This collection is about objects that are described or alluded to in books, objects like clothing, paintings, tapestries, playing cards, enchanted heads, materials of war, monuments, and books themselves. The notion of objects within books, and of books within objects, had a lasting currency. According to ancient texts, Alexander hid the Homeric Iliad under his pillow, wanting to emulate the feats of Achilles and Ulysses. Legend has it that when he found a luxurious chest among the booty taken from King Darius, he ordered the Iliad to be placed within it. This second tale became so popular in the Renaissance that a grisaille painting, Alexander the Great Places Homer’s Iliad in Safe Keeping, appears in Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura at the Vatican (Jones and Penny 1983, 74). The painting, which allows us to “view” the moment in which the book was placed in a magnificent coffer, was, in turn, the subject of an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi, the famous popularizer of Raphael during the Renaissance (Shoemaker and Brown 1981, 10). These two objects, book and coffer, continued to live through painted and engraved images as well as in written texts such as Cervantes’ Don Quixote (de Armas 2007, 27). Like the Iliad, the objects discussed in Objects of Culture pass through many hands, being valorized, hidden, collected, and exhibited for a variety of reasons. The journeys of these textual objects can tell us much as to what was valued and what was shunned, what held power and what subverted it in imperial Spain.
The production of goods in all forms permeated the cultural life of early modern Europe (Jardine 1996). Collecting and displaying finely crafted objects was a mark of character and taste, and a sign of “magnificence.” Indeed, the ceremonial show of material treasures ranked with extravagant hospitality as a “hallmark of noble virtue” and as a token of “princely power and status” (Swann 2001, 16). The monarchs of imperial Spain shared that disposition, and became dedicated collectors. The itinerant court of Charles V (r. 1516–56) carried in its train sets of tapestries for public display during his travels, while his Titians performed a similar service in his palaces, an ostentatious self-marketing learned from his grandfather Maximilian (Silver 2008). Philip II (r. 1556–98) amassed a collection of relics that revealed the pious side of his character (Lazure 2007), all the while keeping a private collection of erotica hidden behind curtains at the Pardo, consisting notably of several Titians, including a Venus and a Danaë. Philip III (r. 1598–1621) likewise was an energetic collector of paintings of the premier artists of his day and of other luxurious objects that comprised one of the largest collections of its kind (Schroth, Baer, et al. 2008). His valido the Duke of Lerma (1603–36), chief architect and procurer of works of art, amassed a huge personal collection of tapestries, jewellery, reliquaries, and foreign and domestic glass and ceramics. Thirteen recently discovered household inventories list his enormous private collection, numbering between 1500 and 2747 paintings, which hung in his various residences (Schroth, Baer, et al. 2008, 88). Lerma stood as a mirror of royal tastes and aspirations in acquiring and gifting cultural objects. It is a tribute to his ambitions that he commissioned a palace larger and more magnificent than the Escorial, and more suitable to display his unrivalled collections of art and artefacts. But Philip III was not to be challenged on that score, and the duke fell from royal favour. Only kings and emperors could play the game of cultural superiority against each other.
Philip IV (r. 1621–65) is well known for favouring the paintings of Rubens, Poussin, and especially his court painter, Diego Velázquez. Indeed, it is said that the visit of Charles, Prince of Wales, to Madrid in a quixotic knight errant effort to woo the infanta María “was the culminating experience in his education as a collector,” as a junta was organized to guide Charles and his entourage “through local collections” (Brown 1995, 33, 35). Instead of a promise of marriage, the prince left for England with a treasure trove of art works, the most important being gifts from the king: Titian’s Pardo Venus and Charles V with a Hound as well as Veronese’s Mars and Venus (Brown 1995, 37). But Philip did not surrender his favourite paintings, and he soon acquired many more, especially by Velázquez, whose Surrender of Breda (1634–5) held a privileged place in the Hall of Realms of the Buen Retiro, the pleasure palace built by Philip IV in the 1630s on the outskirts of Madrid.
