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Home , Alessandro Magnasco, Filippo Abbiati, Francesco Cairo, History of painting, Leonaert Bramer, Lorenzo Magalotti

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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2006 and the Painterly Picaresque Charles Preston McLane

Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF VISUAL , THEATRE AND

ALESSANDRO MAGNASCO AND THE PAINTERLY PICARESQUE

By

CHARLES PRESTON MCLANE

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2006 The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Charles Preston McLane, defended on October 18, 2006.

______Robert Neuman Professor Directing Dissertation

______David F. Johnson Outside Committee Member

______Karen A. Bearor Committee Member

______Jack Freiberg Committee Member

Approved:

______Richard K. Emmerson, Chair, Department of

______Sally E. McRorie, Dean, College of , Theatre and Dance

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to extend my sincerest thanks to all of the faculty and staff of the Department of Art History at Florida State University. The generous welcome I enjoyed upon my arrival has never abated, and I am supremely grateful for the opportunity I have had to study in the company of so many brilliant and talented people. For the crucial financial support that I have received from both the Department and the University, I am deeply grateful. I am especially indebted to Robert Neuman, the chair of my dissertation committee, without whose guidance and support this dissertation would not have been written. Special thanks to Karen Bearor, and Jack Freiberg—each of whose teaching and counsel has shaped my approach to the discipline: during the years of my course work, in research and writing, and through to the completion of this dissertation. The dissertation is readable because of the tireless editing that they each provided. The enormous pleasure I derive from the study and practice of art history is greatly owing to their fine influences. I would have accomplished nothing without the support of my family and friends, and I am happy here to acknowledge the many great sacrifices made by my wife Yelena during this long project. My most heartfelt thanks to her.

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ...... v Abstract ...... xvi

INTRODUCTION...... 1

1. THE PICARESQUE IMAGE IN AND ...... 45

2. PICARESQUE THEMES AND IN THE WORK OF ALESSANDRO MAGNASCO ...... 95

3. READING MAGNASCO’S AS FICTION ...... 176

4. MAGNASCO AND MONASTICISM: PICARESQUE PREMISES OF PIETY ...... 219

CONCLUSION ...... 251

FIGURES...... 254

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 385

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH...... 415

iv LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Anonymous, La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas . . ., (Alcala de Henares: Salzedo Librera, 1554), frontispiece ...... 254

Figure 2: Anonymous, La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes desus fortunas y adeur sidades, woodcut (Burgos, 1554), frontispiece...... 255

Figure 3: Anonymous,Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache, engraving (, 1599), frontispiece...... 256

Figure 4: Jean Baptista Morales (Fecit), Lopez de Úbeda, La pícara Justina, engraving (Madrid, 1605) frontispiece ...... 257

Figure 5: Anonymous, Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch, engraving, (Renchen, 1668) frontispiece ...... 258

Figure 6: Leonard Bramer, Illustration from Lazarillo de Tormes, ink and wash on paper, after 1635. Graphische Sammlung, Vienna. [Lazarillo, Robert S. Rudder trans., p. 9.] ...... 259

Figure 7: Leonard Bramer, Illustration from Lazarillo de Tormes, ink and wash on paper, after 1635. Graphische Sammlung, Vienna. [Lazarillo, Robert S. Rudder trans., p. 65.] . . . . . 260

Figure 8: Leonard Bramer, Illustration from Lazarillo de Tormes, ink and wash on paper, after 1635. Graphische Sammlung, Vienna. [Lazarillo, Robert S. Rudder trans., p. 91.] . . . . . 261

Figure 9: , St. Francis in , oil on canvas, 92.5 x 128. 4 cm, c. 1595. Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.] ...... 262

Figure 10: Caravaggio, Entombment of Christ, oil on canvas, 300 x 203 cm, c. 1602-03. Pinacoteca, Vatican. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.] ...... 263

Figure 11: Adam Elsheimer, Il Contento, oil on copper, 30.1 x 42 cm, c. 1607. of Scotland, Edinburgh. [Keith Andrews, Adam Elsheimer, Il Contento. (Edinburgh: The National Gallery of Scotland, 1971), cover illustration.] ...... 264

Figure 12: Diego Velázquez, Old Woman Frying Eggs, oil on canvas, 101 x 120 cm, 1618. National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.] ...... 265

v Figure 13: Diego Velázquez, Peasants at the Table (El Almuerzo), oil on canvas, 96 x 112 cm, c. 1620. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.] ...... 266

Figure 14: Diego Velázquez, Musical Trio (Los músicos), oil on canvas, 87 x 110 cm, c. 1617-18. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.] . 267

Figure 15: Diego Velázquez, The Servant (La mulata), oil on canvas, 55 x 104 cm, c. 1618-19. The . [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.] ...... 268

Figure 16: Diego Velázquez, The Waterseller of , oil on canvas, 106.7 x 81 cm, 1623. Wellington Museum, Apsley House, London. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.] ...... 269

Figure 17: Attributed to Diego Velázquez, of (detail), oil on canvas, c. 1630. Wellington Museum, Apsley House, London. [http://jaserrano.com/unamuno/poes_archivos/image007.jpg] ...... 270

Figure 18: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Young Beggar, oil on canvas, 137 x 115 cm, c. 1649. : The , Paris. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.] ...... 271

Figure 19: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Boys Eating Fruit (Grape and Melon Eaters), oil on canvas, 146 x 104 cm, c. 1650. , . [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.] ...... 272

Figure 20: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Four Figures on a Step, oil on canvas, 107 x 142.5 cm, c. 1655-60. Kimbell , Fort Worth. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.] ...... 273

Figure 21: , Blind Old Beggar, oil on canvas, 124.5 x 101.7 cm, c. 1632. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin. [Allen Memorial Art Museum, http://www.oberlin.edu/allenart/collection/ribera.html] ...... 274

Figure 22: Jusepe de Ribera, The Sense of Touch (Il ceico di Gambassi), oil on canvas, 125 x 98 cm, c. 1632. , Madrid. [Alfonso E. Pérez Sanchez and Nicola Spinosa, Jusepe de Ribera, 1591-1652 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), cat. 27, p. 99.]...... 275

Figure 23: Jusepe de Ribera, The Club-Footed Boy, oil on canvas, 164 x 92 cm, c. 1642. Louvre, Paris. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.] ...... 276

Figure 24: Caravaggio, The Cardsharps, oil on canvas, 90 x 112 cm, c. 1596. Kimbell Art Museum, Forth Worth. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.] ...... 277

vi Figure 25: Caravaggio, The Fortune Teller, oil on canvas, 115 x 150 cm, c. 1596. Musei Capitolini, . [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.] ...... 278

Figure 26: Pieter Van Laer (Bamboccio), with Morra Players, oil on canvas, 33.5 x 47 cm, c. 1630. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.] ...... 279

Figure 27: , Cardplayers, oil on canvas, c. 1635. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome. [Jonathan Scott, Salvator Rosa: His Life and Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 8.]...... 280

Figure 28: Salvator Rosa, Beggars’ Encampment, oil on canvas, c. 1640. Matthieson Gallery, London. [Scott, p. 45.] ...... 281

Figure 29: Jacques Callot, Le Mendiant au rosaire, from Les Gueux, etching, 13.8 x 8.2 cm, c. 1622-23. [Chone, Paulette ed. Jacques Callot, 1592-1635 (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1992), cat. 328, p. 279.]...... 282

Figure 30: Jacques Callot, Capitano de Baroni, from Les Gueux, etching, 14.4 x 9.3 cm, c. 1622-23. [Chone, cat. 317, p. 276.]...... 283

Figure 31: Jacques Callot, La Caverne des brigands, from Les Caprices, etching, 5.6 x 8 cm, c. 1616. [Chone, cat. 200, p. 235.] ...... 284

Figure 32: Jacques Callot, Le Gentilhomme à la grande canne, from Les Caprices, etching, 5.65 x 8.4 cm, c. 1616. [Chone, cat. 210, p. 237.]...... 285

Figure 33: Jacques Callot, Le paysan se déchaussant, from Les Caprices, etching, 6 x 8.2 cm, c. 1616. [Chone, cat. 213, p. 237.] ...... 286

Figure 34: Jacques Callot, L’Auberge, from Les Caprices, etching, 6 x 8.2 cm, c. 1616. [Chone, cat. 218, p. 238.]...... 287

Figure 35: Jacques Callot, Le Mendiant aux béquilles, coiffé d’un chapeau, from Les Gueux, etching, 13.8 x 8.7 cm, c. 1622-23. [Chone, cat. 231, p. 277.] ...... 288

Figure 36: Jacques Callot, La dame décolletée conversant avec deux gentilshommes, from Les Fantaisies, etching, 6.3 x 8.3 cm, c. 1635. [Chone, cat. 368, p. 291.] ...... 289

Figure 37: Alessandro Magnasco and Antonio Francesco Perruzzini, Procession of Capuchins, oil on canvas, 230 x 285 cm, c. 1700. , Rome. [Alessandro Magnasco 1667- 1749, Marco Bona Castellotti, ed. (: Electa, 1996), cat. 19, p. 145.] ...... 290

vii Figure 38: Alessandro Magnasco and Antonio Francesco Peruzzini, The Shipwreck, oil on canvas, 115 x 173 cm, c. 1700. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. [Castellotti ed., cat. 20, p. 147.]...... 291

Figure 39: Alessandro Magnasco and , Hunting Scene, oil on canvas, 85 x 111 cm, c. 1706-07. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford. [Harold Acton, The Last Medici (London: MacMillan, 1980), fig. 68.] ...... 292

Figure 40: Salvator Rosa, Scene of Witchcraft, oil on canvas, 75 x 64 cm, c. 1670. Giorgiana Corsini, . [The , http:// www.theitalians.com.au.] ...... 293

Figure 41: Salvator Rosa, Anchorites Tempted by Demons, oil on canvas, 65 x 83 cm, c. 1665. Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.]...... 294

Figure 42: Detail from Salvator Rosa, Anchorites Tempted by Demons, [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.] ...... 295

Figure 43: Detail of Alessandro Magnasco, Sacreligious Robbery, oil on canvas, 160 x 240 cm, c. 1731. Quadreria Arcivescovile, Milan. [Castellotti ed., cat. 61, p. 221.]...... 296

