Baroque Architecture: Góngora and the Folds of Wit

Abstract

This article analyses the architectonic rhetoric of Luis de Góngora's Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea through a comparison with Baroque quadratura, the painting of walls and/or ceilings with illusionistic architecture on a one-to-one scale with real space. It draws upon the theories of Baltasar Gracián and, especially, Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski to argue that what links quadratura and such architectonic wit is the manner in which both embody contrastive elements and impact on the viewer or reader, and, especially, the consequences attendant on their merging of contrastive elements. The article aims both to contextualize what I term Baroque space by reading it through the aesthetic of wit dominant in the seventeenth century and to read the Polifemo's rhetoric and conceits, especially when at their most architectonic, as superb folds in the fabric of language in order to explore one of the Baroque's most striking and disquieting features, the interplay of opposites, in visual and verbal media.

Notes

¹Jorge Guillén, ‘Lenguaje poético: Góngora’, in Lenguaje y poesía: algunos casos españoles, 3^rd ed. (Madrid: Alianza, 1983), 33–71 (p. 52).

³On the bimembre, see Dámaso Alonso, ‘La simetría bilateral’, in Estudios y ensayos gongorinos (Madrid: Gredos, 1955), 117–73.

²For a useful summary of recent accounts of the poem's narrative organization, see Ponce Cárdenas' introduction, in Luis de Góngora, Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, ed. Jesús Ponce Cárdenas (Madrid: Cátedra, 2010), 11–141 (pp. 62–64). (All references to the Polifemo will be to this edition, by stanza and/or line number.) See also Giuseppe Mazzocchi, ‘La estructura narrativa del Polifemo’, in Góngora Hoy VII: Actas del Foro de Debate Góngora hoy celebrado en la Diputación de Córdoba. VII: El ‘Polifemo’, ed. Joaquín Roses, Colección de Estudios Gongorinos 5 (Córdoba: Diputación de Córdoba, 2005), 125–38. Enrica Cancelliere has argued that the poem's structure is essentially elliptical, and has used this to link the poem to its broader artistic, intellectual and scientific context. See Cancelliere, ‘La imaginación científica y el Polifemo de Góngora', in Góngora Hoy VII, ed. Roses, 19–51.

⁴On this dimension of the poem, see my ‘ “Dar garrote al entendimiento”: The Aesthetic of Violence in Góngora's Polifemo’, in Changing Times in Hispanic Culture, ed. Derek Harris (Aberdeen: Univ. of Aberdeen, 1996), 144–55.

⁵See Baltasar Gracián, Agudeza y arte de ingenio, in Obras completas, ed. Emilio Blanco, Biblioteca Castro, 2 vols (Madrid: Turner, 1993), II, 316. All references are to this volume, by chapter and, when relevant, page number.

⁶My reading of the Polifemo will thus initially be through a dialogue with quadratura. For a reading of the poem in terms essentially of the visual field of early modern easel painting, see Enrica Cancelliere, Góngora: itinerarios de la visión, trans. Rafael Bonilla and Linda Garosi, Colección de Estudios Gongorinos 8 (Córdoba: Diputación de Córdoba, 2006). And for Góngora and links with Baroque art in general, see Elena del Río Parra, ‘El tamaño del barroco: dimensión y espacialidad en la palabra poética áurea’, Hispanic Research Journal, 5:1 (2004), 3–14. Matthew Ancell (‘Este … cíclope: Góngora's Polifemo and the Poetics of Disfiguration’, Hispanic Review, 79:4 [2011], 547–72) reads the poem in terms of its anamorphic poetics. See also the points of similarity and difference noted between Góngora and Churrigueresque architecture in Jorge Guillén, Notas para una edición comentada de Góngora, ed. Antonio Piedra and Juan Bravo (Valladolid: Fundación Jorge Guillén/Univ. de Castlla-La Mancha, 2002), 238–39.

⁷For a preliminary consideration of the notion of Baroque space, and for an analysis of a stunning example of this created under the influence of quadratura, see my ‘Baroque Space: Claudio Coello's Sagrada Forma and the Sacristy of the Escorial’, BHS, LXXXVI:6 (2009), 775–86. The spatial dynamics of Baroque theatre and staging also embody this complex cross-over of opposites. See my ‘Folding Space and Staging the Palace in the Baroque sainete: Antonio de Solís’ fin de fiesta to Triunfos de Amor y Fortuna (1658)’, in Golden-Age Studies in Commemoration of A. A. Parker, ed., with an intro., by Terence O'Reilly and Jeremy Robbins, BSS, LXXXV:6 (2008), 79–91. In developing the notion of Baroque space as a highly distinctive form and experience of actual space in the early modern period, I am expanding on the ideas of coextensive space and of the mutual penetration of reality and illusion that are such recognised features of Baroque art, theatre and literature. On these notions, see, amongst many, John Rupert Martin, Baroque (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), 14–15, 155–96; and Angela Ndalianis who, in her Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 2004), explores these particularly in relation to modern entertainment media. One of my aims in the current article is to contextualize what I term Baroque space by reading it through the aesthetic of wit dominant in the seventeenth century.

