 |
Charles Marvin Fairchild (SFS '48) Memorial
Gallery
October 14, 2005 · January
15, 2006
Home · Illustrations · Press
Gallery Talk: A
gallery talk for TILTING AT WINDMILLS:
DON QUIXOTE AT 400 will be held on Friday,
November 18, from 11:00 a.m. to noon
in the Fairchild Gallery,
with Prof. Barbara Mujica, of the Department
of Spanish and Portuguese. Admission
is free and is
open to the
public. If you plan to attend, please
contact the Georgetown University Art
Collection at (202) 687-4484; artcollection@georgetown.edu.
The gallery talk is being held in conjunction
with the symposium on Don Quixote being held
by the Department
of Spanish and Portuguese in the Murray
Room on the fifth floor of Lauinger
Library, including a panel
discussion at 1:00 p.m. with Professors
Francisco LaRubia Prado, Gwen Kirkpatrick,
and Barbara Mujica, to be
followed at 3:00 p.m. with a presentation
of the 1985 film Monsignor Quixote, with Alec
Guinness, directed
by Rodney Bennett.
 TILTING
AT WINDMILLS: DON QUIXOTE AT 400 celebrates
the four-hundredth anniversary of Part
I of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote
de la Mancha by Miguel Cervantes, and is one of
the few exhibitions in
the United States to commemorate this
milestone in the history of world literature.
TILTING AT WINDMILLS: DON
QUIXOTE AT 400 includes art and rare books
from the Georgetown University Library's
Special Collections division, including
a series of engravings by eigteenth-century
English master printmaker William Hogarth,
ten embossed color etchings by Canadian
artist Lucille Gilling, a color
woodcut by Hans Alexander Mueller, a color
wood engraving by Stanley
Bate, and a lithograph by Czech artist
Bohumil Krátký;
and handsome editions of the novel, such
as a 1780 set from Madrid and a nineteenth-century
tome illustrated
by Gustave Doré.
El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (The
Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of Mancha),
Part I published in 1605 and Part II in
1615, often is considered
to be the greatest novel ever written.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Victor Hugo, Sir
Walter Scott, and others
have given it the highest praise. The
German philosopher Friederich von Schelling
considered Don
Quixote and
Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister to be the
two greatest novels of all time.
Part I of Don Quixote had seven distinct editions,
in Madrid, Lisbon, and Valencia, in1605. Cervantes
knew of thirteen editions in his lifetime, published
in Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and Italy. The first
English edition dates from 1612.
The novel is rich in stylistic approaches, including
even a false lead about its authorship, a comic ploy
that anticipates later techniques by modern writers:
In Chapter 9 of Part I, the author speaks of finding
the manuscript of Don Quixote, written in Arabic,
among old notebooks and papers offered for sale by
a youth in Toledo; and claims that he had it translated
into Spanish by a bilingual Moor, in exchange for
fifty pounds of raisins and three bushels of wheat.
The work became the most frequently translated and
reprinted in the histories of the world’s secular
literature. Many hundreds of copies of the novel were
shipped to America in the early 1600s. Indeed, the
collection of Juan Sedó, of Barcelona, includes
around 2000 editions, dating from 1605 to the mid
1900s, with translations into more than fifty languages,
including such remote or unexpected tongues as macaronic
Latin, Esperanto, Kashmiri, Gaelic, Basque, Mogul,
Provençal, Tagalog, Basque, Japanese, Korean,
and many others.
Don Quixote (modern spelling, Quijote) has inspired
numerous musical compositions (such as the comic opera
by Antoine Alexandre Henri Poinsinet and François
Danican Philidor included in this exhibition, and
works by Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel, Jules Massenet,
Henry Purcell, Manuel de Falla, and others). The Spanish
National Orchestra will be playing works based on
Don Quixote in Mexico in October 2005.
Artistic works based on the novel include hundreds
of fine prints, drawings, sculptures,
and paintings, going back to the 1600s.
These dwell on many aspects
of the novel - the scores of varying episodes,
characters, imagery, and special themes.
 There is a total of 126 chapters in the novel (52
in Part I, 74 in Part II); and in the
small format Aguilar edition (Madrid, 1963), almost
every chapter
is accompanied by one or more prints,
dating from 1618 on. (A chronological discussion of
these printmakers,
century by century, will be found on pp.
129-141 of that edition.) Gustave Doré alone
completed 370 illustrations, based on visits to the
places that
figure in the novel, and a few of which
are shown in this exhibition. About half of these
illustrations
appear in the 1860 London edition, as
published by Putnam in New York in 1863.
An account of the overall character of the work is
beyond the purpose of this article. As everyone knows,
humorous episodes abound; these will elicit laughter
in its young readers (there have been many editions
for children). But the humor often is touching and
multi faceted in meaning, and older readers will smile
and will reflect on the subtle philosophical and societal
implications. As in the roughly 700 songs by Franz
Schubert, who set to music poetic texts by more than
one hundred writers, Don Quixote touches on a seemingly
infinite range of human concerns and feelings, including
friendship, the nature of love, tolerance, morality,
religion, philosophy, aesthetics, criminality, and
madness. For this writer, the most impressive aspect
of Don Quixote is the attention given to the need
for tolerance, including both religious tolerance
and racial harmony.
