Don Quixote Illustrated: Textual Images and Visual Readings. Iconografía
del Quijote. Ed. Eduardo Urbina and Jesús G. Maestro. Pontevedra
(España): Mirabel Editorial, 2005. 174 pp. ISBN: 84-934275-5-1.
In: http://www.academiaeditorial.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/R-Urbina-y-Maestro-Iconografia-Quijote.pdf
In March of 2005 the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives at Texas A&M
University hosted an international conference titled “Don Quixote Illustrated: Textual
Images and Visual Readings,” an event celebrating the 400th anniversary of the
publication of Don Quixote Part I. The present volume, comprised of a preface and
seven essays, includes the contributions of the participants at this conference. The
editors explain in the preface that the goal of organizing the conference had been
“contribuir a la sistematización y desarrollo de los estudios sobre la iconografía textual
del Quijote” (11), and they add that the essays that follow “ofrecen un amplio y detenido
análisis de las diferentes posibilidades de interpretación de las ilustraciones de que ha
sido objeto la novela cervantina a lo largo de su historia editorial” (11).
Eduardo Urbina opens the collection with “Visual Knowledge: Textual
Iconography of the Quixote,” an essay that begins quite logically by establishing the
importance of studying the visual aspects of Cervantes’ novel; the author asserts that
232 Reviews Cervantes
“most people know about the Quixote through some derivative representation, from
some image or icon and its cultural associations. One could affirm, indeed, without
fear of exagerration, that the Quixote is an often seen, talked-about, but seldom-read
book” (15). Though thousands of editions of the work have been published since its
first appearance in 1605, there has been no way to access the illustrations that have
played an instrumental role in the canonization of the novel. After providing a brief
overview of the way that illustrators from different centuries have depicted episodes
from Cervantes’ novel, Urbina perceptively asserts that the ekphrasis describing the
knight’s battle with the Basque in I, 9 both underscores the fundamentally visual
nature of the novel and serves as “the point of departure for the iconographic tradition
of the Quixote” (30). Of particular interest to cervantistas is the author’s description
of the Cervantes Project, a digital archive of Quixote illustrations begun in 2001, whose
goal is “to create an online repository of textual, documentary, bibliographic, and visual
electronic resources to serve the needs of students and scholars interested in Cervantes’
life, times and work, and focused in particular on the study of Don Quixote de la
Mancha, http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/cervantes” (33).
In a carefully researched and insighful essay titled “Beyond Words: Cervantes
Iconography in the 1905 Centenary and the Following Decade,” Rachel Schmidt
categorizes the visual arts and activities produced for the 20th-century centenary
celebrations of the publication of Don Quixote Part I into what she terms spectacular,
ethnographic (documentary), and modernist currents. Her intention is to show “how
the Cervantine centenary and certain aspects of its iconographic production served as
fodder for the political and cultural battles of the time” (41). Spectacles celebrating
the novel often played out the struggle between the political right and left for the
“hearts and minds of the pueblo” (46). The “liberal lettered classes” (46) hoped that
the novel’s idealism might result in a desire for regeneración among the common folk;
the right adopted a patronizing tone toward the rural lower classes, seeing them as a
group in need of protection from modernizing forces. Schmidt analyzes photographs
of La Mancha that appear in Azorín’s La ruta de Don Quijote and in the 1915 Spanish
translation of Augusto Floriano Jaccaci’s On the Trail of Don Quixote, asserting that the
images (five of which follow the essay) interrogate the boundary between the fictional
and the historical. Furthermore, she notes, the photographs serve “as an ethnographic
document of life in La Mancha at the turn of the 20th century” (54-55). In analyzing the
modernist current in iconography, the author persuasively shows how the illustrations
of Don Quixote by Ricardo Marín and Daniel Urrabieta Vierge (seven of which follow
the essay) problematize the relationship between the image and the frame.