Figure 44: Salvator Rosa, Soldiers Gambling, oil on canvas, 77.1 x 61.6 cm, c. 1658. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. [Dulwich Picture Gallery, http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk.] ...... 297

Figure 45: Michael Sweerts, Soldiers Playing Dice, oil on canvas, 86.7 x 74 cm, c. 1656-1658. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. [El Museo de arte Thyssen-Bornemisza, http://www.museothyssen.org.]...... 298

Figure 46: Alessandro Magnasco, The Players (I giocatori), oil on canvas, 49 x 36 cm, c. 1725. Private Collection, . [Laura Muti and Daniele de Sarno Prignano, Alessandro Magnasco (Faenza: Edit Faenza, 1994), cat. 418, p. 613.] ...... 299

Figure 47: Alessandro Magnasco, The Guard (Corpo di guardia), oil on canvas, 69 x 46 cm, c. 1740. Borromeo Collection, Isola Bella. [Castellotti ed., cat. 75, p. 245.]...... 300

Figure 48: Alessandro Magnasco, Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (Ritrovo di pícaros e di soldati), oil on canvas, 91 x 129 cm, c. 1715. Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa. [Castellotti ed., cat. 33, p. 171.] ...... 301

viii Figure 49: Detail of Alessandro Magnasco, Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (Ritrovo di pícaros e di soldati), Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa. [Castellotti ed., cat. 33, p. 171.] ...... 302

Figure 50: Marco Ricci, Travelers Attacked by Highwaymen, oil on canvas, c. 1715. Private Collection, Belluno. [Muti, fig. 129, p. 113.] ...... 303

Figure 51: Giacomo Ceruti, Evening at the Piazza, oil on canvas, 210 x 298 cm, c. 1730. Museo Civico d'Arte Antica, Palazzo Madama, . [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.] ...... 304

Figure 52: Alessandro Magnasco, The Hospital, oil on canvas, 44 x 82 cm, c. 1708. Museul de Arta, Bucharest. [Muti, cat. 40, p. 64.] ...... 305

Figure 53: Jacques Callot, The Hospital, from Les Grands Misères de la Guerre, etching, 1633. [Chone, cat. 521, p. 407.]...... 306

Figure 54: Alessandro Magnasco, The Sacking of a Church (Saccheggio di una chiesa), oil on canvas, 45 x 82 cm, c. 1708. Museul Brukenthal, . [Muti, cat. 325, p. 194.] . . . . . 307

Figure 55: Jacques Callot, The Devestation of a Monastery, from Les Grands Misères de la Guerre, etching, 1633. [Chone, cat. 511, p. 404.] ...... 308

Figure 56: Jacques Callot, The Feast of the Bohemians, from Les Bohémiens, etching, c. 1623. [Chone, cat. 347, p. 284.]...... 309

Figure 57: Alessandro Magnasco and Giuseppe Antonio Pianca, Assault of the Brigands, oil on canvas, 40 x 60 cm, c. 1730. Collection of Alberto Robiati, Lodi. [Muti, cat. 142, p. 578.]...... 310

Figure 58: Alessandro Magnasco, Interrogations in a Jail, oil on canvas, 44.5 x 82.5 cm, c. 1708. Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna. [Castellotti, cat. 28, p. 161.] ...... 311

Figure 59: Jacques Callot, Plundering a Large Farmhouse, from Les Grands Misères de la Guerre, etching, c. 1632-33. [Chone, cat. 511, p. 404.] ...... 312

Figure 60: Jacques Callot, The Strappado, from Misères et Malheurs de la Guerre, etching, c. 1632-33. [Muti, cat. 516, p. 406.]...... 313

Figure 61: Alessandro Magnasco, Transfer of the Prisoners, oil on canvas, c. 1725. Frederick Church’s Home, State Historic Site, Olana. [Castellotti ed., fig. 31, p. 36.]...... 314

ix Figure 62: Alessandro Magnasco, The Interrogation, oil on canvas, 73 x 58 cm, c. 1725. Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt. [Muti, cat. 92, fig. 327.] ...... 315

Figure 63: Alessandro Magnasco, The Tortures, oil on canvas, 73 x 58 cm, c. 1725. Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt. [Muti, cat. 93, fig. 326] ...... 316

Figure 64: Jacques Callot, Les Supplices, etching, 11 x 22 cm, c. 1630. [Chone, cat. 527, p. 411.]...... 317

Figure 65: Alessandro Magnasco, Giuseppe che interpreta i sogni (Joseph the Dream Interpreter), oil on canvas, 134 x 177 cm, c. 1726. Private Collection, Milan. [Castellotti ed., cat. 32, p. 169.]...... 318

Figure 66: Alessandro Magnasco (with Clemente Spera), Halt of the Brigands, oil on canvas, 112 x 162 cm, c. 1720-30. National Hermitage, Saint Petersburg. [Castellotti, cat. 50, p. 199.]...... 319

Figure 67: Alessandro Magnasco, Soldiers Feasting, oil on canvas, 59.1 x 44.8 cm, c. 1725. Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco: Museum purchase, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco. [Muti, cat. 310, fig. 313.]...... 320

Figure 68: Alessandro Magnasco, Soldiers and a Charlatan among Ruins, oil on canvas, 65 x 88 cm, c. 1720-30. A.S. Drey, Monaco. [Muti, cat . 240, p. 393.] ...... 321

Figure 69: Modern of eighteenth-century gypsy-themed toile ...... 322

Figure 70: Giacomo della Porta, (Pompilio de Benedetti, fecit.) Grotesque face, detail of the fountain in Piazza Campitelli, 1589, Rome...... 323

Figure 71: Alessandro Magnasco, Kitchen Scene with Maid and Pícaro, oil on canvas, 95 x 120 cm, c. 1709-10. Lechi Collection, Brescia. [Muti, cat. 37, fig. 217.] ...... 324

Figure 72: Alessandro Magnasco, Kitchen Scene with Nobles and Servants, oil on canvas, 95 x 120 cm, c. 1709-10. Lechi Collection, Brescia. [Muti, cat. 36, fig. 216.] ...... 325

Figure 73: Alessandro Magnasco, Arrival of the Galley Slaves to the Prison at Genoa, oil on canvas, 116 x 143 cm, c. 1736-38. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux. [Muti, cat. 32, fig. 360] ...... 326

Figure 74: Alessandro Magnasco, Embarkation of the Galley Slaves at the Port of Genoa, oil on canvas, 116 x 143 cm, c. 1736-38. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux. [Muti, cat. 33, fig. 32] ...... 327

x Figure 75: Alessandro Magnasco, Satire of a Nobleman in Misery, oil on canvas, 73.7 x 58.7 cm, c. 1719-25. Detroit Institute of Arts, Gift of Luigi Grassi (36.14) [Bissell, Derstine, and Miller, p. 125, cat. 39; photo © 2004, Detroit Institute of Arts.] . . . . . 328

Figure 76: Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Umori diversi, etching, 1696. Collezioni d’Arte e di Storia della Cassa di Risparmio in . [Bissell, Derstine, and Miller, p. 124, fig. 1.] ...... 329

Figure 77: Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, In casa sua ciascuno è re, etching, 1694. Collezioni d’Arte e di Storia della Cassa di Risparmio, Bologna. [Bissell, Derstine, and Miller, p. 125, fig. 2.] . . 330

Figure 78: Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Non conosce la pace, el non la stima, chi provata non ha la guerrain prima, from the series Proverbi Figurati, etching, 1678. [Le Collezioni d’Arte della Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna: Le Incisioni; Vol. I., Franca Varignana, ed.] ...... 331

Figure 79: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Soldiers and Pícaros, oil on canvas, 46 x 87 cm, c. 1725. Galleria Nazionale, Stoccarda. [Franchini Guelfi, 1977, pl. 52, p. 367.] ...... 332

Figure 80: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Soldiers and Pícaros, oil on canvas, 46 x 87 cm, c. 1725. Galleria Nazionale, Stoccarda. [Franchini Guelfi, 1977, pl. 51, p. 365.] ...... 333

Figure 81: Alessandro Magnasco, Den of the Gypsies and Soldiers (Ritrovo di zingari e soldati), oil on canvas, 125 x 172.5 cm, c. 1710-15. Galleria degli , Florence. [Castellotti ed., cat. 22, p. 151.]...... 334

Figure 82: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Den of the Gypsies and Soldiers (Ritrovo di zingari e soldati), [Castellotti ed., cat. 22, p. 151.] ...... 335

Figure 83: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Embarkation of the Galley Slaves at the Port of Genoa, oil on canvas, 116 x 143 cm, c. 1736-38. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux. [Muti, cat. 33, fig. 32] ...... 336

Figure 84: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (Ritrovo di pícaros e di soldati), [Castellotti ed., cat. 33, p. 171.] ...... 337

Figure 85: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Den of the Gypsies and Soldiers (Ritrovo di zingari e soldati), [Castellotti ed., cat. 22, p. 151.] ...... 338

Figure 86: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Den of the Gypsies and Soldiers (Ritrovo di zingari e soldati), [Castellotti ed., cat. 22, p. 151.] ...... 339

xi Figure 87: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Den of the Gypsies and Soldiers (Ritrovo di zingari e soldati), [Castellotti ed., cat. 22, p. 151.] ...... 340

Figure 88: Adriaen Brouwer, The Card Players, oil on canvas, 29 x 39 cm, c. 1635. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.] ...... 341

Figure 89: Alessandro Magnasco (with Clemente Spera), detail from Halt of the Brigands, oil on canvas, 112 x 162 cm, c. 1720-30. National Hermitage, Saint Petersburg. [Castellotti, cat. 50, p. 199.]...... 342

Figure 90: Tony Johannot, Don Quixote Reading, wood engraving from Volume I of the1836 edition of Louis Viardot's translation of Don Quixote, (Paris: J.J. Dubochet, 1836), Frontispiece...... 343

Figure 91: William Lake Price, Don Quixote in His Study, albumen silver print from wet collodion negative, c. 1855. Austin: University of Texas Libraries ...... 344

Figure 92: Honoré Daumier, Don Quixote Reading, oil on wood panel, 33.6 x 26 cm, c. 1867. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Felton Bequest 1923, 1276-3. [http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au] ...... 345