Like the palaces and collections of the Duke of Lerma, the Buen Retiro served as a prism through which to view the royal court and, more generally, the cultural and political doings of imperial Spain. In their classic study, A Palace for a King (2003), Jonathan Brown and J.H. Elliott sought to recapture the material and cultural life of the Buen Retiro. Through a comprehensive study of the great central hall, the Hall of Realms, and its paintings, which are the only objects to survive from the complex of palace buildings and grounds, Brown and Elliott recovered a rich court life saturated with objects, mostly paintings, prints, tapestries, sculpture, furniture, and the related trappings of a powerful monarch. With the Buen Retiro serving as the architectural frame for the objects commissioned, collected, and displayed within it, the royal court can now be understood as a complex melding of place, events, and objects with which it was identified. No less grand than Fontainebleau, Versailles, or the Pitti, the Buen Retiro and other stately houses and palaces of the Habsburg kings of Spain – the Escorial, the Alcazar of Madrid, the Pardo – were well appointed to guard the cultural objects acquired by the royals, with court theatre and political intrigue vying for attention with patronage and collecting. The monarchs of imperial Spain, from Charles V through Philip IV, surrounded themselves and their courts with cultural objects in a manner unimaginable by their predecessors, and their collections, both for public display and for private contemplation, rivalled or surpassed those of other European monarchs of the time.
The writers of imperial Spain, we argue, were just as deeply implicated by the production and circulation of material goods as were the royals and aristocrats who consumed them and shared the same impulse to collect, arrange, and display those objects, though in imagined settings. Indeed, this impulse extended to the colonial world and back.1 The transmutation of objects of culture into the realm of the imagined may be seen as a metaphorical instance of what Stephen Greenblatt calls the human touch, the moment when objects are moved, mutilated, or broken, when they are taken away from their original placement and relocated to a new site (1991, 44).2 In collections of art objects, for example, each item is labelled and explained through brief textual summaries to aid the viewer in understanding the object’s significance and function. Writers performed a similar manoeuvre as they wrote objects into their texts, which were stocked with paintings, tapestries, books, clothing, armour, and other artefacts of the time as well as Roman antiquities, which had become coveted objects recently unearthed in Italy (Barkan 1999). The essays in this volume explore some of the ways in which those objects “performed” as literary artefacts, for they are more than bibelots strewn about for decorative or rhetorical purposes. The essays engage what might be called an archaeology of real and imagined objects in order to understand the various ways in which writers of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain appropriated those objects for their own aesthetic, social, religious, and political purposes.
Our second avenue of inquiry is the role of the material objects themselves as carriers of culture and as agents of disruption. In this sense, we are interested in what Greenblatt calls resonance: “The power of the displayed object to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged and for which it may be taken by the viewer to stand” (1991, 42). How did objects of diverse provenance (books, pyramids, paintings) acquire new meaning within new contexts, both in Spain and in its overseas possessions? How were some objects (books of hours, musical notations) used to perpetuate certain habits of thought and belief, whereas others (food, clothing, and instruments of war) challenged accepted conventional social and moral norms? And how did these objects serve to enhance and authorize the author, and / or create wonder in the reader through the excesses of writing and collecting? In sum, we examine both the function of cultural objects and their circulation and re-purposing within the various realms of imperial Spain.
Anthony Grafton has observed: “A network of museums … grew up across Europe in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From Oxford to Vienna, from Naples to Nuremberg, kings and merchants, doctors and professors set spaces aside for collections of the wonderful works of nature and art” (1998, 14). We envision this volume as a Wunderkammer or a camerino much in the spirit of those who created their private cabinets of illustrative exotic curiosities, for we imagine the writers of imperial Spain as metaphorically collecting and displaying all manner of objects for the delectation of readers and viewers. Although Greenblatt notes that the wonder cabinets were “at least as much about possession as display” (1991, 50), he reminds us that an important aspect of viewing the objects was to create “reports” in order to explain what had been seen, and the significance of the objects on exhibition. Writers of early modern Spain likewise “report” real or imagined objects and collections in written texts, which we have here placed on exhibition in separate essays that can be viewed as rooms in an early modern museum. And like the actual objects in a cabinet of curiosities, these imagined curiosities are not mute items on display; they are evoked as active, discursive participants in narrative performances.
