SOURCE: Folkenflik, Vivian. “Vision and Truth: Baroque Art Metaphors in Guzmán de Alfarache.” Modern Language Notes 88, no. 2 (March 1973): 347-55.

[In the following essay, Folkenflik discusses Alemán's references to painting in Guzmán de Alfarache, many of which show the author's insistence that the visual world is an illusion.]

Towards the end of his description of his Italian travels, the narrator of Guzmán de Alfarache has occasion to lament that nowadays men judge only according to what they see:

Cuando fueres alquimia, eso que reluciere de ti, eso será venerado. Ya no se juzgan almas ni más de aquello que ven los ojos.

(IV, 92¹)

Anyone who has read this far in Mateo Alemán's massive picaresque novel will agree. Social reality is so completely founded on what can be seen that most of the inhabitants of Guzmán's world pay little attention to anything else. The inventive tricks by which the hero makes his way in the world all rest on his conception of it as a place in which parecer is what counts. His calculations often miscarry—as the proverb has it, “que aunque vistan a la mona de seda, mona se queda” (II, 115). Nevertheless, exposure is as often due to inadequate attention to disguise as to anything. We are left with the impression that if people cannot see the monkey through the silk, they will accept the masquerade. Indeed, it often seems that there is nothing else of lasting importance:

Lastimosa cosa es que quiera un ídolo de estos tales particular adoración, sin acordarse que es hombre representante, que sale con aquel oficio o con figura dél y que se volverá presto a entrar en el vistuario del sepulcro a ser ceniza, como hijo de la tierra. Mira, hermano, que se acaba la farsa y eres lo que yo y todos somos unos.

(II, 151)

By the time we have learned the lessons of the courts and courtyards depicted by our narrator-hero, we readily concede that anyone who places his trust in the hollow appearances of this world is deceived by a mirage.

It is, then, slightly disturbing for the reader to realize that when the narrator speaks of his own story—which is told to teach us the falsity of what we see—he very often does so in visual terms. His book is compared to paintings of various kinds, and the art of writing it is discussed in terms of the art of painting. When we first run across such passages, we may simply categorize them as quaint or charming, but we soon come to realize that they are worth closer attention.

The first reference to painting and its relation to the novel can be found in the Dedicatoria al Discreto Lector, in an apology to the discerning reader for anything in the book which is roughly sketched instead of being properly colored and finished:

Muchas cosas hallarás de rasguño y bosquejadas, que dejé de matizar por causas que lo impidieron. Otras están algo más retocadas, que huí de seguir y dar alcance, temeroso y encogido de cometer alguna no pensada ofensa. Y otras que al descubierto me arrojé sin miedo, como dignas que sin rebozo se tratasen.

(I, 34)

What can be clearly seen, what is accurately presented, is shown without apology; but the author is ashamed of his less finished work. It may occur to us that labeling something as a sketch suggests that there is a reality beyond what we can see, but this remains within the framework of a gracious and modest introduction.

In the story itself, we soon find a similar passage, excusing this time his inadequate portrait of his mother:

Porque con la natural suya, sin traer aderezo en el rostro, era tan curioso y bien puesto el de su cuerpo, que, ayudándose unas prendas a otras, toda en todo, ni el pincel pudo llegar ni la imaginación aventajarse.

(I, 75)

This lady, who belongs more to the world of the pastoral than to Guzmán's own, does not indulge in the common artifices of her sex. Nature has made her so lovely that the painter is not capable of achieving her beauty. We must imagine it for ourselves, though try as we will we cannot imagine anything better. The ultimate effort of our imagination must finish the portrait. The apology is thus transformed into an invitation: our work must supplement that of the artist.