Figure 93: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (Ritrovo di pícaros e di soldati), [Castellotti ed., cat. 33, p. 171.] ...... 346

Figure 94: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (Ritrovo di pícaros e di soldati), [Castellotti ed., cat. 33, p. 171.] ...... 347

Figure 95: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (Ritrovo di pícaros e di soldati), [Castellotti ed., cat. 33, p. 171.] ...... 348

Figure 96: Alessandro Magnasco, The Wedding Banquet (Banchetto nuziale), oil on canvas, 86 x 118.5 cm, 1731. Louvre, Paris. [Castellotti ed., cat. 65, p. 229.] ...... 349

Figure 97: Alessandro Magnasco, six examples of the soldier/dandy figural type from multiple paintings...... 350

Figure 98: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Arrival of the Galley Slaves to the Prison at Genoa, oil on canvas, 116 x 143 cm, c. 1736-38. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux. [Muti, cat. 32, fig. 360.]...... 351

xii Figure 99: Alessandro Magnasco, The Nuptial Parade (Corteo nuziale a cavallo in un bosco), oil on canvas, 87.5 x 117 cm, c. 1731. Staatliche Museen Gemäldegaleri, Berlin. [Muti, cat. 21, fig. 355.]...... 352

Figure 100: Alessandro Magnasco, Assault of the Highwaymen, oil on canvas, 69.5 x 95 cm, c. 1730-33. Charles E. Roseman, Cleveland. [Muti, cat. 47, fig. 358.] ...... 353

Figure 101: Alessandro Magnasco, The Beggar Painter (Il pittor pitocco tra zingari e suonatori), oil on canvas, 94 x 95 cm, c. 1720. Museo Giannettino Luxoro, Genoa. [Castellotti ed., cat. 78, p. 253.]...... 354

Figure 102: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from The Beggar Painter (Il pittor pitocco tra zingari e suonatori), [Castellotti ed., cat. 78, p. 253.] ...... 355

Figure 103: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from The Beggar Painter (Il pittor pitocco tra zingari e suonatori), [Castellotti ed., cat. 78, p. 253.] ...... 356

Figure 104: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from The Beggar Painter (Il pittor pitocco tra zingari e suonatori), [Castellotti ed., cat. 78, p. 253.] ...... 357

Figure 105: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from The Beggar Painter (Il pittor pitocco tra zingari e suonatori),[Castellotti ed., cat. 78, p. 253.]...... 358

Figure 106: Giuseppe Maria Crespi, The in his Studio, oil on canvas, 57.3 x 42.9 cm, c. 1735. Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum. [Spike, cat. 29, p. 169.] ...... 359

Figure 107: Luis Egidio Meléndez, Self Portrait, oil on canvas, 100 x 82 cm, 1746. Musée du Louvre, Paris. [http://cartelen.louvre.fr.]...... 360

Figure 108: Alessandro Magnasco, Calefactorium with Friars, oil on canvas, 94.2 x 134.6 cm, c. 1725. , Pasadena. The Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena. [Castellotti ed., cat. 40, p. 183.]...... 361

Figure 109: Alessandro Magnasco, Landscape with Processing Capuchins, oil on canvas, 235 x 176 cm, c. 1720-30. , Milan. [Castellotti ed., cat. 44, p. 189.] . . . . . 362

Figure 110: Alessandro Magnasco, Graveyard of the Trappists, oil on canvas, 91 x 129 cm, c. 1720. Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa. [Castellotti ed., cat. 34, p. 173.] ...... 363

Figure 111: Alessandro Magnasco, Spiritual Exercises of Monks in a Ravine, oil on canvas, 48 x 34 cm, c.1735-40. Berl Collection, Vienna. [Muti, cat. 379, fig. 349.] ...... 364

xiii Figure 112: Alessandro Magnasco, Monks Eating in a Grotto, oil on canvas, 72.5 x 56.2 cm, c. 1740. Szépmüvészeti Mùzeum, Budapest. [Muti, cat. 41, fig. 351.] ...... 365

Figure 113: Egbert van Heemskerck, Drinking Monk, oil on panel, 31 x 27 cm, c. 1680. Museum Bredius, . [http://www.museumbredius.nl/schilders/heemskerck.htm] . . 366

Figure 114: Cornelis Dusart, Satire of a Capuchin Monk, etching, c. 1690 ...... 367

Figure 115: Alessandro Magnasco, details of monastic physiognomies. [Franchini Guelfi, 1977, pls. 15, 28, pp. 293, 319.] ...... 368

Figure 116: Philips de Koninck, The Friar About Town, ink and wash on paper, c. 1660. Private Collection. [Franchini Guelfi, 1977, fig. 210, p. 195.] ...... 369

Figure 117: Cornelis Dusart, Monk Embracing a Laughing Woman, oil on canvas, c. 1695. [Franchini Guelfi, 1977, fig. 208, p. 192.]...... 370

Figure 118: Alessandro Magnasco, The Friar Barbers, oil on canvas, 99 x 73 cm, c. 1720. Museum of Western and Eastern Art, Odessa. [Castellotti, ed., cat. 73, p. 241.] ...... 371

Figure 119: Alessandro Magnasco, Capuchins in Contrition before their Superior, oil on canvas, 58 x 88 cm, c. 1730-40. Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. [Castellotti, ed., cat. 72, p. 239.] ...... 372

Figure 120: Alessandro Magnasco, details from Capuchins in Contrition before their Superior, [Castellotti, ed., cat. 72, p. 239.] ...... 373

Figure 121: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Capuchins in Contrition before their Superior, [Castellotti, ed., cat. 72, p. 239.] ...... 374

Figure 122: Francesco del Cairo, Saint Francis in Ecstasy, oil on canvas, 74 x 53 cm, c. 1630-33. Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan. [Castellotti, ed., cat. 2, p. 111.] . . . . . 375

Figure 123: Alessandro Magnasco, Saint Francis Consoled by , oil on canvas, 118 x 92 cm, c. 1690-95. Galleria di , Genoa. [Castellotti, ed., cat. 17, p. 141.] ...... 376

Figure 124: Alessandro Magnasco, Christ Bearing the Cross, oil on canvas, 82 x 57 cm, c. 1690-1695. Vitali Collection, Pistoia. [Muti, cat. 286, fig. 56.] ...... 377

xiv Figure 125: Geritt Dou, The Hermit, oil on canvas, 46 x 34.5 cm, c. 1670. , Washington, Timken Collection. [www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2000/dou/full34.htm.] ...... 378

Figure 126: Alessandro Magnasco, Friars in a Grotto, oil on canvas, c. 1730. Private Collection [Franchini Guelfi, 1977, plate 15, p. 293.] ...... 379

Figure 127: Alessandro Magnasco (and Marco Ricci?), A Procession of Friars, oil on canvas, c. 1710. Galleria Sabauda, Turin. [Franchini Guelfi, 1977, fig. 84, p. 92.] . . . . 380

Figure 128: Alessandro Magnasco, Monks Warming their Feet, oil on canvas, 57 x 41.5 cm, c. 1719-21. Private Collection, London. [Muti, cat. 151, fig. 427.] ...... 381

Figure 129: Alessandro Magnasco, Pícaros at the , oil on canvas, 56 x 67 cm, c. 1715-20. Private Collection, . [Muti, cat. 375, fig. 430.] ...... 382

Figure 130: Alessandro Magnasco, The Latrine of Misery, oil on canvas, 52.5 x 38 cm, c. 1715-20. Private Collection: Venice. [Muti, cat. 374, fig. 429.] ...... 383

Figure 131: Alessandro Magnasco, The Convent Parlor, oil on canvas, 72 x 56 cm, c. 1730. Private Collection, Milan. [Franchini Guelfi, 1977, pl. 31, p. 325.] ...... 384

xv ABSTRACT

The paintings of Alessandro Magnasco constitute an innovation in the visual of picaresque themes, characters, and environments. Over an active career of more than fifty years, Magnasco developed a highly original painterly manner which, when combined with picaresque subject matter adapted from Spanish literature, presented viewers with images of literary pícaros in many guises (beggars, gypsies, soldiers, and monks), social and religious deviants cast in fictitious and interiors. I am not the first to propose that Magnasco's paintings share thematic and iconographic affinities with the picaresque literary genre, but this study is the first to confront the conceptual and methodological consequences of proposing such intertextual relationships. From the beginning, this study has sought to expand upon other scholars’ limited interpretations of Magnasco's “picaresque” oeuvre. To date, these interpretations have lacked the textual endorsement of primary source materials (the original content of the novels and novellas), and none has made use of the conceptual resources available through contemporary literary scholarship, in which genre typologies, reception theories, and notions of fictitiousness have all been gainfully applied to picaresque texts. This study mitigates these deficits, expanding the operative definition of a picaresque text to include pictorial representations of comparable content, to the end of justifying other scholars’ habits of calling Magnasco's paintings “picaresque.” I have tested the relataionship of a number of works—by Magnasco and his forebears—to the most paradigmatic picaresque novels: including the anonymous texts Lazarillo de Tormes and Estebanillo González, Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache, Quevedo's La vida del buscón, Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares, and Lesage's Gil Blas de Santillane. This study explores the painter’s use of genre conventions like stock characters (the beggar boy, lazy soldier, inquisitor, galley slave, disenfranchised nobleman), typological settings (the roadside tavern, bandits’ lair, inquisitorial prison, gypsy encampment), and thematic schemas (hunger, servitude, imprisonment, self-aggrandizement through costume and deportment), such that viewers may consider the paintings as dialogically related to the novels. I conclude that audiences might thus perceive the images as representing pictorial fictions analogous to the literary fictions created and conventionalized by the picaresque author.