“A Primer in Illustration: Reading Pictures of Don Quixote” by Patrick Lenaghan
provides an overview of the various ways in which artists have depicted scenes from
the novel over the centuries. The essay describes the work of artists – and includes
illustrations – ranging from Jérôme David and Jacques Lagniet in the 17th century
to Charles-Antoine Coypel in the 18th century and Gustave Doré in the 19th. The
author’s discussion of the changing artistic interpretations of Don Quixote’s attack
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on the windmills is particularly interesting. While 17th-century illustrators focused
on the humor of the episode, there was a “growing desire throughout the eighteenth
century to reduce the moments of slapstick” (89); moreover, a number of editions from
this century did not even include a portrayal of the scene. By the 19th century the
episode had grown to be widely popular and hence “became almost obligatory for any
illustrated edition” (91). By this time, the Romantic interpretation of the work was in
full force, according to which “the adventure came to epitomize the glorious futility of
the knight’s enterprise and his admirable effort to change an uncaring world against all
odds” (91). Nineteenth-century artists accordingly depicted Don Quixote in ways that
emphasized his vulnerability, idealism, and determination. Referring to the multitude
of artistic representations that Cervantes’ novel has inspired over the centuries,
Lenaghan aptly concludes his essay: “When examined in their context, they offer an
exceptional and vivid history of the reception of Cervantes’s masterpiece, attesting to
its timeless appeal yet also showing how each artist has remade the novel in his image
and that of his age” (93).
In “Narrar el Quijote I en palabras e imágenes gráficas: Cervantes, Doré y Dalí”
Stephen Miller contrasts the ways that the French illustrator and the Spanish artist
represent characters and scenes from the novel, pointing out that the two “representan,
cada uno en su época y estilo, una cumbre entre los centenares de ediciones ilustradas
del Quijote, y han gozado, a juzgar por su uso continuado en ediciones posteriores de
la novela, de una gran aceptación entre lectores y editores” (96). The essay begins by
highlighting three moments early in the first part of the novel in which the importance
of art is stressed: I, 2 when the knight imagines that his great deeds will be “dignas de
entallarse en bronce, esculpirse en mármoles y pintarse en tablas”; I, 9 which contains
the ekphrasis of Don Quixote battling the Biscayan; and I, 19 in which knight and
squire discuss Don Quixote’s desire to have his “triste figura” painted on his shield.
Of particular interest is Miller’s observation that although Sancho is described in the
ekphrasis as having “zancas largas,” illustrators of the novel tend to ignore this textual
information and instead most often present the squire as a man with short legs. While
Doré depicts the same Don Quixote in his 169 illustrations of the novel, Dalí, in his 41
illustrations, represents the protagonist in a multitude of ways including, for example,
“un grupo de Quijotes extremadamente alargados, casi agonizantes” and another group
“cuya nota dominante es formas compuestas de líneas espirales” (110). Though neither
of the two editions follows Cervantes’ chronology exactly with regard to the placement
of illustrations, the results for a reader of the text are quite different. Miller asserts that
Doré succeeds in offering a new reading of the novel: “Lo que en una edición puramente
léxica del Quijote se puede llamar un diálogo entre Cervantes y su lector, se convierte en
una conversación entre Cervantes, Doré y el lector” (105, emphasis in the original). In
the case of Dalí, however, the illustrations are so out of place with regard to the text
that they become a distraction, with the result that “[e]n lugar de reforzar y dialogar
con el texto léxico, el texto gráfico inoportunamente intercalado es una interrupción”
(111). The essay concludes by affirming that “[l]o que hacen Doré y Dalí, cada uno
234 Reviews Cervantes
a su manera, es entrar en los juegos perspectivistas y meta-artísticos de la novela al
ilustrarla” (115).