This metamorphosis is not an isolated case. When the traveling clerk is telling Guzmán the story of Ozmín and Daraja, he explains why he is unable to describe Daraja's grief. Here again, the subject matter is beyond the possibilities of his tale:

Mucho diré callando en este paso. Que para pintar tristeza semejante, fuera poco el ardid que usó un pintor famoso en la muerte de una doncella que, después de pintada muerta en su lugar, puso a la redonda a sus padres, hermanos, deudos, amigos, conocidos y criados de la casa, en la parte y con el sentimiento que cada uno en su grado podía tocalle; mas, cuando llegó a los padres dejóles por acabar las caras, dando licencia que pintase cada uno semejante dolor según lo sintiese. Porque no hay palabras ni pincel que llegue a manifestar amor ni dolor de padres; sino solas algunas obras que de los gentiles habemos leído. Así lo habré de hacer. El pincel de mi ruda lengua será brochón grosero y ha de formar borrones. Cordura será dejar a discreción del oyente y del que la historia supiere, cómo suelen sentirse pasiones cual ésta. Cada uno lo considere juzgando el corazón ajeno por el suyo.

(I, 207-208)

Here the narrator ends by excusing his tongue as a rude brush, but this apologia is not a shamefaced apology. The speaker does not regard his silence as a failure: it is by being silent that he will speak. “Mucho diré callando. …” And in fact he is not silent; but instead of speaking about Daraja he moves away from her, and speaks about something else: a famous painting described in some detail. Here the artist felt that he could not paint the sorrow of the bereaved parents. Not that he could not see their faces, but that their faces, even properly reproduced, would not express the reality of their sorrow. He thus calls on us, as the narrator of the tale is doing, to complete the picture according to the emotions of our own hearts. The words of the narrator and the paint of the artist are considered inadequate in very similar ways here, “porque no hay palabras ni pincel que llegue a manifestar amor ni dolor de padres.” We must participate in the tale of Daraja just as we would in the painting of the funeral: in each case we recognize that it is our own grief which gives reality to the work of art.

But where does this grief of ours come from? The narrator speaks as if all that were involved was a sort of looking-glass arrangement, where we substitute our own emotions for those of the bereaved parents; but the situation is not quite so simple. Even allowing for the devastating infant mortality rate of the seventeenth century, not every reader can be assumed to have lost a beloved child; most of us will have to imagine what our emotions would be. The viewer of the painting is presumably helped by the mood set by the rest of the tableau. We, as readers, are influenced by the narrator, whose description of the funeral painting has been so charged with emotion that we have been made to participate without our knowledge already. The elaborate presentation of the friends gathered round in their varying appropriate degrees of sorrow, leading up to the halting simplicity of the sentences about the parents' anguish: these have made us imagine and experience something like what we assume to be their grief.

Even then, however, there is a decided gap between these emotions and the faces of the parents. Surely we cannot be expected to construe the actual lineaments of these faces according to our own? Or according to our own ideal of beauty? Any such suggestion does not quite work out. We are not in fact interested in visualizing their faces at all: they have moved out of the realm of anything that can be seen as we see things in the everyday world. They have some kind of reality for us, but that reality is created by our imagination. In no sense is it restricted to any of the frameworks through which we have come: our visual world, or the mourners', or the artist's own.

It is overwhelmingly probable that Alemán has invented this anecdote, but in any case his use of it is his own. We begin with the clerk telling our hero of Daraja's grief; then move to the painting; then, learning that no one could have painted such a subject (if not some artist living in tantalizingly foreign lands), we are obliged to complete the painting ourselves, applying the grief we create towards the story of Daraja. This very movement from one level to another, and from the fiction whose medium is linguistic to one a degree further removed, creates a stimulating atmosphere which excites the imagination and makes it more receptive to the spiritual reality Alemán is trying to suggest.

It is illuminating to compare this to a legend which interests Guzmán in Florence. One of the first things he goes to see is the church of the Annunciation, where he is struck by the following legend:

Otro viaje hice a la Anunciada, iglesia deste nombre, por una imagen que allí está pintada en una pared, que mejor se pudiera llamar cielo, teniendo tal pintura, de la encarnación del Hijo de Dios. La cual se tiene por tradición haberla hecho un pintor tan extremado en su arte, como de limpia y santa vida. Pues teniendo acabado ya lo que allí se ve pintado y que sólo restaba por hacer el rostro de la Virgen, señora nuestra, temeroso si por ventura sabría darle aquel vivo que debiera, ya en la edad, en la color, en el semblante honesto, en la postura de los ojos, en esta confusión se adormeció muy poco y, en recordando, queriendo tomar los pinceles para con el favor de Dios poner manos en la obra, la halló hecha. No es necesario aquí mayor encarecimiento, pues ya la hubiese milagrosamente obrado la mano poderosa del Señor o ya los ángeles, ella es angelical pintura.

