No. 04 (2015)

Within the gallery of texts annotated by Quevedo, the treatise De’ veri precetti della pittura is the unique reading of a book that deals with precepts in painting. The introductory comments of this article deals with the purpose of Armenini’s text and its Spanish reception. It follows with the detailed examination of Quevedo’s three annotations, which are in dialogue with the pictorial Parnassus drafted by the poet in two poems (“El pincel” y “Matraca de los paños y sedas”). The annotations confirm Quevedo’s preference for Italian painting and specially the Venetian school, adding some information on his interest in sculpture.

The habit of adding an index, more commonly called a table, began in the middle of the Sixteenth Century. It was usually placed at the end of the volume as a reading guide and consisted of a few unnumbered pages. By the middle of the Seventeenth Century, however, the tables began to evolve into bulky summaries about what a book contained, or in some cases, what might be termed “short moral dictionaries”, as in volume V of the complete works of Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, 1665. While many were stark, there were cases of narrative tables, such as the one that appears in the work of Juan Bautista Poza [1647]. In fact, in Arte de predicar la palabra de Dios (The art of preaching the word of God) [1667] a way to create them is provided. In this article a moralizing editorial judgment of the Baroque Spanish press can be seen, starting from the time of selecting the content to be indexed, without the table continues to be, as it is today, a useful place that facilitates the search for a topic.

In the first part of the present work, I examine imprese and emblems where signs appear decontextualized, part of an omitted whole. The moral, civil, worldly, political or religious message is cryptically delivered either by one or a few items, or by fragments of objects isolated in a context alien to them. Even though their own postulates and intentions differ, they have often be connected with the deconstructive ways of surrealism. In the second part, I describe the modifications of signifier and signified in the process of transference, substitution, obliteration of one or many main or minor elements in the arrangement, with regard to their usual place and function within the iconographic or historic-narrative tradition.

Note on the trajectory of Jose María Pozuelo Yvanco and his latest publication La invención literaria (2014), which brings together his articles in discussing our classics (Garcilaso, Góngora, Cervantes, Quevedo and Gracian) from the Classical Rhetoric and the theoretical neo-rhetoric model.

Review on the book: Rafael Bonilla Cerezo y Paolo Tanganelli, Soledades Ilustradas. Retablo emblemático de Góngora, which analyzes and interprets the Dedication to duke of Béjar and the 320 first verses of the Soledades by Luis de Góngora in the light of the Emblem Books.

Review on the book Lyra mixta. Silva ejemplar de artificios gráfico-literarios, by Víctor Infantes. Published in Madrid, Turpin Editores, 2015.

Review of a work that addresses the transmitted image of Ferdinand the Catholic throughout history from a multidisciplinary approach: emblem studies, literature, political thought, art..

Review on the book: Las relaciones de sucesos sobre seres monstruosos durante los reinados de Felipe III y Felipe IV (1598-1665). Análisis discursivo y edición by Ana Mancera y Jaime Galbarro, which edits fourteen news relations about monstrous beings printed between 1598 and 1665 and analyzes the main linguistic resources used to give verosimilitude to the contents, display the subjectivity of the speaker, reflect the polyphony or express the enunciative mode.