This collection of eclectic essays stems from an NEH seminar at the University of Chicago in 2003, titled "Recapturing the Renaissance: Cervantes and Italian Art." Typically such volumes offer the opportunity of presenting different aspects and approaches towards a topic, and Ekphrasis in the Age of Cervantes is no exception. It conveys the diversity of the use of ekphrasis in the period, and may well inspire the publication of a sustained and vigorous monograph that will complement Emilie Bergmann's foundational Art Inscribed: Essays on Ekphrasis in Spanish Golden Age Poetry (1979). Frederick A. De Armas, editor of the volume and author of the final essay, explains in Part I ("A Preface") the focus on the topic of ekphrasis and traces the literary history of this rhetorical technique. The title of his prefatory essay, "Simple Magic: Ekphrasis from Antiquity to the Age of Cervantes," refers to a passage from Canto 33 of Ariosto's Orlando furioso and is a play on another title, Robert Alter's Partial Magic: The Novel asa Self-Conscious Genre. The phenomenal success of visual reproductions of the windmill encounter (I, 8) is the subject of a now-classic essay by E. C. Riley. It is not surprising, therefore, that De Armas analyzes this particular scene to specify Cervantes' innovative contribution to the ekphrastic tradition. We may recall that Don Quixote invokes the magical powers of the maleficent and particularly ill-willed enchanter Freston to explain the visual disparities between windmills and giants. This apparently "simple magic" represents for De Armas Cervantes' transformation of a literary tradition, for he creates here a new kind of ekphrasis, no longer dependent on an external stimulus: "It is the magic of Ur-ekphrasis, the description of the creation of an art object in the character's mind. And, this imagination has as one of its functions to foreground the imaginative qualities of the text itself" (18). According to the editor, the rhetorical term "ekphrasis," as used and understood in the period from the 1530s to the 1650s, is capacious both in terms of what is described and how it is inserted in a text, and has endless combinatory possibilities. Its function can be "allegorical, emblematic, decorative, or veiled" (22). It can be based on an existing work of art ("actual") or on an imagined one ("notional"), or it can refer to a work not named or described ("allusive"), to cite but a few examples (22). The permutations possible are reflected in an analysis of the appearance of Galatea at the beginning of Cervantes' pastoral novel, which is deemed "not only true, dramatic, and transformative, but also combinatory" (22), and is, in addition, allegorized (23). Because of this dizzying diversity, one assumes, the book is organized not according to the theoria of ekphrasis but rather to its praxis in a variety of texts, primarily, but not exclusively, by Cervantes. This organizing principle results in individual essays that are wholly distinct and must, accordingly, be discussed separately.
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