xvi INTRODUCTION

This study presents a critical analysis of selected paintings from the career of the late- artist Alessandro Magnasco (1667-1749), determining the extent to which the Spanish picaresque literary phenomenon influenced and informed his visual formulations. Many of the critics and art historians who have written on Magnasco have posited a relationship between the artist’s paintings and the picaresque novel, owing firstly to their comparable portrayals of an organized European subculture of beggars and brigands, and secondly to the belief that the literature that described life among these deviants was read and appreciated by Magnasco’s presumed class of collectors at the late Medici court, among the nascent Italian middle class, and in the scholarly circles of Milan’s academies and noble houses.1 To date, however, there has been no effort to examine comprehensively the applicability of picaresque literary tropes and their related critical theory to the visual arts in general, nor to Magnasco’s work in particular.2 The scholars of Magnasco have been content simply to assume the use of this complex genre term, and to imply that Magnasco’s painterly treatments of transient anti-heroes—thieves, gypsies, and noncommissioned soldiers—were broadly derived from the Spanish literary tradition. Virtually all historians who relate Magnasco’s work to the picaresque genre base their assertions on the artist’s use of iconographic details that may be vaguely associated with character types and settings common to picaresque novels. These assertions are made without discussing specific units of text, and without proposing any determinate knowledge of formal or contextual genre associations held by one or another class of readers or audience.3 Scholars have not supported such assumptions with critical writing on the methodological implications brought about by linking two such disparate mediums with a common, and presumably dialogical, genre categorization. This study explores these implications in a comparative treatment of what I term Magnasco’s “painterly picaresque.” The formal and aesthetic interaction between the mediums

1 of and literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is a topic that has surfaced in recent years in the work of a small number of interdisciplinary scholars.4 Even when visual culture adapted from the Spanish picaresque novel has been the focus, no one has discussed the paintings of Magnasco. In fairness, Magnasco was an Italian whose work post-dated the publication of the key novels of the Spanish picaresque genre by more than a century.5 This would make his scenes of itinerant pícaros less ready for direct association than the more textually illustrative canvases of the Golden Age Spanish masters—Velázquez’s taverners and kitchen maids, Ribera’s blind beggar, Murillo’s hungry children—but for the fact that nearly all of the most iconic picaresque novels were reprinted in dozens of foreign-language editions and remained among the most popular titles throughout Europe into the 1800s.6 Owing to a general relaxation of church-mandated censorship and a boom in the available to the publishing , it is now assumed that far more readers in more places were versed in the adventures of Rinconete and Cortadillo, Lazarillo de Tormes, Don Pablos “El Buscón,” Guzmán de’Alfarache, the Bachelor Trapaza, and Estebanillo González in the eighteenth century than during the roughly one hundred years (1554-1646) that spanned the era of their initial publication.7 This study will show that the low-life content and stylistic conceits of picaresque literature were important, dialogical influences on Magnasco’s work, and that the artist drew both iconographic and thematic content from the novels in an intertextual process of amalgamating visual art and written genres.8 Magnasco’s painterly picaresque incorporates a rich visual record of motifs, themes, and devices of fantasy, suggesting that the works could have been understood by contemporary audiences as painted counterparts to the fictitious world of the picaresque narrative. Rather than book illustrations in the conventional sense, Magnasco’s paintings are analogous fictional spaces that visually articulate the core tenets of the literary form, including transience, beggary, crime, hunger and feasting, manners and fashion, corporeal materialism, and spiritual and personal redemption. This study will incorporate the wider social history of the picaresque literary genre as it developed over two centuries of contemporary critical thought from a “confessional” form of comic —exemplified by Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades

2 (Alcalá de Henares, 1554) and Mateo Aleman’s Guzmán de’Alfarache (Seville, 1599- 1604)—into stylized “road novels” of confidence games, petty theft, conscription, fashion, marriage, and social mobility, best represented by the anonymous Vida y hechos de Estebanillo González, hombre de buen humor (Madrid, 1646), Grimmelshausen’s Der abenteurliche Simplicissimus (Mompelgard, 1669) and the loose Spanish adaptations and novels by the French author Alain-René Lesage, including his most canonical Gil Blas de Santillane (Paris, 1715- 1735).9 As later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century novels and translations of picaresque derivation intersected with the concurrent tradition of the Bildungsroman, these writings informed a broader European trend leading to the development of the cross-media meta-genre of “realism,” of which Magnasco’s paintings were proleptically a part. There is extensive literary- historical and theoretical support for understanding the Baroque fictional imagination, centered on genre and dialogism within bodies of literature—comic, satirical, picaresque, and otherwise.10 This study applies that research towards a fuller understanding of the reception potential underlying Magnasco’s highly imaginative and provocative paintings.

The Artist’s Biography

In order to establish the contexts that contributed to the development of Magnasco’s painterly approach to picaresque subject matter, I will present a brief chronology of the artist’s life and career.11 Overall, I assert that Magnasco’s career was fostered and supported in environments that endorsed a world view of enlightened secularism. The amusive social contexts of Magnasco’s career contrasted markedly with the formal and iconographic rigidity of academic , official portraiture, and ecclesiastical commissions—the dominant artistic enterprises of the Baroque era. The artist’s personal penchant for secular literary sources contributed to an oeuvre that was formally and iconographically anomalous in eighteenth-century Italy. After several years spent as a painter’s apprentice, Magnasco lived and worked in the company of patrons and fellow whose attitudes towards the literary and visual arts was at least partly (if not mostly) directed toward conspicuously aestheticized, diversionary forms of “low-life” : laic art forms that incorporated aspects of satire,

3 burlesque, and mild social criticism—attributes common to the Spanish novels and works of picaresque derivation read and enjoyed by the artist’s contemporaries. Though no doubt partly apocryphal, virtually all of the literature, both past and present, assumes the basic narrative established by Magnasco’s late-contemporary biographer, Carlo Giuseppe Ratti (1737-1795). Alessandro Magnasco was born in Spanish-controlled Genoa in 1667 to the artist Stefano Magnasco (c. 1635-c. 1670-73), a student and follower of the Genoese Baroque painter (1624-1659).12 Soon after his father’s premature death, the seven-year-old “Lissandrino” was sent northward to Milan, ostensibly to learn commerce from a wealthy merchant. Following a dire infection in one of his legs (and while recuperating in bed with a pen and paper for diversion), Magnasco demonstrated to his patron a great aptitude for . This persuaded the merchant to sponsor an apprenticeship for the boy in the studio of the Milanese painter (1640-1715), who who had been recommended to the man for a portrait , probably around 1680.13 By the early 1690s the young Magnasco had completed his training and established an independent studio in Milan as a portraitist and painter of images of devotion. The artist’s early works were influenced by the harsh and dramatic art of seventeenth-century , with stark contrasts of light and dark and livid, earthy tones, far removed from the bright colors of contemporary Genoese painting typified by his father’s generation.14 These years of Magnasco’s youth would be the only time that the artist worked on conventional portraiture (Portrait of a Scribe [c.1690, Private Collection]), and religious subject matter (Saint Ambrose Refusing Theodosius Admission into the Church [c. 1690-1700, Art Institute of Chicago]), and his affinity for socially deviant content appeared early. By 1695 (the date of his first signed work, Meeting of the Quakers [1695, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence]) Magnasco was already expressing himself in a personal manner, with wisplike forms fragmented by swift brushstrokes and darting flashes of light. Over roughly a decade the artist shifted his practice away from painting heavily- powdered dowagers and martyred saints in favor of more cabinet-scaled genre scenes and rural fantasies. By 1700 he had all but forfeited his portrait studio to specialize as a figurista, or painter of picciole figure, collaborating with a number of celebrated painters of landscapes and ruins, including Carlo Antonio Tavella (1668-1738) and Antonio Francesco Peruzzini (c. 1646-

4 1724).15 Magnasco would continue providing the human staffage for other painters’ wind-swept pastorals and architectural capricci until around 1735, after which he is believed to have been the sole author of all of the figures, landscapes, and interiors that define his paintings. Around 1701, Magnasco moved to Florence, where he was an intimate of the two sons of Grand Duke Cosimo III—Grand Prince Ferdinando and Prince Gian Gastone.16 At this time Ferdinando de’Medici commissioned the majority of Magnasco’s works, and it is assumed that the artist enjoyed access to the Grand Prince’s extensive library and collection of Dutch and Flemish , Spanish bodegones, and comparable works by the Roman .17 During these years Magnasco experimented with a wide range of subjects drawn from varied sources, and it has been posited that the artist’s familiarity with Spanish picaresque novels was fostered by their presence in the personal libraries of the Medici princes.18 He found inspiration in prints, such as those of the series on the Quakers after Egbert van Heemskerck (1610-1680), and is known to have painted at least three scenes after Jacques Callot’s (1592-1635) Misères de la guerre.19 Magnasco’s extensive study of Callot—particularly the Cappricci di diverse figure, Balli, Gueux, and Bohémiens—is known to have inspired many of the “spontaneous” figural conventions of his own compositions.20 When Magnasco returned to Milan around 1709, his success in finding distinguished patrons continued with a request from the Austrian governor Gerolamo di Colloredo for a series of paintings addressing life among the Capuchins and other cloistered religious orders (1719-c. 1725). Magnasco received a number of commissions in Milan from Giovanni Francesco Arese, Giovanni Batta Monticelli, and members of other prominent families for canvases showing his idiomatic (in Ratti’s words, “suo modo del tutto novo”) representations of soldiers, gypsies, footpads, and the comparably itinerant lives of mendicants and musicians—the paintings that are most often called “picaresque.”21 According to Ratti, “He painted a picture for Colonel Lora, an art-lover, showing an encampment of soldiers engaged in various activities. This work was acquired after Lora’s death by Balieu, a bookdealer, who lovingly holds it to this day.”22 The Milanese seemed especially to enjoy Magnasco's witty subjects whose cast and bearings highlighted those issues of religious reform and contemporary social problems similarly addressed in the narratives of picaresque novels.

5 Returning to Genoa around 1735, the painter found that the concerns of cultivated Milanese and Florentine aristocrats, who sympathized equally with religious reformers and the writers of picaresque novels, were not shared by patrons in his native city.23 During the last decade and a half of his life (1735-1749), Magnasco's distinctive and subject matter encountered a resistant audience among the Genoese. Ratti wrote that it was condemned as “worthless” (senza valore) and “ridiculous,” but Ratti made a point to fault Genoa as having “no decent judges of the new manner.”24 Nonetheless, Magnasco continued to paint until an advanced age, perhaps for clients in Florence and Milan. Although Magnasco had many collaborators and assistants throughout his career, there were no immediate followers who carried on his stylistic and iconographic innovations after his death in Genoa in 1749. In all of the published records of Magnasco’s life, commissions, and relationships with his patrons, both in Milan and Florence, there is no direct report of his having drawn from the world of Spanish picaresque literature for his themes or subject matter. It should be noted that while Magnasco’s contemporaries did categorize his art as “bizzare” and “capricciose invenzioni,” referring to his “extremely odd fantasies,” and citing “disreputable vine growers,” “crowds of small rogues,” and “rascals on the road,” no one claimed an explicit affinity for Spanish novels, nor was Magnasco recorded as having been directly acquainted with any library or other resource for studying the forms and conventions explicated in the picaresque genre.25 The relationship is conjecture on the part of the many modern writers and historians who have assumed this influence, and it must remain conjecture until some concrete evidence of affiliation is discovered. This study originates with the question of how much evidence Magnasco’s paintings themselves offer to support the widely repeated thesis that the artist drew thematic and iconographic inspiration from the picaresque novel.

