Painting and Poetry in Early Modern Spain: The Primacy of Venetian Colore in Góngora’s Polyphemus and The Solitudes *
Abstract Luis de Góngora’s Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea (1612) and The Solitudes (1613) have inspired comparisons to painting ever since they first appeared in manuscript form at the Court of Philip III. Engaging the doctrine of ut pictura poesis, which notes the kinship between painting and poetry, Góngora creates pictorial conceits modeled in color as if using a painter’s palette, and thus his poems read like imaginary art galleries. By way of both plastic and discursive references to the Venetian school, Góngora inserts his poetry into one of the most salient polemics of his time, the paragone tra colore e disegno, the debate over the supremacy of Venetian color versus Florentine draftsmanship. This essay seeks to provide a reading of Góngora’s major poems in light of the paragone as it played out in seventeenth-century Spain among art theorists and painters such as Francisco Pacheco and Domenico Theotocopoulis (El Greco), and intertwined with related discourses pertaining to artistic progress and innovation, including the link between aesthetics and religious reform.