It is well-known that not all early modern museums survived. Some were absorbed while others were scattered. The Accademia dei Lincei in Rome obtained Gianbattista della Porta’s substantial collections by promising him “that donating his museum to the academy would ensure his fame.” Indeed, his bust as well as those of the Roman nobles Federico Cesi and Galileo Galilei “looked down on the giants of antiquity” (Findlen 2000, 171). And yet, this was not to be. This collection, as well as that of Cardinal Pietro Bembo, was scattered through the antiquities markets. The transitory nature of collecting inspired Federico Borromeo, founder of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan (1609), “to continue the project of writing the museum” in order to preserve it. “Borromeo wrote that the ancients had commemorated their cultural monuments in writing in order ‘to let them live a double life’” (Findlen 2000, 176).
This was the double life followed in Spain not only by royal collections, but also by the famous museum of the curioso Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa (1607–82), whose treasures are evoked in Baltasar Gracián’s allegorical novel El Criticón. In his palace, works of art by Rubens, Titian, and Tintoretto vied with some seven thousand tomes on alchemy, astronomy, botany, mathematics, and many other topics. Indeed, art vied with the natural sciences as coins and ancient weapons could be seen together with exotic plants, magnificent sculptures, and delightful gardens. Lastanosa was conscious of the need to reproduce some of his objects, not only in writing but through illustrations. Of that twin enterprise, John Slater concludes: “What is particularly helpful about Lastanosa’s book … is the way in which he sifts apart and then juxtaposes the conflicting tendencies in Baroque historiography into, on the one hand, a graphic naked series of engravings, and on the other, their corresponding texts” (2008, 41).
In our collection, objects lead a double life: material and textual. In this sense, this museum of words contributes to the increasing scholarly interest in the material culture of imperial Spain, displayed to us in the essays collected by Enrique García Santo-Tomás (2009) and in monographs by Encarnación Juárez Almendros (2006) and Laura Bass (2008). García Santo-Tomás’s volume includes a multiplicity of objects – carriages, bodegón painting, textiles, tobacco, and more – in an attempt to understand the formation of identity and the culture of consumption (2009, 20–2). Juárez Almendros focuses on garments in autobiographical writings and Bass on portraits that circulate in dozens of dramas and which serve, among other things, “as tokens of love, objects of jealous passion, and icons of royalty’ (2008, 1). In our collection, objects of art, power, and the quotidian predominate, be they paintings, tapestries, edifices, monuments, food, talking portraits, or books as amulets. Our emphasis is on writing as a way of preserving and transforming these cultural objects as they “resonate” in their performative roles.
The essays in Part One, “Objects of Luxury and Power,” examine how familiar material objects function both in structuring narratives and in animating their arguments. In “Gifts for the Vicereine of Naples: The Weavings of Garcilaso’s Third Eclogue,” Mary Barnard follows recent scholarship that restores the role of tapestries as the most iconic of objects, along with paintings, commissioned and displayed by aristocrats in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She analyses Garcilaso’s four discursive tapestries woven by nymphs as lyric versions of actual tapestries, which circulated as artistic commodities within an aristocratic culture of consumption. Placing those tapestries within a vibrant gift-giving tradition, Barnard shows how the poet constructs an elaborate, self-referential stage for imagined material objects that are collected, gifted, and displayed to great effect: they serve at once as celebratory presents for María Osorio Pimentel, as items of social networking, and as the locus for inscribing the poet’s identity as friend, flattering courtier, and skilled verbal craftsman. The complementarity between writing and weaving reveals the poem itself as a fabric in its various functions as text, textile, and networking, all connected to the enterprise of fabric-making in cloth. Like the emperor Charles V, who carried an extravagant collection of tapestries to enhance his authority and prestige, Garcilaso crafted his lyric tapestries to celebrate both the vicereine and himself.