“Iconografía popular del Quijote” by Isidro Sánchez Sánchez, Esther Almarcha
Núñez-Herrador and Óscar Fernández Olalde makes the point that many more
people have some familiarity with Don Quixote – including certain aspects of the work’s
characters, situations, and themes – than actually have read the novel. The authors
explain that this state of affairs results from a confluence of events. On the one hand,
students assigned Cervantes’ novel as part of their studies often fail to read it in its
entirety; Don Quixote is, after all, a complex work far removed from everyday reality.
On the other hand, the ubiquity of images from the novel, which the authors term the
Iconografía popular del Quijote, brings Cervantes’ work into contact with all sectors of
society: “Nos llama desde las páginas ilustradas del texto a las imágenes quijotescas
en las entradas de los pueblos de La Mancha, pasando por series televisivas, películas,
comics, postales, cajas de diferentes alimentos, etiquetas compañeras de muy diversos
productos o humildes envolturas de caramelos” (127). With regard to these sorts of
ephemera, and many other types including stickers, calendars, and playing cards, the
authors assert: “aunque la mayoría de dichos elementos tiene una vida útil limitada,
acaban convirtiéndose en documentos de interés para investigadores y coleccionistas
tras expirar su vigencia” (121). In fact, as part of the many celebrations of Don Quixote
that took place in 2005, three separate expositions were dedicated to the novel’s place
in popular culture: one in Salamanca, one in Zaragoza, and one that traveled to various
cities. This last exposition was organized by the Centro de Estudios de Castilla-La
Mancha, whose collection titled Iconografía Popular de don Quijote de la Mancha can be
seen at http://www.uclm.es/ceclm/CentenarioQuijote.
“Don Quichotte vu par Pablo Picasso: Visual Syntax in the Iconography of Don
Quixote,” by Enrique Mallén, addresses the famous drawing Picasso made of the
knight and his squire, which the artist created in 1955 for the French journal Les lettres
françaises in celebration of the first part’s 350th anniversary. The author notes that in
the drawing “Picasso chooses to arrange his characters in a triangular composition, with
Sancho at the base and his master at the apex” (135), and then asks what the structure
of this visual composition might mean. Starting with Picasso’s concept of “reality,” the
essay then discusses, in somewhat tortuous fashion, the issue of how best to interpret
Don Quixote, several of Freud’s theories, and the cognitive responses that viewers have
when looking at works of art. Mallén argues that Picasso’s goal in the drawing was to
“emphasize the important psychological content of Don Quixote by pictorial means”
(144), and concludes that placing the knight at the apex of the drawing may have
been Picasso’s way of representing a flight from “reality” for both Don Quixote and for
Cervantes himself.
The volume’s last essay is “Imaging the Quixote: A Digital Iconography” by Richard
Furuta, Jie Deng, Carlos Monroy, and Neal Audenaert from the Center for the Study of
Digital Libraries and the Department of Computer Science at Texas A&M University.
The authors first present the current state of the project devoted to creating a digital
Volume 28.2 (2008) Reviews 235
iconography of Don Quixote. Impressively, there are more than 4,000 digitized images
from 74 editions currently available at the Cervantes Project’s web pages. They describe
the highly interdisciplinary nature of the project and explain the process by which new
entries are added to the research collection. They also share some of the lessons they
have learned in the process, which may be of interest to technical specialists working
on similar projects. Future plans for the digital iconography collection include “a site
devoted to the music used in Cervantes’ writings, based on the dissertation by Juan
José Pastor and a presentation of legal records collected in Spain documenting events
related to Cervantes’ life, based on the records collected by Kris Sliwa” (173).
In the preface, the editors state their hope that this volume will inspire further
development of investigations that synthesize art, literature, and iconographic
interpretation of Don Quixote. Don Quixote Illustrated succeeds admirably in this
regard, thus making a noteworthy contribution to scholarship relating the visual
and the verbal in the work of Cervantes. Both the volume and Texas A&M’s online
Cervantes Project Collection are valuable resources for those interested in studying the
iconography of Don Quixote.
William Worden
University of Alabama
wworden@bama.ua.edu
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