The Literature: Magnasco

Any research on Magnasco must begin with two documents written by the Genoese biographer Carlo Giuseppe Ratti. Ratti’s earliest draft (1762)26 and published biography in Delle vite de’pittori, scultori, ed architetti genovesi (Genoa, 1769)27 together

6 amounted to fewer than ten thousand words, but still managed to incorporate a biographical sketch, anecdotes about the artist’s diminutive size and penchant for fancy clothes, a historical episode relating the artist’s commission of a painting to commemorate a visit to Milan by the Emperor Charles VI, a list of his most favored motifs, brief mention of his most illustrious collectors, account of his physical decline and death, and a rather forceful defense of his rough “al tocco” against the anti-Baroque critical tide of the times.28 Aside from a short and factually incorrect entry in the second edition of Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi’s L’Abecedario pittorico (Bologna, 1719)—the very document that prompted Ratti to produce a supplement volume on the artists of Genoa—Ratti’s companion Vite is the only publication regarding Magnasco written by someone who is believed to have had direct knowledge of the facts and circumstances of the artist’s life. The Florentine art historian (1732-1810) incorporated the eccentric painter of “umore e piacere” into the canon of Italian masters in the third volume of his Storia pittorica della Italia (1795-96). Lanzi relied heavily on Ratti’s account for his entry on Magnasco in the chapter on the . Though much of the information is redundant, in accentuating the artist’s role as a figurista of “very appropriate subjects” (oggetti molto adatti) for the landscape painters Tavella and Spera, Lanzi explained the of Magnasco’s lifelong success as a genre painter: “that bold and simple stroke of the [brush] . . . transferred to his subjects of humor, shows, and popular meetings, in which he may be called the Cerquozzi of his school.”29 In describing Magnasco’s work, Lanzi emphasized the artist’s fondness for diminutive forms, “scarcely more than a span large.”30 Magnasco emerged from this brief entry as an unpopular anomaly in his native Genoa, where “a noble conception . . . finish and union of tints” was most prized.31 In Lanzi’s words, “This artist was more esteemed by foreigners than by his own countrymen.”32 Indeed, it was a German who would revive the study of Magnasco more than one hundred years later, at the turn of the twentieth century. Through the nineteenth century Magnasco had virtually disappeared from the art-historical record, with only minor mention in a few scattered museum catalogues of the collections at Seitenstetten (1819), Paris (1879), Dunkerque (1880), Bassano del Grappa (1881), Hermannstadt (1894) and Leipzig (1906).33 The historian and art

7 collector Benno Geiger launched the effort to inventory Magnasco’s work with his exhibition catalogue Alessandro Magnasco (Berlin, 1914), which by 1949 had grown into the most thorough monographic survey to that date, Alessandro Magnasco, 1667-1749 (, 1949), with an index of 385 paintings and .34 A comparable bid for completeness in cataloguing Magnasco was made by Maria Pospisil in 1944—the first full-length study of the totality of Magnasco’s work—though in subsequent scholarship, many of this author’s attributions were reassessed.35 Laura Muti’s most recent catalogue raisonné of Magnasco’s paintings (Faenza, 1994) marks the culmination of efforts to produce a complete record of the surviving works with 538 entries from over 300 collections, and it has been satisfactorily received as a thorough and reliable resource for researchers and historians.36 With ten short essays, Muti’s catalogue focuses primarily on issues of chronology, authorship, collaboration, and geographic context, but includes a compelling essay on the long-term influence of Magnasco’s combination of “espressionistica” technique and “inscrutabile” subject matter on the development of decorative genre painting in eighteenth-century Venice.37 As a catalogue and hard data resource, Benno Geiger’s book of 1949 endures as the central column that supports all subsequent Magnasco scholarship, yet Geiger’s interpretation of Magnasco was often contradictory and remains fundamentally weak. Geiger took Magnasco to be a pure artist, an artist without a point of view: “Having taken up painting, he was above everything else a painter. . . [His work] is not, in my opinion, the fruit of a tendency of some sort, whether political or sectarian, or of some secret lodge to which the painter belonged, but the vibrant and pictorially naïve expression . . . of whatever he saw before him day after day.”38 It would be fine to assert Magnasco as an early proponent of -based realism, but Geiger proved himself equally capable of waxing romantic about Magnasco’s emotional imagination—“il soffio della propria commozione”—by posing scenarios interwoven with undocumented “sacred and passions” that strayed far from the quotidian people watching of his initial thesis.39 Such tendencies to dive into the artist’s —to rhapsodize on Magnasco’s bizarre state of mind, his effusivity and demonical vision—have burdened the greater part of the literature, damning most of the bibliography as subjectivist essays that are of little value to the task of informing a robust critical analysis.40

8 Magnasco was first treated to serious conceptual scrutiny in a short article by Leo Planiscig published in Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft (1915).41 In the space of ten journal pages, Planiscig became the first scholar to contextualize Magnasco’s work within the Dutch low-life genre tradition; to draw distinct iconographical parallels between Magnasco and the Dutch-Italian school of the Bamboccianti; and to cite the popularity of picaresque literature at the Florentine court and in Milan, proposing its consequent value as an interpretive device.42 Planiscig’s article stood as a proposal to widen the consideration of Magnasco’s oeuvre beyond the rhapsodies and conoisseurship notices that had thus far dominated the artist’s bibliography. Georg Syamken’s wide-ranging dissertation, Die Bildenhalte des Alessandro Magnasco 1667-1749 (, 1965) took up this challenge. Syamken marks the first attempt to apply critical theory and iconographic analysis to Magnasco’s seemingly inscrutable subject matter. He posited the interpretive utility of the many social histories of gypsy life published in seventeenth- century Italy, and used this information to propose some moral and conceptual differentiations between the preceding schools of northern European low-life genre painting and their southern counterparts.43 In Syamken’s point of view, Magnasco was a cautious skeptic, prone to secularizing the sorts of social issues that were historically within the purview of the Church (beggary, homelessness, fraternities, and the concomitant practices of vice). While weak on documentary evidence, Syamken argued that the artist’s undisputed popularity, as evident through his prolificacy, must be interpreted to mean that this broadly secularizing tendency was acceptable to his circle of relatively enlightened patrons. But while the formal elements of the capriccio and Dutch influences are omnipresent and legible to most any audience, the artist kept his underlying satirical mien dull, thereby insulating him from any Inquisitorial accusations of heresy.44 Hans Joachim Dürst’s monograph Alessandro Magnasco (Teufen, 1966) is also of great interest in defining the differences between Magnasco’s art and the treatment of similar subject matter by his predecessors and contemporaries.45 Dürst strongly denies that Magnasco is a genre painter. Though many of his subjects are similar to those of the Dutch, Dürst emphasizes Magnasco’s passion for the uncanny, the dramatic, and the bizarre—repeatedly stressing Ratti’s descriptive term, “bizarre invenzioni.” In a daring sub-thesis, Dürst ascribes interpretive

9 meaning to the intensity (Dynamisierung) of Magnasco’s brushstrokes, relating style to subject matter in a profoundly modernist idiom. To Dürst, Magnasco was a proto-espressionist who enjoyed a “magical relationship to the world,” presenting his audiences with ahistorical visions of “contrasts, tensions, and exaggerations.”46 Fausta Franchini Guelfi is by far the most prolific scholar of Magnasco’s work, with at least fifteen books and articles published between 1966 and 2002. More than any other scholar she has defined Magnasco’s place in art history, with careful and informative treatments of his subject matter, formal influences, painting techniques, drawing style, and the first full-color survey of his work, published in 1977.47 Franchini Guelfi’s scholarship sets the stage for this study by a consistent sensitivity to how the primacy of the fictional universe of the Spanish picaresque novel provided Magnasco with important conceptual influences. In her 1977 survey, Franchini Guelfi went so far as to call his figures “tipi,” drawn in a graphic language that should be analogized with the highly stylized personages of the standard picaresque genre contexts that appear in narratives by Alemán, Quevedo, and Cervantes.48 Together with this assertion, she made a case for the ready availability of the Spanish literary source materials by citing the widely read and reproduced translations of the Venetian writer Barezzo Barezzi.49 In 1991 she called “il romanzo aventuroso picaresco” and “il particolare modo di vivere del pícaro” the trove and fountain from which flowed virtually all of Magnasco’s pictorial descriptions “con i suoi soldati, i suoi zingari, i suoi vagabondi, ladri e banditi.”50 In a 2002 article for Revue du Louvre et des Musées de France she argued for establishing a category of “oeuvre appartenant au genre du roman picaresque”—a class of paintings derived from the picaresque novel—into which Magnasco’s many hundreds of soldiers at cards, bandits’ hovels, and gypsy feasts would necessarily fall.51 In short, Franchini Guelfi, the preeminent scholar on Alessandro Magnasco, has established a critical interpretation of Magnasco’s paintings that relies both on Spanish picaresque literary source material and the assumption that knowledge of this literature was widespread enough to provide for an informed audience capable of analogizing between verbal and pictorial mediums presenting comparably fictional genre content.52 However, despite Franchini Guelfi’s repeated references to the Spanish picaresque novel as a likely source for Magnasco’s visions of life among itinerant rogues, she has not offered analyses of specific works

