpiece from which important lessons on Truth, Knowledge, Madness, Love, Prudence and Satire could be learnt – ideas that soon began to be represented through emblems and allegories.

The Extravagant Knight of La Mancha

Folly was the first idea from Don Quixote that interested illustrators. The first attempt to represent it in a symbolical way appeared in 1719 in the edition published in London by Knaplock. Here, as a decorative tailpiece, there is a little woodcut that, at first sight, has nothing to do with Don Quixote’s history. It represents Phaeton, Phoebus’ son, falling from the cart of the sun as it was described by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. But why has the illustrator selected this Roman myth to accompany Cervantes’s text? What do Don Quixote and Phaeton have in common? We find the answer in Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum libellus (or Book of the Emblems, 1531). In this book, there are two emblems, LV and LVI, about Recklessness or Stultitia (Temeritas and In Temerarios). In the first one, a mad man is compared with a cart drawn by runaway horses. In this allegory, the cart alludes to the human body, the charioteer to the human reason and the horses to the senses; man becomes mad when the body is not controlled by reason but by perturbed senses.⁴ Alciato stated,

A driver pulled by a horse whose mouth does not respond to the bridle is rushed headlong and in vain drags the reins. You cannot readily trust one whom no reason governs, one who is heedlessly taken where his fancy goes.⁵

And in the second emblem, Alciato used Phaeton’s myth in a similar way [Figure 1.1]:

Even so, the majority of the kings are borne up to heaven on the wheels of Fortune, driven by youth’s ambition. After they have brought great disaster on the human race and themselves, they finally pay the penalty for all their crimes.⁶

Phaeton becomes a symbol of reckless or mad acts; he dies because of his reckless action because he tries to act without reason, just guided by a passion. The metaphor fits Don Quixote really well.

Figure 1.1 Phaeton, anonymous woodcut (London: R. Knaplock, D. Midwinter, J. Tonson et al., 1719)

Source: Image courtesy of the Cervantes Project

This first example of how emblems began to be used in Don Quixote’s illustrations marks the beginning of a symbolical and iconographical tradition that will endure during all of the eighteenth century – a tradition whose chief inaugurator was Charles-Antoine Coypel.⁷ Between 1717 and 1734, the French painter Charles-Antoine Coypel designed 27 tapestry cartons based on episodes from Don Quixote that served to produce several series of tapestries at the Gobelins manufacture in Paris. These designs were such an early success that starting in 1723, they were engraved and sold in Paris at Chez Surugue as a set of prints by themselves. Coypel’s compositions are in keeping with eighteenth-century French, court and baroque tastes; they resemble great theatrical performances where all the elements of eighteenth-century theatre have been included, chiefly emblems and allegories.

Coypel’s series of engravings, composed as emblems with a pictura (image) and a suscriptio (caption), begin with Don Quichotte conduit par la Folie et Embrasé de l’amour extravaguant de Dulcinée sort de chez luy pour estre Chevalier Errant [Don Quixote, led by Folly and embraced by the extravagant love of Dulcinea, leaves his house to be an Errant Knight], plate engraved by Surugue in 1724 (Figure 1.2).⁸ Here we find the first allegory of Folly clearly applied to Don Quixote. The knight initiates his first sally accompanied by the allegory of Folly, who points towards some of the adventures that await him: the flock of sheep and the windmill half-transformed into a giant. Folly is represented as a female figure with a sceptre, such as those used by jesters, and wearing a barber basin as a helmet (Mambrino’s helmet). This element, the basin, is a purely quijotesco [quixotic] symbol; it was the one won by Don Quixote during one of his adventures and now, taken from the novel, it becomes a symbol of madness itself. Moreover, this basin has been decorated with several feathers, which are not just a mere ornament as discussed next.

Figure 1.2 Don Quichotte conduit par la Folie et Embrasé de l’amour extravaguant de Dulcinée sort de chez luy pour estre Chevalier Errant. Charles-Antoine Coypel (des.) and Louis Surugue père (eng.) (Paris: Chez Surugue, c. 1724)

Source: Image courtesy of the Cervantes Project

If we search again in Alciato’s Emblematum libellus, we find another emblem, in this case number LXV, about Foolishness (Fatuitas). Alciato explained,

You are surprised that in my poem you are called Otus, when your ancient family name, handed down for generations, is Otho. The otus is eared and has feathers like the little owl. The skilful birdcatcher gets the bird into his power as it dances. For this reason we call stupid people, easy to catch, oti. You too can have this name, which suits you.⁹

In Latin, Otus refers to a long-eared owl (scientifically known as Asio otus) described by Pliny in his Natural History as an easy to catch bird because, when it fixes its attention on one person, it does not notice if another one circles around it.¹⁰ Due to that, the otus was considered a stupid animal, and Alciato took its name to designate the stupid man, depicting his emblem as a man with owl feathers. That is the reason why Coypel has incorporated some feathers into Don Quixote’s basin or, better said, Folly’s basin.

Finally, this allegory of Folly is completed with the appearance of another one with which the cause of Don Quixote’s madness is explained – namely, Cupid or Love. In Coypel’s opinion, Love is the cause of Don Quixote’s folly; as it is said in the description of the illustration: “An Extravagant Passion for Dulcinea.” Coypel has represented Love in a traditional way with the winged figure of Cupid, Venus’ son. However, here he is not holding his usual bow and arrows but a torch with which he is touching Don Quixote’s heart in order to inflame it with this incommensurable and mad love. This idea of Love as a torch or as a flame is well-known, and it appears in another of the most important books of allegories: Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593). When Ripa describes the allegory of Love Tamed, he refers to “Cupid sitting, and his flambeau being burnt out.”¹¹

So, accor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Old Concepts in New Garments: Ut Pictura Poesis and Ekphrasis
• PART II The Sister Arts in the English Long-Nineteenth Century
• PART III Intermedial Encounters in America
• PART IV Where the Future Lies: Transatlantic Interdisciplinarity
• Index