Marsha S. Collins reminds us of the importance of spatial context – here a palace and a cave – for the display and performance of material objects. In “Artful Edifices and the Construction of Identity in Montemayor’s Diana and Lope’s Arcadia,” she explores how Montemayor crafted an intricate and sumptuous imaginary palace to frame his pastoral, in effect transferring the classic rural background into a building filled with chambers and all manner of manufactured artefacts. In essence, architectural space displaces nature’s realm as the setting for pastoral narration. Just as portraits in the comedia could move from static accessory to active narrative participants, so could pastoral with its attendant myth and metamorphosis unfold within constructed architectural space in lieu of nature’s space. Lope’s cave, on the other hand, retains a nature-like space for his narrative, but it too is filled with cultural objects – a pyramid, a magnificent marble tomb, a steel box for preserving books and a culture of learning – that elicit powerful visual imagery in the Arcadia. Here again the material not only intrudes into traditional narrative forms, it shifts the storytelling from untroubled rural pastoral scenes into a more visually complex world of the late sixteenth century.
Miguel de Cervantes used playing cards and paintings as similar visual cues in Don Quixote. Frederick A. de Armas in “The Artful Gamblers: Wagering Danaë in Cervantes’ Don Quixote I.33–35” turns to El curioso impertinente, arguing that the characters in the tale could be portrayed as gamblers: theatrical gamblers who create new roles to win or accomplish their desires; and artful gamblers who prize works of Italian Renaissance art concealed within the text and even model themselves after these paintings. Indeed, de Armas asserts that the tale conceals an ekphrastic moment in Terence’s Eunnuchus, and that the painting exhibited therein is key to understanding the interpolated tale: it represents the myth of Jupiter and Danaë, a tale that circulates not only through the antique play and Cervantes’ novel as an ekphrasis, but also through the recollection that Titian’s Danaë was exhibited in what some have claimed was an erotic camerino by Philip II and his successors.
In “The Things They Carried: Sovereign Objects in Calderón de la Barca’s La gran Cenobia,” María Cristina Quintero examines how stage props – sceptres, crowns, thrones, and books – were as critical to the performance of the comedia as the script itself. As theatre became more elaborate, she contends, visual devices became more prevalent and carried more of the performance’s meaning. In La gran Cenobia, with its positive and negative exemplars of monarchy, and gendered struggle for power, she finds Calderón acting as a master manipulator of stage objects. Visual cues take on new meanings as the playwright constructs and interrogates political power before the very eyes and conscience of the audience, including the king himself. In this instance actual material objects are scripted as dramatis personae in their own right.
Tapestries and paintings were primarily handcrafted objects made to be hung on walls, where their fixed scenes could be admired. But, as Christopher B. Weimer explains in “Beyond Canvas and Paint: Falling Portraits in the Spanish Comedia,” portraits in the comedia could assume far more active, nonconventional roles, as lifelike surrogates for their absent subjects. These stage portraits not only engaged viewers directly with their eyes, but they could also enter the scene to participate in the representation. In one case a fictive portrait, crashing to the floor, even attempts to change the script. In another case, a declaration of eternal love addressed to a portrait, standing for the deceased, evokes the mystical language of love, with the portrait, by allusion, serving as a performative religious object. Far from being inert, imagined painted portraits – ostensible static set pieces – could participate in their own drama, usually for beneficial effects.
The essays in Part Two, “The Matter of Words,” address the relationship between material objects and conceptual investigations, specifically relating to sound, vision, time, memory, and space. How is sound materialized in writing? How are the hours of a Christian’s day, a typical medieval episteme, translated to the indigenous peoples of the new world? Is memory best preserved in a monument or in a poem? Like the Buen Retiro palace that occasioned musical and cultural performances, the cultural products analysed here – musical scores, books of hours, picaresque novels, and buildings – occasioned transactional performances in writing.
In “Book Marks: Jerónimo de Aguilar and the Book of Hours,” Heather Allen shows how a medieval religious episteme introduced into the New World became an ambiguous agent of empire. The book of hours serves as a useful example of how material objects circulated far beyond the area of their intended use, and how a familiar object, re-contextualized, acquired new meaning. Aguilar appears in multiple histories of the conquest written by a variety of authors from Spanish and mestizo backgrounds. In the stories she examines, literacy and its material manifestation – the book of hours – fulfil specific roles according to each historiographer’s goals. She argues that although we might expect a rupture between Western and indigenous concepts of literacy, the authors do not, in fact, structure their arguments along ethnic lines. To the contrary, they restructure their ideas to incorporate elements of literacy from the other’s culture, moving into flux what were once static cultural beliefs and attitudes towards reading, writing, and texts.
