Painting in the poetry of Luis de Gongora

Gongora's major poems, the Polifemo and the Soledades, have long inspired comparisons to painting, as these works delight the mind's eye with visual and plastic qualities such as color, light and shadow, and the representation of space and depth. Much has been written on the relationship between the visual arts and Spanish Golden Age poetry and this thesis, in building upon a foundation already established, seeks to expand the synthesis between art history and literary studies in order to promote a fuller understanding of the dynamic relationship between Gongora's poetry and painting. The main purpose of this project is to analyze the visual qualities of Gongora's poetry in light of the art-theoretial and art-critical discourses that accompanied developments in Renaissance art, which evolved out of writings by artists and art-theorists such as Vasari, Dolce, Lomazzo, Pacheco, El Greco and Van Mander.;Chapter One deals with the Renaissance doctrine of kinship between painting and poetry, ut pictura poesis which, named for a quote from Horace's Ars Poetica, was forged in the Renaissance out of classical theories pertaining to dramatic poetry. After a review of the development of ut pictura poesis, this chapter addresses accompanying discourses such as the paragone between painting and poetry as well as the Neo-platonic Idea, and also discusses the unique role of Spain in facilitating the doctrine of ut pictura poesis and one of its main contingencies, the liberalization of painting.;The focus of Chapter Two is the Polifemo and its relationship principally to Venetian, but also Netherlandish, painting technique and artistic theory. As critics have pointed out, in the Polifemo Gongora uses color much in the same way as the Venetian master Titian. In creating poetry that imitates Venetian painting, Gongora participates in one of the most salient artistic polemics of his time, the paragone tra colore e disegno. As will be explained in Chapter Two, Venetian colorist technique of painting directly on canvas differed radically from the initial process of painting over chalk drawings developed in Florence, and the debate that ensues over technique spills over into notions of cultural achievement and artistic worth.;Not only Venetian but Flemish masterpieces dominated Spanish collections, and the Polifemo demonstrates Gongora's inspiration in the techniques of the Northern masters. After a discussion of the relationship between the Polifemo and Venetian art theory, Chapter Two introduces the theories of Karel Van Mander, whose treatise Schilderboeck , first published in Amsterdam in 1604, was known in Spain and found amongst Pacheco's book collection, with significant parts of the treatise translated into Spanish and incorporated into Francisco Pacheco's Arte de la Pintura.;Images reminiscent of Renaissance masterpieces abound in the Soledades, which are the focus of Chapter Three. Equestrian portraits, still-lifes, landscapes, mythological paintings are carefully crafted, and the accumulation of painterly images renders the poem, in the words of Marsha Collins, "a veritable art gallery in verbal form." But the overarching aesthetic frame in the Soledades is the Flemish 'World' landscape, with expansive distances and the introverted compositional format that dwarfs the protagonist and the narrative action. Chapter Three explores Gongora's aesthetic choices in the Soledades as they relate to Van Mander's theories regarding landscape and history, and how these ideas contrast with the Albertian and Vasarian view regarding painted histories and the underlying principles of ut pictura poesis . Furthermore, Chapter Three explores the idea of the poem as art gallery.;Throughout this thesis, I have attempted to emphasize the importance of not only actual paintings and movements in art but also art treatises that were published and known to Gongora and his readers, for these texts greatly contributed to forming perceptions and discourses related to the visual arts. In sum, the goal of this work is to examine the way in which Gongora's major poems, in expressing in verse the plastic qualities that are reflected in actual works of art, also engage the art-theoretical discourses that helped shape the history of European aesthetics. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...