(III, 238)

Once again, the face of the central character has not been completed. This time, however, divine intervention has limned the face of the holy Virgin. In this case, of course, the face has been visualized and incarnated in the painting, but not by a human mind or brush.

In a different way, we have again gone beyond our ordinary relationship to the work of art. Guzmán speaks of the wall on which the fresco is painted as “una pared, que mejor se pudiera llamar cielo”—a very real identification of Alemán, whatever it would have been for a Renaissance artist. Alemán's language makes us sympathize with the painter: the enumeration of the problems involved in creating with human skill the semblante of the Virgin, the hesitation of “queriendo tomar los pinceles para con el favor de Dios poner manos en la obra,” and the startling fait accompli at the end: “la halló hecha.” It is done, and lifted above the level of his own work: “ella es angelical pintura.” The syntactical wordplay of the last phrase permits an affirmation of the same kind as the opening pared-cielo metamorphosis. The fresco has become angelical in more ways than one, and the painting of the Virgin's face is a re-enacting of the Incarnation of the Son of God. Alemán may not have invented this legend, but his treatment of it belongs to a new age. What interests him is the way in which the work of art can go beyond the normal boundaries set for it by the Renaissance world.

The most detailed discussion of a work of art occurs, however, in the opening chapter of the story. This time the painting which goes beyond accuracy is apparently treated unfavorably, made the butt of a comic anecdote. However, we must not dismiss the incident out of hand, or say that there is no sense to be made of Alemán's use of the work of art. The apparent contradictions may well be reconcilable in terms of the different dramatic functions of the two passages.

In this, the opening chapter of the book, Guzmán is at pains to convince us of his veracity. He is not one to distort a tale to make it sound better—not the sort of scoundrel who,

si se le ofrece propósito para cuadrar su cuento, deshará las pirámides de Egipto, haciendo de la pulga gigante, de la presunción evidencia, de lo oído visto y ciencia de la opinión, sólo por florear su elocuencia y acreditar su discreción.

(I, 49)

On the contrary, he will tell the truth, and the portrait of his father which he is about to give will be the unvarnished facts. To illustrate his point, he tells the tale of a foreigner who is so fond of his two Spanish horses that he wishes to carry home with him a faithful portrait—“el fiel retrato”—of them, since he is unable to take the real thing. He has therefore commissioned two artists to paint rival portraits, and will pay an extra premium to the better of the two. The first man paints an absolutely accurate portrait of his model:

El uno pintó un overo con tanta perfección, que sólo faltó dalle lo imposible, que fué el alma; porque en lo más, engañando a la vista, por no hacer del natural diferencia, cegara de improviso cualquier descuidado entendimento. Con esto solo acabó su cuadro, dando en todo lo dél restante claros y oscuros, según y en el lugar que convenía.

(I, 50)

This painting is able to “trick the eye” of any unprepared viewer, and “blind the understanding,” since there is, once one enters into the fiction, apparently no difference between it and the real thing. This is to represent perfection, insofar as perfection can be attained by accuracy. We may note in passing, however, how different this perfection is from the achievement of the other works of art Alemán presents: here, though the eye is tricked, there is no emotional conviction, merely a stunned absence of rational opposition, for the horse we see has everything but a soul. The other artists we read about may not be so proficient, but they move us more; and their great advantage is in giving the effect of soul, of some reality higher than the material.