⁸On scepticism in Spain, see my Arts of Perception: The Epistemological Mentality of the Spanish Baroque, 1580–1720 (London: Routledge, 2007). And for a reading of the Polifemo as inflected by early modern scepticism, see now Ancell, ‘Este … cíclope’.

⁹On the pair's stay in Spain, see David García Cueto, La estancia española de los pintores boloñeses Agostino Mitelli y Angelo Michele Colonna, 1658–1662 (Granada: Univ. de Granada, 2005).

¹²My thanks to Terry O'Reilly for advice on sharpening my translation here.

¹⁰For details and dates of the work's conception, see M. J. Woods, Gracián Meets Góngora: The Theory and Practice of Wit (Warminster: Aris & Philips, 1995), 18.

¹¹See Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, De acuto et arguto liber unicus, in Wykłady Poetyki (Praecepta poetica), ed. Stanisław Skimina (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy Im. Ossolińskich, 1958), 5/10. (This volume is double paginated, the first number corresponding to the page of each individual text by Sarbiewski within the edited volume, the second to the overall volume itself. Both numbers will be given here).

¹³See Martial, Epigrams, ed. and trans. Walter C. A. Ker, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA/London: Heinemann, 1961), Vol. I, I.xiv, 38 (Ker's translation, 39).

¹⁴As Pring-Mill briefly observes, Sarbiewski focuses on relationships, not on the terms of a conceit. See Robert Pring-Mill, ‘Revisiting Gracián: The Linkages of Wit’, in Culture and Society in Habsburg Spain: Studies Presented to R. W. Truman by His Pupils and Colleagues on the Occasion of his Retirement, ed. Nigel Griffin et al. (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2001), 153–72 (p. 163).

¹⁵This said, of course, given that each ratio is derived from topics, as Sarbiewski's complex model for generating conceits sets out (De acuto et arguto, 11/22–14/28), it is ultimately rooted in things and their qualities.

¹⁶‘Effectus ergo et proprietas acuti est admirationem cum delectatione parere in animo audientis. Admiratio vero nascitur ex inopinato […] Nam ut Aristoteles docet, admiratio nascitur ex ignoratione causarum. […] Itaque sicut admiratio nascitur ex dissentaneo magis proprie […] ita delectatio magis ex altera parte nascitur ex consentaneo […] Atque ita coniunctio admirationis cum delectatione nascitur adaequate ex coniunctione dissentanei et consentanei’ (De acuto et arguto, 7/14).

¹⁷See The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Helen Gardner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 19.

¹⁸For a recent general consideration of Sarbiewski and Gracián, and of the possibility that the latter may have known the former's work, see Małgorzata Anna Sydor, ‘La concordia discors en Sarbiewski y Gracián’, in Edad de Oro Cantabrigense. Actas del VII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional del Siglo de Oro, ed. Anthony Close and Sandra María Fernández Vales (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2006), 585–90.

¹⁹See Woods, Gracián Meets Góngora, 12.

²⁰See Woods, Gracián Meets Góngora, 21. See also his comment ‘Gracián himself, who places emphasis on beauty, makes no such requirement for a discordant note’ (30). For Pring-Mill's countering of Woods’ position, see ‘Revisiting Gracián: The Linkages of Wit’, 165–69.

²¹On this point, compare T. E. May, ‘Notes on Gracián's “agudeza” ’, in May, Wit of the Golden Age: Articles on Spanish Literature (Kassel: Reichenberger, 1986), 270–83 (p. 282): ‘All agudezas communicate a correspondence found between things. “Correspondence” is a wide term, ranging from any kind of concordance to any kind of opposition. But, since all concordance is between things which are in some respects different and all contrast is between things which are in some respects alike, the basic agudeza divides at once into two main classes: agudeza de proporción and agudeza de improporción. The difference between the two is one of emphasis and temporal order’.

²²See Woods, Gracián Meets Góngora, 13.

²³From Donne's ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’.

²⁴For examples of poets who imitated Góngora here, see Góngora, Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, ed. Ponce Cárdenas, 224.

