NEH SUMMER SEMINAR
"Recapturing the
Renaissance:
Cervantes and Italian
Art"
University of
Chicago
June 23 - August 1, 2003
Dear Colleague:
I am delighted to have the opportunity to host an NEH Seminar this coming summer at the University of Chicago, entitled “Recapturing the Renaissance: Cervantes and Italian Art.” This web page provides a detailed description of the seminar and addresses basic questions concerning the seminar and the rich cultural activities that the University of Chicago and Chicago, itself, have to offer.
A. INTELLECTUAL RATIONALE
The purpose of the Seminar is to
re-envision Cervantes’ works through Italian Renaissance art. Throughout his
literary works, Cervantes repeatedly represents his desire for Italy. This
desire often takes the form of evocations and descriptions of the art and
architecture of the Italian peninsula. In many cases, these moments carry a
second, deeper and more concealed aspiration, that of recapturing the ancient
world. These two yearnings coexist within many of the textual images since a
number of the Italian frescoes and edifices described in Cervantes’ prose
fiction evoke antiquity. Although some theorists such as Michel Foucault view Don
Quixote as “the negative of the Renaissance world,” a whole school of
criticism, starting with Américo Castro and culminating with Alban Forcione,
has discussed how Cervantes’ Don Quixote owes much to the Northern and
the Italian Renaissance. However, most if not all critics have ignored Italian
art while discussing Cervantes’ models. This Seminar seeks to re-engage the new
critics of today by formulating the link between Cervantes and the Renaissance
through an interdisciplinary dialogue that establishes a new set of models and
predecessors. In order to assist
literature faculty to bridge disciplines and explore the relation between the
verbal and the visual, the Seminar will delve into notions of ekphrasis and
pictorialism from Philostratus to Murray Krieger. In addition, a special exhibit specifically set up for the
Seminar at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art will allow participants
to view relevant works of art while discussing their link to Cervantes’ texts.
This Seminar, then, will turn to the art
and architecture of the Italian Renaissance in order to begin to understand how
Cervantes’ three major works of prose fiction (La Galatea, Don
Quixote and Persiles y Sigismunda) deal with Renaissance humanism
and Counter-Reformation ideals; with art and censorship; with memory and
museum. All these elements will be
studied utilizing the aesthetic opposition between the verbal and the visual.
In order to understand Cervantes’ pictorial texts, it will be necessary not
only to analyze the works of art from the Renaissance that are inscribed in his
three major novels. It will also be useful to delve into the tradition of
ekphrasis, the description of a work of art in literature, starting with
ancient models such as Homer, Virgil and Philostratus. Participants in the
Seminar will investigate how Cervantes’ knowledge of these texts, transformed
his narrative. In addition, Cervantes would have read texts from the
Renaissance that helped to frame notions of a Renaissance, texts that utilized
the works of Michelangelo, Titian and Raphael to proclaim the rebirth of
ancient ways. Seminar participants will thus read from Giorgio Vasari’s Lives
of the Artists (1568), a text that promotes the notion of a Renaissance and
provides a history of Renaissance art, canonizing such figures as Leonardo,
Raphael, Michelangelo and Titian. This history of art contains no illustrations
of paintings. These are described through what resembles the ancient technique
of ekphrasis. Vasari’s Lives may have given Cervantes the interpretative
tools necessary to understand the visual images he witnessed in Italy.
Other works such as Baldassare
Castiglione’s The Courtier, Lodovico Dolce’s Dialogues and Carlo
Ridolfi’s The Marvels of Art will also be discussed. Although a number
of critics have established links between Castiglioni and Cervantes, none have
touched upon the pictorial component. Castiglioni’s assertion that the courtier
must be conversant with the best of ancient and Renaissance art may help to
explain why Cervantes may have conceived of his texts as verbal museums of
art. Indeed, the notion of museum was
rapidly developing in the early modern period. The Seminar will thus bring up
recent discussions of Renaissance museums and of artificial memory in order to
understand the relations between memory, museum and the placement of images in
Cervantes’ texts. By examining the arrangement of the exhibit at the Smart Museum of Art, participants
will come to understand how memory, place, structure and vision help to frame
understandings and guide meanings. It is in this context that Cervantes’ memory
museum with its many frescoes and portraits will be studied.
B. ORGANIZATION OF THE SEMINAR
The goal of the Seminar will be two-fold:
to facilitate research and writing of participants on Cervantes and on the
relationship between the verbal and the visual in early modern Europe; and to
provide resources for those who wish to create interdisciplinary literature
courses that foreground the relationship between the verbal and the visual.