Tolerance as a theme is brought out most beautifully,
I believe, in the extended episode of the Christian
captive, beginning in Chapter 33, where we are first
introduced to Zoraida, an attractive, devout Moorish
woman. For this episode there are five prints accompanying
the text, in the Aguilar edition. In the 1863 American
edition (Putnam, New York), where all the illustrations
are by Gustave Doré, there are six prints related
to the same episode. Also noteworthy are illustrations
of the early title pages in the six-volume Spanish
edition of 1905, which celebrated the three-hundredth
anniversary of the novel. In this episode, we learn
that a Christian naval captain was captured in the
Mediterranean area and held prisoner in North Africa.
The largely open air prison is next to the house of
a rich Moor, father of Zoraida. She becomes attracted
to the Christian captive, and communicates with him
by means of messages dropped from her window. The
two are united, and with strong insistence from Zoraida
they escape to Spain, not without some harrowing difficulties.
(Doré contributes a beautiful print depicting
an attack on their vessel by a French boat.) They
finally arrive at a Spanish inn, she on a mule with
the Christian man walking at her side. She wishes
to be called "Maria," recalling the tales
of a Christian servant who regaled her with accounts
of the Virgin Mary. As with Joseph and Mary, there
is no room at this Spanish inn, although Dorotea,
a prominent figure in the novel, welcomes her and
provides hospitality. At the inn, the Christian captain
relates his story to Don Quixote and others with him.
The degree of tolerance between Christians and Moors
in Spain varied strongly from the time of the Moorish
invasion (711 C.E.) to the taking of Granada (1492)
and on the expulsion of the Moors around 1600. A beautiful
graphic illustration of racial compatibility in Spain
in medieval times is the illuminated miniature from
the great document, the Cantigas de Santa Maria (ca.
1270), which shows two musicians making music together,
one Christian and the other Moorish. The history of "convivencia" (harmonious
living) in Spain is long and complex. There were ups
and downs in Christian Moorish relations from the
year 711 up to the time of Cervantes. But scholars
have concluded that in the early centuries when the
Moors dominated Spain, there was a relatively high
degree of Moorish tolerance of the Christians. From
about 1300 on, as the Christians recovered more and
more of Spain, there generally was increasing intolerance
of the Moors.
Since the Moorish expulsion occurred around the time
that Cervantes was writing the novel,
his depiction of compatibility between the Christian
captive and
Zoraida is especially daring. It also
may be of interest to note that, in the novel, there
is an episode involving
a morisco (a Moor who lingered on in Spain),
only to be expelled in 1609. In this rather humorous
story,
found in Part II of the novel, the morisco,
Ricote, had returned from Germany, fancifully dressed
in the
French manner, and seeks out Don Quixote’s sidekick
Sancho Panza, his former Christian friend of earlier
days. Ricote offers him a meal of typically Spanish
food, including ham and the dressings, obviously in
the hope that he will not be "profiled" as
a Moor. Sancho is delighted to encounter
and welcome his old friend, in their two-way demonstration
of
their old-time spirit of tolerance.
Roderick
S. Quiroz is a meteorologist, scholar
of Spanish literature, and collector and
connoisseur of fine prints and other works
of art. A World War
II-era veteran of the U.S. Air Force and
career scientist with the National Oceanographic
and Atmospheric Administration
until his retirement in 1985, Mr. Quiroz
received his M.S. in Spanish Literature
from Georgetown University
in 1991. He is the co-author of The Lithographs
of Prentiss Taylor: A Catalogue Raisonné, and
numerous articles for the Washington Print
Club Quarterly. He has been a generous
donor to the Georgetown University
Library of works by Prentiss Taylor and
other artists. This article was based
largely on an essay by the writer
prepared at Georgetown University in 1993,
titled "El
moro en Las cantigas de Santa Maria: una
nueva perspectiva" ("The
Moor in Las cantigas de Santa Maria: a
New Perspective"),
and on data from the Aguilar edition of
1963 (described in the text).
Illustrations: top: Windmills by Lucille
Gilling (1905-1997), from A Portfolio of Ten Etchings
by Lucille Gilling based on Don Quixote
de la Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes (Willowdale,
Ontario: The Studio, 1968);
color etching; ed. 14/100;
24.8 x 21.3 cm;
Georgetown University Fine Print Collection;
lower: Tilting at Windmills by (Paul)
Gustave Doré (1832-1883), from The History
of Don Quixote by Cervantes, ed. J.
W. Clark, and a biographical notice
of Cervantes by T. Teignmouth Shore; illus.
by (Paul) Gustave Doré (New York: P.F. Collier,
1863).
Lauinger Library has in its collection
nearly four hundred items related to Don Quixote, including translations of the novel; scholarly studies;
video recordings of dramatic productions, the musical,
and lectures; sound recordings of music inspired
by the great novel; and the works of art and rare
books in this exhibition.
The
following persons are acknowledged for
their support of and assistance with
this exhibition: Roderick
S. Quiroz M.S. '91; Joseph A. Haller,
S.J., Curator Emeritus; George M. Barringer,
Associate University Librarian for Special
Collections; Prof. Barbara Mujica, Department
of Spanish and Portuguese; Karen H. O'Connell, Reference
Librarian; David Hagen, Graphic Artist;
Jennifer Taylor Louchheim '06, intern;
Jan Halaska '06.
Matting by Frames By Rebecca
Silver Spring, Maryland
Return to top
|
|