²⁵See Góngora, Polyphemus and Galatea, trans. Gilbert F. Cunningham, intro. A. A. Parker (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1977), 66.

²⁶On the ‘aesthetic of antithesis’, see my ‘ “Dar garrote al entendimiento” ’.

²⁷As the meeting point of a perspectival scheme's converging orthogonals, the vanishing point constitutes another apex, such that a one-point perspectival scheme has effectively a dual triangular structure and thus a double apex, the one positioning and determining the other. This said, I have equated Sarbiewski's apex (and thus acumen) with the viewing point precisely because the consequence of a viewer's physical movement to this point, namely to bring harmony out of seeming visual discord, parallels that of the reader's intellectual enagement with a conceit according to Sarbiewski.

²⁸See De acuto et arguto, 5/10.

²⁹‘perche essendo la prospettiva una mera fintione del vero, non s'obliga il pittore di farla parer vera da tutte le parti, mà da una determinata […] Se poi à cagione del sito irregolare l'architettura fuori del punto si deformi alquanto: e se le figure tramezzate nell'architettura fuori del punto commune havrann'anch'esse qualche deformità; ciò oltre che è scusato dalle ragioni già dette, non è difetto mà lode dell'arte, che dal suo punto fà parer proportionato, diritto, piano, ò concave ciò che tale non è' (see Andrea Pozzo, Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum, Part 1 [Roma: Joannis Jacobi Komarek, 1693], after fig. 100).

³⁰In schemes where quadratura seeks to raise the real room's height, artists could incorporate several vanishing points in order to lessen the dramatic disjunction between real and illusionistic architecture that is a consequence of one-point perspective schemes like Pozzo's nave in Sant'Ignazio, though distortion remains unavoidable. Palomino gives instructions for such a scheme based on Colonna and Mitelli's practice. See Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco, El museo pictórico y escala óptica, ed. Juan A. Céan Bermúdez (Madrid: Aguilar, 1947), 614–15.

³¹As he writes: ‘Nota autem non esse necessarium, ut semper dissentaneum praenoscatur, postea autem cognoscatur consentaneum, sed posse etiam prius cognosci consentaneum, postea autem dissentaneum. Acutum enim, ut iam initio diximus, est affinitas dissentanei et consentanei, sive unum prius, sive aliud praenoscatur vel postnoscatur. Unio enim illorum tam bene dici potest et esse discors concordia, quam concors discordia’ (De acuto et arguto, 8/16).

³²See Palomino, El museo pictórico, ed. Céan Bermúdez, 922–23.

³³Compare Sarbiewski, De acuto et arguto, 3/6.

³⁵See Deleuze, The Fold, 4. Deleuze subsequently expands on the spatial idea expressed in the ‘allegory’ of the Baroque house with explicit reference to Baroque architecture and art (28–30).

³⁴See Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London/New York: Continuum, 2003), 3. In ‘Folding Space and Staging the Palace’ I have drawn on Deleuze's notion of the Zweifalt to conceptualize the use of space in court drama; in this paragraph, I am expanding on my brief outline of the fold in that study (81).

³⁶For the hierarchy of monads, see Leibniz, Against Barbaric Physics, in Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1989), 319. (All page references that follow are to this edition.) See also Leibniz to Burchardus de Volder, 20 June 1703 (177); The Principle of Philosophy, or, the Monadology (no. 83, 223). For Leibniz's approach to the relationship between the body and the monad, a simple substance independent of and thus shut off from all other things, see Leibniz to Burchardus de Volder, 1704 or 1705 (181–82); A New System of Nature (143–44); Primary Truths (33); and That We Have All Ideas in Us; and of Plato's Doctrine of Reminiscence (58).

³⁷See Deleuze, The Fold, 12.

³⁸Salcedo Coronel, for example, reads this line as a pleonasm, taking ‘carcaj’ as a synonym for ‘aljaba’, whilst Pellicer argues they are distinct items. See García de Salcedo Coronel, El ‘Polifemo’ de don Luis de Góngora comentado (Madrid: Juan González, 1629), fol.62^v and José Pellicer de Salas y Tovar, Lecciones solemnes a las obras de Don Luis de Góngora y Argote (Madrid, Imprenta del Reino, 1630), facs. ed. (Hildesheim/New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1971), col. 201. Like Pellicer, Díaz de Rivas also views them as distinct. See Dámaso Alonso, Góngora y el ‘Polifemo’, 5^th ed., 3 vols (Madrid: Gredos, 1967), III, 175. See also José María Micó, El ‘Polifemo’ de Luis de Góngora: ensayo de crítica e historia literaria (Barcelona: Península, 2001), 57 and Góngora, Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, ed. Ponce Cárdenas, 276. Góngora's use of ‘si … no’ was condemned by Jáuregui and defended by Díaz de Rivas. See Jáuregui, Antídoto contra la pestilente poesía de las ‘Soledades’, aplicado a su autor para defenderle de sí mismo, and Díaz de Rivas, Discursos apologéticos por el estilo del ‘Polifemo’ y ‘Soledades’, in Eunice Joiner Gates, Documentos gongorinos (México D.F.: Colegio de México, 1960), 111–12. On Góngora's varied use of the phrase, see Dámaso Alonso, ‘Repetición de fórmulas estilísticas’, in La lengua poética de Góngora, 3^rd ed. (Madrid: Revista de Filología Española, 1961), 135–56.

