La gravité des affects : le madrigal face à l’image religieuse (Cascales, Pacheco, Quevedo)

Abstract

Around 1610 in Cartagena (Murcia), pilgrims were able to wander down a devotional path through gardens offering various paintings and literary texts. Today, all that remains of these gardens are desert ruins, as well as a selection of poems collected by Francisco Cascales. Francisco Pacheco, in turn, provides keys for understanding not only the sense of this type of religious painting, but also the rhetorical strategies of the literature dedicated to it. Quevedo and the Spanish translators of Marino instead focus on the spectator’s emotions before the Pietà and representations of martyrs. For them, a central question emerges: how can the poet’s voice bring together both sentient rocks and hearts of stone? In these three cases, the poetic form of the madrigal concentrates both the expression of the soul’s passions and a manner of serious meditation, revealing –in its brevity– a powerful density.

Keywords

• Francisco Pacheco
• painting and sculpture
• devotional art
• Francisco Cascales
• Francisco de Quevedo
• Giambattista Marino