10 wherein definite textual adaptations or parallels may be observed, nor have her analyses ranged beyond the iconographic, entertaining questions of thematic affinity and the applicability reception theories adapted from the extensive fund of literary and historical criticism pertaining to genre literature. In short, having initiated the discussion of Magnasco and the picaresque, Franchini Guelfi remains silent on the most determinative issues of intertextual exchanges between literary and visual texts, elegantly summarized by Janice Best in a recent article in Criticism, "The Chronotope and the Generation of Meaning in Novels and Paintings," (1994).53 This study accepts Franchini Guelfi’s thesis of derivation as a starting point, from which an informed reading of several of Magnasco’s ostensibly picaresque paintings, combined with the application of genre and reception theories derived from scholarship on the picaresque will yield conclusions as to the validity of appropriating the genre category of “picaresque” into critical writing on art historical topics. To date, there has been only one English-language monograph devoted to Magnasco, Oscar Mandel’s The Art of Alessandro Magnasco: An Essay in the Recovery of Meaning (Florence, 1994). The work is invaluable for its comprehensive historiography and the appended translations of two early texts, but the author’s qualitative sociological methodologies are misplaced, as they are applied to the analysis of a single work, Magnasco’s Interior with Monks (c. 1725, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena), and the author’s best occur outside the parameters of his art-historical experiment. In searching for a social or literary context in which the understanding of Magnasco’s work might be elaborated, Mandel’s primary concern, the discovery of meaning through analogy, is much the same as that which lies behind the present study.54 While Mandel repeatedly assumes that Magnasco's original viewers were erudite and fond of satire, his conclusions do not draw directly upon the literary source materials that I believe were crucial to defining contemporary audiences' receptivity to Magnasco. As a scholar of comparative literature, Oscar Mandel often employs literary metaphors akin to Janice Best’s use of the chronotope, suggested by phrases such as “reading what [the paintings] appear to write for us,” and “depicting stories.” His principle motivation in researching Magnasco was to provide a forum for discussing the relative appropriateness of viewing an eighteenth-century artist as being as ambiguous as a contemporary humorist or satirist.55 Mandel concedes that

11 Magnasco “has failed so far to impress himself on the general cultural consciousness,” but he does not let the relative exiguity of critical literature dissuade him from his ultimate belief in the artist’s “meaningful inventiveness.”56 Of all of the scholars to have addressed Magnasco, Mandel is by far the most articulate in acknowledging the limitations of what is actually knowable, as he speaks deliberately of a sense of knowing, and a sense of grasping, rather than knowing and grasping in the absolute.57 In the case of Magnasco, as it is with most artists, very little empirical data about his life and motivations have been found through archival research.58 The dynamic environment of words and manners and metaphors that couched Magnasco’s reception by eighteenth-century audiences is not documented. To use Mandel’s vocabulary, the meaning of Magnasco’s work cannot be “recovered,” it can only be proposed considerately and supported by compelling suppositions. While the present study makes every effort to present empirical evidence when available, many arguments must rely on the persuasivity of visual and textual analyses, together with a thoroughgoing assumption that Magnasco was a literate, socially aware, intellectually savvy, politically attuned individual whose creative output reveals at the very least an aesthetic interest in the social issues of crime and punishment, transience and beggary, hunger and wasting, mendicancy and spiritual devotion—issues that that fueled extensive philosophical debates and informed many narratives of fictional and non-fictional writing before and during his life. This study will address Magnasco’s intersection with one such body of writing, the picaresque literary genre, in an attempt to expand the interpretative resources available to historians of art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Pícaro

The term pícaro, as used throughout this study, is technical shorthand for the hero of a picaresque novel,59 though there are proponents of more encompassing “behavioral” designations of the pícaro that might include the blind beggar, the commissionless soldier, the kitchen maid, the evicted nobleman, the freeloading muleteer, and the petty thief as each embodying that most essentially picaresque designation—itinerant rogue.60 The word pícaro was first used in the sense

12 of “scullion” in 1525.61 It appears in a morality play by Bartolomé Palau, Farsa llamada Custodia del hombre (after 1541), in the argumentative form picarote, and in a context suggesting a wrongdoer or maker of mischief.62 In 1548 and again in 1560 Eugenio de Salazar used the word pícaro, the first time opposing pícaros to courtiers, and the second time putting pícaros among thieves, swindlers, gamblers, counterfeiters, vagrants, and other undesirables.63 The word does not appear in Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), but it was employed in an early edition of Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599, 1604) and by custom came to apply to the denizens of the environments that the author described.64 Virtually all of the ostensibly picaresque writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth century drew from the world of low-lifes, petty nobles, matchmakers, and clergy as described in Alemán’s Guzmán, but it is important to note two preceding texts that provided a basis for Alemán’s imagination of the picaresque life. The first is the Spanish dialogue novel La Celestina,65 originally released in sixteen acts as the Comedia de Calisto y Melibea (1499).66 The work has been popularly known since its publication as La Celestina, after its chief character, the bawd who serves as the go-between for two young lovers.67 By the mid-seventeenth century, La Celestina had been both widely reprinted and imitated in Spanish, English, Italian, French, German, Hebrew, and Latin more than one hundred times. The second work, Lazarillo de Tormes (1554; dubiously attributed to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza), is generally held to be the first picaresque novel. It shows all of the recognizable characteristics of comical content and confessional structure: the poor boy Lazaro recounts to an inquisitor his life of punishing service under seven successive lay and clerical masters, hypocrites all, who hide their dubious characters behind public .68 Such pícaros as Lazarillo are beings stripped of public identities. They may spend years working as haulers, dogsbodies, stewards, and indulgence peddlers, but none of these vocations grants any distinction; the abused protagonist merely stands in for some other nameless servant. Any social or economic advancement is the product of cunning. The pícaro must commit small wrongs (stealing bread, assisting charlatans), so as to save himself from having greater wrongs done to him (forced starvation, homelessness). There is no negotiating with the causes of his misfortune; he is either playing tricks on people or having them played back at him, all the while mugging for

13 his reader’s laughs and sympathy.69 But the author of Lazarillo did not grant his character the higher charter of what anthropologists call a “culture hero.”70 Lazarillo depends too much on the mercies of fate to be classed as a self-actualized “trickster” in the tradition of Hermann Bote’s Till Eulenspiegel (c. 1510) or Julio Cesare Croce’s Vita di Bertoldo (1606).71 Though it was a highly original and innovative work of fiction, Lazarillo de Tormes incorporated a number of anecdotes drawn from a long tradition of storytelling, many of which originated in the medieval Italian canon.72 In these earlier works, attention focused less upon the doer than upon the thing being done: most “novellas” were assortments of jokes and beffe—sharping, cheating, fraud—committed by stock figures.73 Contriving poseurs, corrupt priests, and penniless noblemen lent comedy to the heroes’ schemes.74 While far more discursive and psychological than its predecessors, the seminal “Spanish novel” Lazarillo was derived in large part from international sources, reinforcing one of the fundamental points of the presengt study, the contention that from its earliest incarnation the picaresque phenomenon transcended ethnic and linguistic boundaries and was reflective of a Europe-wide interest—comic, sympathetic, aesthetic, and socio-critical—into the lives and tribulations of roguish protagonists. The existence of a literary genre such as the picaresque presupposes certain recognizable characteristics of content and technique understood apart from the immediate life experiences of the intended audience. One need not roam the Spanish or Italian countryside to recognize these characters as “types” (muleteer, blind man, hidalgo, priest, confidence man, etc.)75 To quote Alexander Blackburn, “Let the hero be an orphan, let him relate his adventures in a more or less sardonic manner, let him wander into delinquency, and so forth—and we are orbiting in the picaresque galaxy.”76 Claudio Guillén applies a similar synopsis to the establishment of a picaresque “trope” or “”—“an essential situation or significant structure derived from the novels themselves.”77 The “essential situations” of the picaresque narrative were founded in Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache.78 Ironically, even as the book was selling thousands of copies, Alemán himself worked to discouraged readers’ of Guzmán as a scoundrel. He had striven to create a character of moral complexity. When Part I of Guzmán became widely known as “El Pícaro,” the author objected vehemently in a public letter and proceeded to subtitle his entire

14 work “atalaya de la vida humana” (“watchtower of human life”).79 Guzmán’s simulated autobiography—an ostensibly sincere and repentant Christian struggling to impose a comprehensive order upon his reflections on a corrupting world—closely describes the debased elements and arenas of society, while arguing for the immanence of redemption at the end of every wretched life.80 While the orthodox Catholic that underlay the novel directed readers’ higher thoughts toward the universal laws that operated beneath the seeming arbitrariness of the material world, the author’s documentary concern with the fine details of the lives and manners and deportment of his characters (rebellious and servile alike) made the novel a practical rogues’ gallery of coarse motifs after which dozens of imitators fashioned their own stories of penitent pícaros.81 Alemán’s cast of orphans, bandits, beggars, kitchen scullions, street musicians, friars, and courtly poseurs routinely must choose between personal integrity and physical well being (i.e., honor versus appetite.) Guzmán repeatedly points to the fact that everyone is imprisoned in an earthly corpus that is subject to appetites, elemental abuses, sexual passions, anatomical imperfections, and decay.82 Because human perceptions are limited by the grossness of our senses, we can easily be deluded by appearances. Thus the picaresque genre is one overwhelmingly focused on outward appearances and the corporal maintenance of the as the requisite activity of self-preservation and self-presentation. Feeding it, clothing it, resting it, posing it, abusing it, and exchanging its labor potential for the means of subsistence and social advancement make up the pícaro’s life—a list that the life story of every reader. This abstract theme of human economics was fundamental to the genre as it sought to edify readers’ moral consciences, but it was in the savory settings of the wayside taverns, the parlor rooms, the gypsy encampments, the prisons, the galleys, and the subterranean lairs that the genre made such an existential thesis substantive, entertaining, and enduring as a literary mode.