³⁹As Micó also notes (El ‘Polifemo’, 36): ‘El epifonema final cierra otro sistema de correlación iniciado en la octava precedente: (Galatea) flores—corza—en tierra/(Palemo) espuma—delfín—en agua, y enlaza retóricamente con la interrogación anterior al «recrear en forma nueva y bellísima la riquísima tradición de “prodigios” e “imposibles” ya existente en la poesía grecolatina y renacentista, transfiriéndola al plano real» (Vilanova […])’. On adynaton here, see also Góngora, Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, ed. Ponce Cárdenas, 232.

⁴⁰See my ‘Baroque Space: Claudio Coello's Sagrada Forma’, 784–85.

⁴¹See, for example, Leibniz, The Principle of Philosophy, or, the Monadology (nos. 56 and 57) and Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason (no. 12) in Philosophical Essays, trans. Ariew and Garber, 220 and 211. On this conception of the monad, compare Deleuze, The Fold, 24, and his comment that ‘the monad has furniture and objects only in trompe l’œil’ (28). It should be emphasized that it is precisely due to the compacted nature of Góngora's language that so much can be enfolded into each stanza.

⁴²See Isabel Torres, The Polyphemus Complex. Rereading the Baroque Mythological Fable, Special Monograph Issue, BHS, LXXXIII:2 (2006), 72. See also Salcedo Coronel, El ‘Polifemo’ de don Luis de Góngora comentado, fol. 106^r. Jesús Ponce Cárdenas points out that Góngora's emphasis on doubt in stanza 53 is not found in Tomaso Stigliani, his source for these lines. See ‘La forja del estilo sublime: aspectos de la hipálage en el Polifemo de Góngora’, in Cinco ensayos polifémicos (Málaga: Univ. de Málaga, 2009), 371–449 (p. 417). And in relation to both stanzas, he furthermore notes that ‘mediante la inserción de un elemento “partícipe” o “testigo” el poeta obtendría un efecto de distanciamiento con respecto al universo relatado, una ficción de perspicua objetividad que se resalta mediante el uso de la diaporesis en ambos pasajes’ (‘La forja del estilo sublime’, 421). The ‘si … no’ figure, of course, can also similarly embody doubt, not least for the reader, as we have seen. Díaz de Rivas’ comments on an example of this figure from the Soledades (‘si Aurora no con rayos, Sol con flores’), criticized by Jáuregui in the Antídoto, are pertinent here: ‘Si Aurora no con rayos, Sol con flores. Es elegante pensamiento. Atribuyen los Poetas a la Aurora las flores, y al Sol los rayos. Trueca, pues, el Poeta estos atributos y dice que las serranas coronadas de flores o parecían Aurora con rayos, o Sol con flores. El Antídoto, no penetrando la gala y frasi de nuestro Poeta, dice que el sí y el no de que usa nuestro Poeta se han de usar cuando queremos significar repugnancia […] Así afirma que en este lugar el Poeta quiere decir que estas serranas no eran Auroras, sino Soles. Pero el sentido del verso incluye condición, como quien dice: si no me concedéis que es Aurora con rayos, es Sol con flores, con que significa que eran lo uno y lo otro. […] Y así cuando [el Poeta] dice: si no Aurora con rayos, no dice con certidumbre que no es Aurora, sino dudando, por virtud de la condición si. Por donde hace este sentido: O es Aurora con rayos, o Sol con flores; o éste: Si no me concedéis que es Aurora con rayos, es Sol con flores. De modo que siempre va el Poeta debajo de duda’. See Pedro Díaz de Rivas, Discursos apologéticos por el estilo del ‘Polifemo’ y ‘Soledades’, in Gates, Documentos gongorinos, 111–12.