The Seminar will be held at the David and
Alfred Smart Museum of Art at
the University of Chicago. The Museum will be exhibiting a series of works from
the Italian Renaissance put together especially for this Seminar. This exhibit
is entitled The Painted Text: Picturing Narratives in European Art. In
addition, there will be an exhibition at the Special Collections Research
Center at the Joseph Regenstein Library (University of Chicago) entitled Writing
for the Eyes from Antiquity to the Renaissance so that participants can
view illustrated versions of ekphrastic texts.
The Seminar will meet twice each week for
sessions of three hours (with a coffee break in the middle). It will have as
its basic activity the reading of three novels by Cervantes. During the first
week we will discuss Cervantes’ knowledge of Rome as it appears in his last
novel, the Persiles. Afterwards, we will proceed in chronological order.
We will turn to his early pastoral novel La Galatea, continue with Don
Quixote and end with the Persiles. Topics dealing with Don Quixote
will be taken up as they appear in the narrative, beginning with the Prologue
to Part One and ending with the ekphraseis of Part Two. These works will
be read in English translation, but the Spanish text will be available to those
wishing to read them in the original. A research assistant from the Spanish
program will be available to help those who know some Spanish and wish to read
some or all of the work in the original language.
Each participant should design a program
of individual research that may result in a paper that they can present during
the latter part of the Seminar. The paper can be either part of a research
project that the participant is engaged in, one which relates to the themes of
the Seminar; or, it can be a design for a course that introduces the visual
arts in the study of literature. These papers may be collected for future
publication.
C. SEMINAR FACULTY
Throughout my career I have been
interested in the relationship between the verbal and the visual in early
modern Spanish literature and Italian art. More than twenty years ago, I
published my first essay on the subject “Lope de Vega and Titian” Comparative
Literature 30 (1978). Other early articles followed on Lope de Vega and
Michelangelo, on Calderón and Botticelli, etc. In recent years, my interest in
the subject has become central to my research as evinced by a series of
articles on topics such as Dosso Dossi and Calderón, Rojas Zorrilla and Giulio
Romano, Argensola and Titian, etc. My most recent book, Cervantes, Raphael
and the Classics (Cambridge, 1998) focuses on Cervantes’ most famous
tragedy, La Numancia, showing how this work is engaged in a conversation
with classical authors of Greece and Rome, especially through the
interpretations of antiquity presented by the artist Raphael.
D. PARTICIPANTS
Among important criteria for selection of
participants, will be a strong interest in the interrelationship between the
visual and the verbal arts. I will also look at the cogency of their statements
and its relevance to the topic of the Seminar. I hope that among the
participants there will be a good mixture of faculty who specialize in Spanish
Golden Age literature and those who come to the field from other disciplines
such as Art History, Comparative Literature, English, Italian and History. As
noted above, those from fields outside of Spanish who wish to read some or all
of the texts in the original will have the help of a research assistant in
Spanish. A selection committee will assess the applications.
The University of Chicago is located in
the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, on the shores of Lake Michigan and about
five miles from the downtown. In Hyde Park and in walking distance from the
participants’ housing, three are major cultural attractions: the Museum of
Science and Industry, the DuSable Museum of African-American art, the Oriental
Institute Museum, and of course, the Smart
Museum of Art, where the Seminar’s exhibit and classroom are located.
Frequent train and bus service can take the participants to downtown where they
can enjoy the Art Institute and many other attractions.
The participants will be listed as
“Visiting Scholars” at the University of Chicago for the duration of the
Seminar. As such, they will receive a University ID card that will give them
access to libraries, computing facilities, etc. The University’s Joseph
Regenstein Library is one of the great research libraries in the country and
has a very distinguished collection in Spanish literature and Italian art.
The
participants will be housed at the University Apartment Building at 5700 S.
Stoney Island, Chicago, IL 60637. This
air-conditioned building is approximately eight blocks from the main quadrangle
of the University of Chicago, and one block from the Museum of Science and
Industry, which borders Lake Michigan.
This five-story elevator building contains 20 carpeted, furnished apartments,
each with 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, kitchen, living room/dining room and
balcony. Participants will have use of
the building’s coin-operated laundry room, bicycle storage room, and furnished
lounge with a 25” screen television.
The cost will be $1302 for the six weeks with only one participant per
bedroom (two participants per apartment).
The price includes linens, towels and a maid service three times per
week. Parking spaces in the adjacent
parking lot are available for $22 per month.
Should participants choose not to stay at the University Apartment
Building, there should be an ample selection of summer rentals close to the
University of Chicago.
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