The Literature: The Picaresque

Since the late nineteenth century, when the earliest comprehensive studies of the picaresque were made, virtually every discussion of the picaresque novel has begun with the

15 same fundamental questions: What are the formal and contextual parameters that define the genre? What are the canonical texts? Does the picaresque reflect a larger cultural phenomenon in European arts and letters, foreshadowing the emergence of a bourgeois popular culture rooted in the mores and exploits of rebellious individuals? I will not present a complete historiography of the Spanish picaresque as there are numerous such resources readily available in the key works of picaresque scholarship.83 I will instead offer a distillation of the formal and theoretical concepts historically applied to picaresque genre studies, emphasizing the ones I consider crucial to the shaping of a popular imagination of the characters and active in picaresque fictional space, those genre attributes that provide fertile material for translations into visual representations of the picaresque universe. In 1895 the Dutch scholar Fonger de Haan succinctly described of the picaresque narrative as he saw it, as “the prose autobiography of a person, real or imaginary, who strives, by fair means and by foul, to make a living, and in relating his experiences in various classes of society, points out the evils which come under his observation.”84 Thus, for something to be picaresque, it must reflect upon the morally and economically debased elements of society. The most influential early historian of the picaresque was Frank W. Chandler, whose Romances of Roguery (1899) demonstrated the societally bipartite nature of the genre as it presented readers with “the slights and shifts of vagabonds and adventurers” together with “most vivid pictures of manners and times.”85 Chandler’s compendium of rascally character types asserted the genre as one concerned primarily with entertaining descriptions. Chandler perceived the picaresque audience as interested foremost in perceiving “society through the rogue’s eye.”86 The novels were logical offshoots of the immensely popular beggar books (the Volksbücher, Schwänke, and Liber vagatorum), anthologies of stories that professed insight into the depraved lives of fools, gypsies, and highwaymen.87 Alexander Blackburn (1979) went further into the temporal and conceptual particulars of the genre, calling the picaresque novel “a seriocomic form that tends to appear at times when the literary imagination is unusually threatened by catastrophe: that is, at times when the very idea of existence commingles with worlds of illusion.”88 Thus, the picaresque addresses social and ethical problems through a medium that is powered by the receiver’s capacity for mental

16 imagery. Though I would dispute that generic attributes of illusory escapism can be time specific, Blackburn identified one such period as extending from the late through the Counter-Reformation into the early eighteenth century, a time line that incorporated the rise and fall of Spanish power in Europe, and a time line roughly equivalent to that of the Baroque era.89 While acknowledging the enduring popularity of crude subject matter through these decades, Blackburn drew strict genre distinctions between “the art of the picaresque” and such “rogue anatomies as criminal biographies, conny-catching tales, beggarbooks, and sketches of low-life manners” published concurrently with the novels.90 The picaresque novel, he asserted, is about the creation of a “persona of will” in an environment of moral and structural disintegration, “a fallen man in a fallen world.”91 Thus, while telling the tales of criminals and vagrants, the picaresque art form should convey a sense of personal identity and individual motivation—at least on the part of the envisaging narrator or receiver—in contrasting relation to society’s more vaguely drawn picaresque caste, generically consigned to roguish vocations. Richard Bjornson (1977) noted that many scholars were trending toward overly narrow “economic and geographic definitions” defining the inspirations behind the picaresque genre (ethnic purges, military disenfranchisement, rampant inflation), and worried that critics might thereby be constrained from drawing fruitful analogies between the content of the canonical Spanish novels and works created outside of Spain, across times and geographies that, from an historical-intellectual point of view, had much in common.92 Bjornson believed that the reception of the “picaresque hero” and interest in picaresque states of being appealed broadly to Spanish, French, English, German, and Italian audiences each struggling with their own abiding wars, ecclesiastical reforms, and economic shifts away from hereditary entitlements to meritocratic capitalist market structures. By diagraming the dominant conventions of the European picaresque novel—its peripatetic overview of the types and conditions of human life, its assertion of lower-class individuals as legitimate protagonists in morally serious works of fiction, and its underlying challenge to bourgeois preconceptions about such characters—Bjornson expanded the scope of the picaresque paradigm beyond mere words. Bjornson charted the transformational space in which audiences became aware of themselves as

17 living lives similar to those of picaresque heroes—lives exacerbated by the dehumanizing facets of modern society. For most people in and outside of Spain, the ever-present threat of displacement and poverty required that they make their own choices between social conformity and adherence to abstract values of truth and virtue.93 But in such an expansively dialogical reading, “the picaresque” risked becoming an amorphous sociological appellative of anomie, and both Bjornson and Blackburn rejected the idea that the picaresque could exist as a cultural without concrete texts to shape it. Neither author, however, excluded the possibility that the denomination of “picaresque text” might validly be expanded to include objects of visual culture. With the exception of Giancarlo Maiorino’s recent monograph on Lazarillo, little effort has been made to articulate the word and image theoretical implications for seventeenth-century audiences’ reception of beggars, watersellers, and kitchen maids.94 A great percentage of the literature on the picaresque argues that strict geographic boundaries should be traced around the genre, and that only native Spanish novels written between 1554 and 1640 should count as picaresque.95 It is generally agreed by all parties that the picaresque emerged together with the modern novel—a conscious art of materialist narration, an open-ended travelogue of length and realistic import—and that this nascence can be located in Spain in the middle of the sixteenth century.96 But in employing a rigid geographic framework, the most obvious exclusions are the subsequent writings of Grimmelshausen and Lesage, among the most widely read and determinant novels “of picaresque derivation.” I remain unconvinced of the merits of such exclusions and will not place limits on the potential influence of non- Spanish literary efforts in shaping the wider imagination of the picaresque universe.97 Claudio Guillén made it a point to emphasize the pan-European landscape in which the picaresque narrative itself occurs, “Guzmán de Alfarache, Estebanillo Gonzáles and many a Spanish pícaro serve their apprenticeship in Italy . . . The myth of Italy as the land of vice and crime was general and widespread: indeed the Italian [leggenda nera] was as partial and devestating as the Spanish one. . . Italy was considered the paradise of roguish imposture.”98 Thus, the picaresque is not a genre phenomenon that can be limited to Spanish inventions; nor must its narratives be restrcted to native Spanish content. Italy is geographically affinitive in the plots of the most iconic novels, and the Italian countryside—its landmarks and inhabitants—would remain affinitive in later

18 literary and visual art forms rooted in the picaresque. In the context of this study—as in many others broadly concerned with the cultural import of genre—the given period audiences (be they readers or art viewers) certainly would not have bothered with generic term-wrangling about what constituted a work of picaresque derivation. Readers and art viewers are far more likely to have adhered (passively, intellectually) to understandings like those proposed by Ulrich Wicks. Wicks argues for a spectrum of literary modes upon which the picaresque occupies a place.99 His “picaresque mode” embodies an “essential picaresque situation” and, following the environmental of Northrop Frye, presents its audience with visions of a world that is composed of the same matter, but is morally and materially worse than the reader’s.100 Wicks’s concern is to restore credit to the word, and “to avoid banishing the term picaresque from all but the historically definable genre of la novela picaresca.”101 Once the term has been revalidated as a means of describing distinct genre characteristics (in cultural apart from their appearance in the canonical texts) “the picaresque” can be utilized as a referent for interpreting analogous content in literary and non- literary mediums. Most recently, Peter N. Dunn explored at length how such discursive categorizations of the picaresque novel are of interest in reflecting contemporary trends in literature studies, but cautioned against “apply[ing] the ‘epithet’ picaresque so indiscriminately to any somewhat unscrupulous adventurer” as to render it as a genre without limits or definition.102 In short, a homeless beggar does not a pícaro make. According to Dunn, the picaresque is a complex, realistic genre full of contradictions that the moral and behavioral incongruities of real life. Picaresque texts can be “didactic and dogmatic,” “compassionate and pluralistic,” “comic and tragic,” “shallow and decorative and discursive.” and indeed they must be so for the genre to have valence beyond the synchronic.103 With picaresque texts before us, our challenge should be to “restore to the classics their original strangeness” by theorizing and historicizing,104 as texts can never be explained fully by concepts that post-date their creation.105 But as all texts are read and interpreted diachronically and for the greater part of their existence by audiences far removed from any original context, the latter-day interpreter must use theory. This study strives to find a balance between the use of historical data that would have informed a Baroque-era

19 understanding, and modern deconstructive methodologies that shed light on cultural phenomena that might not have been so clearly understood by the art makers of the era. Dunn takes particular issue with the sorts of vague cultural matrices applied by twentieth- century writers to the Golden Age environment of the novels’ creation—the ostensive struggle of individuals for freedom within their social bounds, the decadence of Spanish society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the biological concept of the development of art and literature. Dunn distances the mission of the scholar of the picaresque away from ideological concerns with the “civilizing and liberating power of humane letters” toward an ordered appraisal of the devices and patterns by which true genre can be recognized.106 Though any study must strive to avoid Dunn’s dreaded “hypostatized transtextual concepts of ‘the pícaro’ and ‘the picaresque,’” his example of genre revealed through careful exploration of the written content of picaresque texts directs this study of the visual content of pictorial texts.107

Chapter One. The Picaresque Image in Spain and Italy

In order to establish a set of methodological parameters for my analysis of Magnasco’s oeuvre, the discussion of individual works of art in Chapter One will critically assess the present state of intertextual iconographic and thematic analyses offered by a number of historians whose writings have addressed the tropes of the picaresque as translated by visual artists into graphic and painted forms. The discussion of the “picaresque image” will begin with examples of book illustrations drawn from the earliest editions of the canonical novels. These and engravings were almost always the product of anonymous printmakers under contract to publishing houses, and yet there are several, rather complex frontispieces from early editions of Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzmán de Alfarache, and Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus which provide important insights into readers’ perceptions of these novels as fundamentally comedic and component to a larger history of what we now call “popular culture”—the literatura desesperanzada, rooted in the rituals of folk life, philosophical pessimism, and economic dispossession.108 The discussion of paintings will begin with the Spanish Baroque practice that I term