⁴³In terms of Gracián's Agudeza, Parker reads the lines in stanza 53 as an example of disproportion, whilst Alonso cites Góngora's contemporary, Díaz de Rivas, on the number of syllables in the line ‘o al cielo humano o al cíclope celeste’ as being expressive of Polifemo's monstruous size. See Parker, ‘Introduction’, Polyphemus and Galatea, 43, and Alonso, Góngora y el ‘Polifemo’, III, 267–68. On this stanza, see also Ancell (‘Este … cíclope’, 566–67) and especially his comments on synalepha in its final line (568).

⁴⁴Reciprocity of exchange is implicit in much figurative language, but my interest here is in the overt folding of terms that occurs across structural elements in two distinct art forms, in both of which the visual and the conceptual come into play.

⁴⁵See Deleuze, The Fold, 12.

⁴⁶On Góngora's use of double hypallage in the Polifemo, see the excellent essay (‘La forja del estilo sublime’) by Ponce Cárdenas, who views it as the ‘figura de figuras’ (424–26).

⁴⁷See Salcedo Coronel, El ‘Polifemo’ de don Luis de Góngora comentado, fol. 52^r. See Torres (The Polyphemus Complex, 53) on the ‘kiss that is syntactically absent from the text’. On the dissonance and disproportion at play within the conceit, see Parker, ‘Introduction’, Polyphemus and Galatea, 42–43, 69. On the gaze and sight within the poem, see Mary E. Barnard, ‘The Gaze and the Mirror: Vision, Desire, and Identity in Góngora's Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea’, Calíope, 8 (2002), 69–85.

⁴⁸On these lines, see especially Parker, ‘Introduction’, Polyphemus and Galatea, 24–25, 64–65; Cancelliere, Góngora: itinerarios de la visión, 115–16; and Torres, The Polyphemus Complex, 43–44.

⁴⁹See Emanuele Tesauro, Il cannocchiale aristotelico (Venezia: Paolo Baglioni, 1669), 205.

⁵⁰See Soledad segunda, ll. 473–87, in Luis de Góngora, Soledades, ed. Robert Jammes (Madrid: Castalia, 1994), 487.

⁵¹For a comparable fold with the suggestion of reciprocal movement in and out as the sun which sets in the sea is replaced by the two suns that are Galatea's eyes, see stanza 47 of the Polifemo: ‘Deja las ondas, deja el rubio coro/de las hijas de Tetis y el mar vea, / cuando niega la luz un carro de oro, / que en dos la restituye Galatea’. The beautifully fluid, unfolding sequence ‘mano-ondas-ondas-pez’ of the description in the Soledades (ll. 482–84) has its equivalent in the occluded chiasmus of the description of Acis drinking: ‘caluroso, al arroyo da las manos/y con ellas las ondas a su frente’ (ll. 209–10).

⁵²See Sarbiewski, De acuto et arguto, 5/10.

⁵³In connection with the final stanza, for example, Pellicer cites Manrique (‘Nuestras vidas son los ríos/que van a dar en la mar, / que es el morir, / allá van los señoríos/derechos a se acabar/y consumir’) along with Ecclesiastes I.7 and Heraclitus. See Lecciones solemnes, columns 347–48. For Ovid's description of the bodily emergence of Acis as a river god, see Metamorphoses, XIII, ll. 887–97.

⁵⁴Sicily's link with life is most forcibly expressed by its abundance, not least through what Gracián identifies as the ‘agudeza de exageración’ employed in stanza 18. See Gracián, Agudeza y arte de ingenio, XIX, 457.

⁵⁵Water is, of course, by no means simply linked with death, as Parker's summary of its presence in the poem usefully indicates: ‘If, after reaching the river's acclamation by the sea, we look back on the poem, we see how important a place the sea assumes in the framework of the fable. It surrounds the island. Much emphasis is placed upon the sea-gods. With no justification in mythology Góngora makes the mermen Glaucus and Palaemon woo Galatea, who is herself a sea-nymph. Acis is the son of a sea-nymph. Polyphemus is the son of Neptune; and the presiding deity of the poem, Venus, was also born of the sea. In the light of Acis's metamorphosis it seems as if mankind, symbolically, is born of the sea and returns to the sea; as if life and death go hand in hand; as if, too, life were courted by death’. See Parker, ‘Introduction’, Polyphemus and Galatea, 78; and compare Rubén Soto Rivera, ‘Acerca de Polifemo y Galatea, o la Natura: un acercamiento parmenídeo a la Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea, de Ovidio y Góngora (II)’, in Góngora Hoy VII, ed. Roses, 187–213 (pp. 206–07).