In contrast, the second man is decidedly less skillful:

El otro pintó un rucio rodado, color de cielo y, aunque su obra muy buena, no llegó con gran parte a la que os he referido; pero extremóse en una cosa de que él era muy diestro: y fué que, pintado el caballo, a otras partes en las que halló blancos, por lo alto dibujó admirables lejos, nubes, arreboles, edificios arruinados y varios encasamentos; por lo bajo del suelo cercano cantidad de arboledas, yerbas floridas, prados y riscos; y en una parte del cuadro, colgando de un tronco los jaeces y al pie dél estaba una silla jineta. Tan costosamente obrado y bien acabado, cuanto se puede encarecer.

(I, 50-51)

In examining this passage, we notice first that the painter is less adept than his predecessor at reproducing his model. We begin, then, as before, with a statement of inadequacy. The central figure, the horse, is not very well done. In return, however, the artist has “dextrously” surrounded him with a framework of “admirables lejos”—houses and ruins and far-off skies and sunsets which can set off this horse “color de cielo.” On the bottom of the painting are more familiar, earthy things—grass, rocks and flowers. Most intriguing of all, on one side of the horse, leading to the trunk of a tree, is a marvelously worked saddle and bridle. This arrangement is clearly meant to attract our attention, forcing us into the painting by impressing us through the standards of our everyday life—the costly well-crafted saddle—to accept without demur the less well painted horse and, more happily, the “admirables lejos” which complete the work. Unfortunately for the artist's scheme, he has subordinated the portrait to his conception as a whole. We move not only from the saddle to the horse, but from the horse to the things in the distance. Even the color of the horse has been assimilated to the color of the skies. And the structure of the paragraph indicates that in no time at all our eye would move back to the saddle again. But the gentleman who has commissioned the portrait, like many patrons of the arts, is more interested in the part than in the whole:

“… no les tengo a afición que a los caballos: y lo que de otro modo que por pintura no puedo gozar, eso huelgo de llevar.”

(I, 51)

The painter's defense is treated rather ambivalently:

Volvió el pintor a decir: “En lienzo tan grande pareciera muy mal un solo caballo; y es importante y aun forzoso para la vista y ornato componer la pintura de otras cosas diferentes, que la califiquen y den lustre, de tal manera, que pareciendo así mejor, es muy justo llevar con el caballo sus guarniciones y silla, especialmente estando con tal perfeción obrado, que, si de oro me diesen otras tales, no las tomaré por las pintadas.”

(I, 51-52)

According to him, his painted bridle and saddle are more valuable than real ones could be, even if they were made of gold: they are absolutely necessary to the composition and are, besides, exquisitely worked. The gentleman naturally replies that he is perfectly willing to buy the portrait of his horse, and that if the trappings are raising the price, the artist is quite free to sell them elsewhere. This comes across as a funny story at the expense of the supposedly high-minded artist who claims to ignore the solid-gold claims of the real world in favor of his own magnificent creation. At the same time, whatever price he is forced to accept, this artist is the one we are now concerned with. The first portrait, perfect as it was, has been forgotten altogether.

As in the other passages, the artist here has moved from a real or fancied inadequacy to a concern for something beyond strict visual representation, and has been interested in drawing us into a relationship with his work by whatever means he can. Such a work is deemed more interesting than one which aims only at an accurate reproduction of the visual world, in any case the object of Alemán's suspicions. Here Guzmán is telling this parable to prove to us what an accurate painter he is, but we must not accept the moral too uncritically. For one thing, we know very well that to take this parable at face value would be impossible: Alemán is not telling the story of his own life, and Guzmán's claims of veracity are part of an elaborate game Alemán is playing with his reader.

Moreover, the novel as a whole much more resembles the “lienzo tan grande” of the second painting than it does the first. Alemán is no serene copyist, able to produce soulless perfection. We see much more evidence of feelings of inadequacy than of the workmanlike confidence of the first craftsman. And in fact, when Guzmán goes on to boast of his own accuracy as a portraitist, decrying those who

no pensando cumplen con pintar el caballo si lo dejan en cerro y desenjaezado, ni dicen la cosa si no lo comentan como más viene a cuento a cada uno,

(I, 53)

we realize that, Guzmán's pride notwithstanding, this is not at all the way he tells his own story. What interests him about each man is precisely the saddle and trappings—how the man is dressed and even how he came by his all-important clothes. And “decir la cosa” certainly involves for him a thorough commentary on any revelant or passing reflections his subject may inspire. If we look at the novel as a whole, we do not see Guzmán standing alone and naked, like the piebald horse; we see him, like the dapple-gray, surrounded by finely worked saddles, bits of architecture, and streaks of some far-off heaven, not to mention a herd of his fellows as well.