In “Embodying the Visual, Visualizing Sound in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Primero sueño,” Emily L. Bergmann finds that musical notation pervades the language (sound) and composition of Primero sueño at the same time as the visual (a pyramid) invokes a range of graphic images imposed on time and space. It is not the transposition of the objects themselves (as in the first set of essays) that strikes us here, but rather the incorporation of structured sound itself within the language of the text, and within images that resonate with the scientific discourses of the time. Instead of staging objects, Sor Juana processes them by absorbing sound and extending the parameters of their epistemology.
Edward H. Friedman focuses on the materiality of words themselves in his “Picaresque Partitions: Spanish Antiheroes and the Material World.” Indeed, words mirror the quest for acquisition by the picaresque characters, a quest that often ends in failure. While words and objects are at odds, so are the protagonist and the authorial narrator. While Pablos hides behind words, Quevedo puts words on display. And yet, Pablos’s words are also a display, attempting to wrest free from the adornments of an author that would contain him, as the pícaro seeks to become more. But the narrator keeps him tied, leading him to fail miserably – overreaching and descent to criminality being the two main paths. While objects of worth and power remain elusive, the beauty of language as object glitters as it attempts to divert the reader from Pablos’s being. He is in the end, more than an object, but a being of value in spite of his criminality.
While Friedman’s Pablos stays in our memory, Robert ter Horst addresses the long-standing question of whether memory is best preserved by architecture, that is, materialized space, or by poetry, written memory. In “Francisco de Quevedo and the Poetic Matter of Patronage,” he situates Quevedo within a long continuum from antiquity to the seventeenth century in which poets addressed, and attempted to combat, the power of buildings to serve as repositories of memory. The palace of Philip IV, the Buen Retiro, with its multiple buildings and gardens, became an aspirational model for the nobles of the royal court, who built their own extravagant residences – trophy estates – as manifestations of their power and as material bases for their future lineages. These “theatres of ambitions” later expired, noted Quevedo the poet, and a palace without life became a mausoleum. Only a poet’s words could adequately capture and preserve the memory of great men and great deeds. But for that, as the ancient poets had recognized, a poet needs a patron to furnish the requisite otium.
The essays in Part Three, “Objects against Culture,” consider the use of material objects to subvert or counter the dominant culture. Food, clothing, and war material are eminent tools for disrupting and challenging the conventional and normative, that is, the prescribed stasis of the times. Cultural objects are subversively upturned in order to question existing hierarchies, as in the consumption of food, in a prayer inscribed on a paper amulet, or in the proper role of clothing for its producers and consumers. In the same manner a cultural icon (the head of Orpheus) might materialize in a new context, and the machines of war could occasion a reexamination of ethical questions pertaining to war, its conduct, and its effects.
Carolyn Nadeau’s “Transformation and Transgression at the Banquet Scene of La Celestina” takes the banquet as the site of contestation between the proper and transgressive rites of conduct and consumption. The table, etiquette, service, seating, and dress all define the norm within an accepted social hierarchy, but it is food and drink that most occasion conversation, which can disrupt the staged banquet scene as it extends to topics beyond the meal itself. Even more disruptive are the subsequent recollections and dissections of the choreographed banquet scene, whose foods and formalities are seen to encode gross social inequities. The carefully structured banquet thus stands both as the epitome of an ordered social scene and as the symbol of a society in need of reordering.
