Cervantes' Architectures: Don Quixote and the Dangers Outside

media release: Lecture:“Cervantes' Architectures: Don Quixote and the Dangers Outside” on Friday, April 8 @ 4:00 PM CDT (in-person) New Location: Van Hise Hall, Room 114  

Workshop: Friday, April 8 @ 12:00 PM CDT (in-person) UClub Room 212, 432 East Campus Mall. Please RSVP to cvc@mailplus.wisc.edu to register for the workshop. Space is limited.

Lecture Abstract:

In this talk, I would like to provide a glimpse of some of the topics discussed in my forthcoming book, Cervantes Architectures: the Dangers Outside. I will limit my remarks to the author’s most canonical text, Don Quixote, rather than attempting to deal with all of his works of long prose fiction, as I do in the book. Cervantes was well acquainted with Vitruvius’s De Architectura, a guide to building dedicated to Caesar Augustus and the only classical treatise that survived into the Renaissance. The Spanish writer read some Spanish treatises on the subject such as Diego de Sagredo’s Medidas del Romano (1526). As he walked to the streets of Seville, he was also cognizant of Hernán Ruiz’s use of Vitruvius. I am not arguing that the Spanish author was an expert in the field; only that his general knowledge of this art together with his observation of structures familiar to him led him to understand the primacy of place for human beings and for the characters in his works. He would wonder, very much like Yi-Fu Tuan does today if we can accept unreservedly the notion that place, the inside of a church or castle implies safety, guarding us from the dangers outside. This talk will consist of four main sections. The first will look at composite or even metamorphic architectures as a study is transformed into a jail and a palace.  The second section of the talk will look at the most utilized building in the first part of Don Quixote, the inn. We will look at questions of occupancy and at Cervantes curious mathematics. The third section moves to the second part of Don Quixote, pointing the knight’s discussion of the Roman Pantheon in order to understand its importance for the novel’s architectures. We will end with a brief look at the church in El Toboso, which knight and squire had taken to be Dulcinea’s palace. A careful reading of the novel in terms of architecture leads to a series of surprises: how the awful din of a jail is muted with a new façade that claims eurithmia; how a study is furnished in melancholy; or how a tower indicates that a journey will never be completed.

Biography: Professor Frederick De Armas is a literary scholar, critic and novelist who is Andrew A. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor in Humanities at the University of Chicago. His scholarly work focuses on the literature of the Spanish Golden Age (Cervantes, Calderón, Claramonte, Lope de Vega), often from a comparative perspective. His interests include the politics of astrology; magic and the Hermetic tradition; ekphrasis; the relations between the verbal and the visual particularly between Spanish literature and Italian art; and the interconnections between myth and empire during the rule of the Habsburgs.

Sponsors: Both events are possible thanks to the generous financial support of the Anonymous Fund. The Center for Visual Cultures would also like to thank the departments of Art History, Spanish and Portuguese, LACIS, English and the Center for History of the Environment.