Title: Cervantes and the pictorial imagination
First published: 2009
Description: "This book examines Cervantes's participation in the ongoing aesthetic debates and conflicts that preoccupied both writers and visual artists of the Renaissance. At the forefront were explorations into the impossible representation of beauty, the use of art propaganda, and the theological implications of the image. Reflections on these topics pervade Cervantes's work, and ultimately denote the multiple dimensions of imagery in the 500s."

"In a period when literal and metaphorical battles were fought over the power of images, divergent conceptions of aesthetics define the artistic and theological principles of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. This religious and aesthetic discord channeled the rich and complex relationship between Northern and Southern Europe. While Spain anxiously attempted to equal Italian cultural splendor, it was a country dominated by the ruling tastes of its northern dynasty, the Habsburgs. Both cultural frameworks, Italian and Flemish, constantly interacted and helped define the society Cervantes lived in, and therefore both are essential in understanding the author's aesthetic sensibility."

"This book inquires, from a comparative perspective, into Cervantes's reflections on three aesthetic and iconographic anxieties of the period: how Quijote's obsession with the impossible beauty of Dulcinea coincides with the aesthetic fixation that dominated the Cinquecento art circles; how the Flemish logic of El coloquio de los perros breaks the Neoplatonic episteme that had equated virtue with beauty; and how Don Quijote can be read as a counterpoint to the historical and artistic ambitions of the Habsburgs, a dynasty that understood, like no other, the need for control of the public gaze through a well-orchestrated form of visual patronage.

As a whole, this study demonstrates how, in order to examine a mind like Cervantes's, we need to approach his work and his world from a perspective as culturally integrative as his own." "This book includes twenty-eight illustrations."--Jacket.
Subjects: Aesthetics in literature, Criticism and interpretation, Cervantes saavedra, miguel de, 1547-1616
People: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616)
LC classification: PQ6351 .L28 2009