A sixteenth-century Oración de la emparedada (Prayer of the immured woman) recently discovered hidden in a wall near the border of Spain and Portugal, like other kinds of prayer books, was believed to convey apotropaic power through its recitation, as well as the materiality of the text (a paper amulet) carried on or bound to the body. In “The Prayer of the Immured Woman and the Matter of Lazarillo de Tormes,” Ryan D. Giles studies the connection between this heterodox textual amulet and the 1554 Lazarillo de Tormes, a prohibited book that was not only stowed away in the same hidden stash as the Oración, but also recited by the rogue’s first master in an early edition of the proto-picaresque masterpiece. Giles’s essay considers how the contents of this prayer relate to the practice of immuring heretical women and other transgressors during the Inquisition, and how the efficacy and material presence of the Oración exert an ironic, proleptic force over the course of his narrative, with its prophetic structure and dishonourable outcome.
The third essay in this section is by Luis F. Avilés, who examines the ethical issues enjoined by war, its technology, and its material consequences in his “War and the Material Conditions for Suffering in Cervantes’ Numancia.” The Numancians, about to be defeated in war by an irrational Scipio, decide to destroy all their personal possessions before their capitulation. Against any hope of survival, they distance themselves from their material objects by their only possible act – destruction. Only bread retains its value for the famished and doomed. The devaluation of cultural objects has its analogue in relations among the survivors: the violence and destruction of war changes fundamentally how one thinks about worldly goods, about craftsmanship and beauty, and about the very carriers of “culture.” Cervantes’ powerful drama, written in an age of abundant worldly goods, poses the ultimate question of how our identities are dependent on the cultural objects we gather around us or, under certain conditions, dispensed with as superfluous.
Timothy Ambrose in his “The Goddess, Dionysus, and the Material World in Don Quijote,” weaves together three very disparate objects – an enchanted head, a painting by Titian, and a labyrinth – in order to bring to light mythical mysteries in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. These mysteries have to do with the ancient Great Goddess and the god Dionysus. Guiding us through Sierra Morena as labyrinth, a place beholden to Ariadne, a name for the ancient goddess in Crete, we encounter the Mountain Goddess. Illuminating Ariadne’s encounter with Dionysus at Naxos and then revealing the enchanted head as that of Orpheus, priest of Dionysus, Ambrose shows the many links between Dionysus and Don Quixote, and between the god and the Great Goddess of old. Objects in Cervantes’ novel, then, point to the antique and they in turn question the culture of imperial Spain where the goddess has been relegated to the imaginative labyrinth of a madman’s mind. And yet, it is Dulcinea, the woman of the madman’s dreams, a woman that can be seen as a new Ariadne, who has dominion over the labyrinth of the mind and of the narrative.
The volume closes with clothing since it, too, both encodes and challenges a stable, hierarchical social organization. In Goretti González’s “Dismantling Sosiego: Undressing, Dressing, and Cross-Dressing in Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache,” sartorial fashion and expectations serve to mask Spain’s dire economic circumstances, which were bizarrely attributed to clothing itself, that is, to cross-dressing and sartorial effeminacy. Alemán thus depicts a different Spain from the somberly clothed nation of sosiego of Boscán and Fernando de Herrera. Alemán’s Guzmán cleverly alters his attire in negotiating an ever-changing discourse of identity, using his tailored garments to enter the picaresque underworld, where clothing is freely employed to create and dissimulate identity. Guzmán’s persona is not so much reflected in his clothing as obscured by his frequent undressing, dressing, and even cross-dressing. Just as the prescribed rite of eating encodes both order and contestation, clothing in its various permutations simultaneously encodes both acceptance and subversion of the sartorial order.
We would like to thank our research assistant, Felipe Rojas, from the University of Chicago for his invaluable assistance in editing this volume. We also wish to express our gratitude to Martha Roth, Dean of Humanities at the University of Chicago, and to Henry Gerfen, Head of the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese at the Pennsylvania State University, for their generous support with this project. Finally, we thank the two anonymous readers for their wealth of information and detail on material culture.
1 For those interested in cartography, scientific instruments and other transatlantic materials, see Padrón (2004), Portuondo (2009), and Bleichman (2011).
2 The field of English studies has been very influential in the study of material culture. The interested reader might wish to consult de Grazia, Quilligan and Stallybrass (1996), Fumerton and Hunt (1999), Jones and Stallybrass (2000), and Orlin (2000).
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Bleichman, Daniella. 2011. Collecting across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
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