Finally, like the second painter, Alemán makes all sorts of attempts to draw us into his work by fair means or foul; his admonitions to the reader, which attempt to control our interest, stand in much the relation to his book that the commanding saddle and bridle do to the artist's painting. One could say simply that Guzmán's claims to accuracy treat Alemán's own concern in a comic mode, but there is more to it than this. There is here no clear-cut sense that Guzmán is differentiated from his creator, nor that he is deceiving himself. This half-accusatory, half-apologetic obsession is at the heart of Alemán's own work.

Any device which forces the imagination to work is superior for Alemán to the accurate representation which leaves nothing to be done by the observer. In the Elogio de Alonso de Barros, Alemán casts this in the form of a parallel between painting and history, coming out in favor of the latter:

Si nos ponen en dueda los pintores, que como en archivo y depósito guardaron en sus lienzos—aunque debajo de líneas y colores mudos—las imágenes de los que por sus hechos heroicos merecieron sus tablas y de los que por sus indignas costumbres dieron motivo a sus pinceles, pues nos despiertan con la agradable pintura de las unas y con la aborrecible de las otras, por su fama a la imitación y por su infamia al escarmiento: mayores obligaciones, sin comparación, tenemos a los que en historias, tan al vivo nos lo representan, que sólo nos vienen a hacer ventaja en haberlo escrito, pues nos persuaden sus relaciones, como si a la verdad lo hubiéramos visto como ellos.

(I, 38)

The idea that a written relation can persuade us that we have seen the event (“como si a la verdad lo hubiéramos visto como ellos”) better than a pictorial representation which would show us the objects that had been seen—this statement reveals again Alemán's distrust of the visual representation of reality in favor of an emotional conviction of perceiving it. This emotional conviction is itself, however, still conceived in terms of the visual. Alemán is unable to escape this orientation. When we speak of his vision of the world we are not using an empty metaphor, and the phenomenon of the vision itself is a continuing and unresolved source of tension. Thus the work of art which cannot in some way surpass pictorial representation has not conquered the deceitfulness of the worldly masquerade. For Alemán, literature is superior to painting because language forces it to move to what he can recognize as a conceptual level. Within the realm of literature, too much involvement in visual representation endangers the work, may even contaminate it; when Alemán moves away from the vivid plastic description of a colorful scene to a hint of some higher spiritual perspective, he is at once escaping this danger and trying to force the reader's imagination, by taking into account this “higher” reality, to create a dizzying juxtaposition which will be itself a justification of his claims.

In Alemán's references to paintings, then, we can come to an understanding of his attitudes towards his own work. His awareness that illusion and the representation of reality need not be opposites; his insistence on frameworks and his need to go beyond them; his distrust of the deceitful visual world countered by his obsession with it; his resolution of this conflict by an appeal to a higher spiritual reality which is to sweep the observer up out of himself—these baroque characteristics are repeatedly revealed in his treatment of real and imaginary works of art. The problem of the “truth” of the work no longer involves its accuracy, but its ability to convince us. In the end, like the man who approves of his painting upside down as well as right side up (V, 157-158), we learn not to insist that the artist give us an accurate representation of things as we think of them. As long as he has imposed his own kind of order, we can accept it, as we will be able to accept the masquerade we live in when we can see it as the tableau wrought by God:

Si se consideran las de Dios, muchas veces nos perecerán el caballo que se revuelca; empero, si volviésemos la tabla hecha por el soberano Artífice, hallaríamos que aquello es lo que se pide y que la obra está con toda su perfeción.

(V, 158)

Note

1. All references are to the edition of Samuel Gili y Gaya, Madrid, 1962.