20 “picaresque naturalism,” derived from the broader concept of Baroque naturalism. It was the Spanish who perfected naturalistic realism, and Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) was among the first to apply the principles of this realism to picaresque subject matter.109 In a painting like Old Woman Frying Eggs (1618, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh) Velázquez appropriated the themes and details of the contemporary picaresque genre in a manner that faithfully reproduced the dramatic habitats and social circumstances of specific picaresque protagonists and staff characters, though not quoting narrative directly from any one of the novels. Similarly, Velázquez’s The Waterseller of Seville (1620, Wellington Museum, London) and The Servant (1618-19, The Art Institute of Chicago) will be analyzed as examples of picaresque naturalism—representations of archetypal characters consigned to the economic margins of the market economy of Spain’s proverbial Golden Age. The Sevillian Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-1682) was likewise aware of the social unrest reflected in the numerous picaresque novels set in his native city,110 and his approach to genre painting was often based on a realistic point of view analogous to that of the picaresque author.111 Several scholars have addressed the relationship between the picaresque novel and Velázquez’s and Murillo’s beggar paintings; most lean heavily on broad iconographic parallels between the literary and pictorial settings and staffage.112 The more dialogical methodologies of art historians Janis A. Tomlinson, Marcia L. Welles, Helmut Hatzfeld, Marianna Haraszti- Takács, Barry Wind, and Giancarlo Maiorino have gradually introduced the role of the viewer in fixing meanings upon these works that parallel the theses and critical posture of the picaresque novelists, on issues ranging from Christian charity, to child abuse, to Spanish philological perceptions of nature.113 Chapter One will critically incorporate these scholars’ theoretical approaches into the discussion of specific works, emphasizing those points of analysis that elucidate Magnasco’s own of picaresque iconography and literary motifs. There is a limited record of scholarly references to the picaresque novel in art-historical writing on Caravaggio (1573-1610), Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652), Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), and the Roman Bamboccianti.114 Any discussion of picaresque influences on Italian art must first acknowledge the virtually universal belief that the explosion of Italian and Spanish low-life genre painting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was due to Dutch influences, both

21 compositionally and thematically. There can be no debate as to the profound influence of Northern European low-life genre painting on related treatments in the South, but this study argues for a more considered interpretation that admits the role that popular Spanish and Italian fiction played in fostering the appeal of images showing beggars, bravos, disbanded soldiers, and other social deviants. In Spain and Italy, the secular tradition of the humanist treatise gradually gave way to picaresque and quixotic novels, illusionistic authorial perspectives, and the phenomenal painted spaces of Caravaggio and Velázquez.115 Just as philosophical humanist writings (a moralizing historical treatise genre in the medieval scholar’s tradition) had served as the textual inspiration behind many artists’ efforts to humanize their painted representations of religious subjects, the picaresque (an entertainment genre within the discursive novel prose tradition) emerged as a textual realm from which Baroque artists could plot an expansive visual cultural tradition of social deviance, represented by low-life itinerancy, the antics of misfits, and the celebratory atmosphere of gypsy and soldier encampments.116 From here, the chapter shifts to a discussion of a second sub-category of picaresque painting, what I term “picaresque ,” wherein artists mine the picaresque literary genre for its characters, scenery, and dramatic irony, and then re-imagine it all in virtuoso displays of satire and burlesque. This sub-category is rooted in the graphic styles of the Florentine printmaker Jacques Callot(1592-1635), and in the painted landscapes of Salvator Rosa.117 Magnasco's playful approach to his figures and settings owed much to the prints of Callot, and Rosa similarly indulged in paintings of wind-swept countryside, grottos, and ruins peopled with brigands, bacchants, and tormented Anchorite friars.118 As with the scenes painted by these artists, Magnasco’s scenes of diminutive figures set in lush landscapes, cavernous halls, and spare interiors defy easy classification as history painting or genre. It is here that I will lay the foundation for the next three chapters. I will argue that the collected paintings of Magnasco's “painterly picaresque,” while at times formally and conceptually derivative, constitute a complete aesthetic vision of a picaresque world, with its intrinsic themes, denizens, and socioeconomic insights. In short, the overt stylistic and narrative continuity between paintings functions to create a fictional space, a fantasy cosmology of settings and players analogous to those utilized by Alemán, Quevedo, Cervantes, Grimmelshausen, and

22 Lesage. And such explicitly literary attributes compel the viewer to consider the intertextual associations between the artist’s oeuvre and the genre.

Chapter Two. Picaresque Themes and Iconography in the Work of Alessandro Magnasco

In the second chapter I will pursue the central thesis and methodology of my dissertation—a critical reading of the applicability of the picaresque literary genre tradition to art historical discourse, specifically addressing examples from the career of Alessandro Magnasco. In my view, Magnasco worked in an artistic environment informed by two painterly traditions of picaresque representation—“picaresque naturalism” and “picaresque romanticism.” The argument will begin with a brief formal comparison of Magnasco’s treatments of typologically picaresque characters and scenes with those of his predecessors There are three questions that underlie the chapter. Who are the figures in Magnasco’s paintings? Where is the action taking place? What might be some of the literary sources for understanding these characters and settings? By identifying the most salient attributes of the picaresque hero, villain, or staff character, we can better recognize the formal and descriptive devices used by painters to realize the visual impression of a scene derived from the standard picaresque narrative. I intend to reveal that, while highly stylized, Magnasco’s artistic approach was keenly attuned to many of the most expressive formal and thematic nuances of the picaresque character type, dealing chiefly with authors’ common emphasis on the relationship between the physical elements and the human body—its carnal attributes, its capacity for abuse, the wracking effects of hunger, thirst, illness, aging, and its ultimate resiliency. I will here introduce theory extracted from literary genre studies, relating specifically to the development of early modern of the grotesque and the socially transgressive nature of representations of the human body as inconstant and physically malleable. By applying Bakhtinian genre theory119 together with historical writing on related issues,120 I will demonstrate that the core concepts of corporeality and comic inversion that permeate the picaresque literary phenomenon are viably applicable to Magnasco’s pictorial interpretation of the genre. Magnasco’s stylized approaches to the human form—the crooked joints, long legs,

23 and distended bellies, all rendered in muddy impasto—will be shown to function as painterly devices for articulating the raw physicality of the lives of picaresque protagonists, and as reinforcement of the emergent social and aesthetic interest in grotesque abuses of the body that coincided with Enlightenment-era writing on human nature and natural economies.121 In related contrast to the aesthetics of “picaresque wasting,” the authors (narrators and protagonists) of these novels are also noted for their substantive interest in the costumes, fashions, deportment, and genial manners that functioned to demarcate the social classes.122 Similarly, Magnasco’s scenes of feasting, loafing, card games, and music parties accentuate the role of dress as an extension of character. The gypsies in their rags and the soldiers in their boots and breeches and the noble in his salon attire are all represented in poses calculated to draw the viewer’s attention to the character’s investment in clothing. For Magnasco, flamboyant dress—be it threadbare capes and crushed hats or leggings and silver buckles—is asserted as an economically transcendent marker of individual style, wit, and carriage, thereby diminishing the customary class distinctions implied by the cuts and material cost of specific garments. The second chapter will present close readings of some of Magnasco’s most “picaresque” paintings, including Halt of the Brigands (c. 1710, The Hermitage, Saint Petersburg), Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (c. 1715, Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa), Soldiers and a Charlatan among Ruins ( c. 1720-30, A. S. Drey, Monaco), Kitchen Scene with Maid and Pícaro (c. 1709- 10, Lechi Collection, Brescia), The Embarcation of the Prisoners at the Port of Genoa (c. 1725, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux), and Satire of a Nobleman in Misery (c. 1730, Detroit Institute of Arts). By subjecting these and other works to a process of informed description, numerous thematic and iconographic parallels between the content of these paintings and the narratives of the most canonical picaresque novels emerge.

Chapter Three. Reading Magnasco’s Paintings as Fiction

The third chapter applies the reception theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, Hans-Robert Jauss, and Wolfgand Iser toward the discovery of the applicative status of Magnasco’s genre paintings as “fiction.” At issue are the relative properties of literary and visual works of low-life genre

24 (iconographic, thematic, and aesthetic) when works are designed to be received as sociological reportage and when they depart from reality to the point that audiences perceive them as imaginary.123 Magnasco's loose, visible brushstrokes and the mannered proportions of his figures made it impossible for audiences to read his paintings as realistically representing the lives and activities of social outcasts, and instead encouraged these audiences to view and interpret the familiar picaresque literary world through a new stylistic screen, removed from the socio- economic moral thrust of the literary genre but nonetheless intended to evoke the intellectual and imaginative aspects of novel reading.124 Magnasco's painterly picaresque represents a moment in the when form and iconography intersected with the reader/viewer’s imagination to create visions of fictional space.125 Most researchers in eighteenth-century intellectual history make assumptions regarding the general popularity of genre literature and comedic theater (and with these influences, a corresponding atmosphere of skeptical ) in the social environments of Magnasco’s principle markets in Florence and Milan.126 Marco Bona Castellotti describes Magnasco as a painter “clearly in the service of an intellectually secular class,” and Benno Geiger conjures the idea of “courtly ambivalence” as central to Magnasco’s seemingly agnostic .127 As Kant would articulate, the aesthetic is distinguished by its “disinterestedness,” the uncoupling of purposiveness from representation of the end. Magnasco’s paintings responded to the desires of just such a disinterested intellectual class for whom picaresque genre literature and satirical letters were prized more for their stylishness and diversional properties than for any moralizing or reformist message that they might also have been written to convey.128 The discussion will begin with an analysis of several paintings from Magnasco’s mature period that display attributes of of fictitiousness.129 Magnasco’s scenes are neither generally nor factually “true”; what is shown never happened, and the images are thereby unencumbered by the formal strictures of history painting or portraiture. The figures are not intended to represent actual people (after about 1710, there is no evidence of the artist having used models) and virtually all of the scenes are set in delusory landscapes and interiors—cramped, unspecified places teeming with anonymous mercenaries and delinquents.130 Magnasco repeated these figural types and props and scenarios again and again, from canvas to canvas, over a forty year span, in a

25 process of generic conventionalization that should be likened to novelists’ repeated use of stock characters, settings, and events to expedite their audiences’ comprehension of the ongoing action. It is not necessary to re-introduce the quack doctor, the hungry muleteer, the retired soldier, or the bandit king, when the reader has met with these same characters in countless stories before. Just as written narratives operated in the imaginary picaresque universe of gypsy camps, thieves’ dens, sculleries, and salons of seventeenth-century Spain and Italy, Magnasco staged his genre scenes according to dialogical pictorial conventions that were understood by viewers to be no more factual or true than any work of fiction. The question of Magnasco’s use of stock, fictional staffage is nowhere more interestingly posed than in his incorporation of these figures in his many self-referential paintings of the artist in his studio.131 Magnasco deviates from the mimetic and ennobling traditions of the Baroque self-portrait by casting himself as yet another member of the cavalcade of derelicts, at work at his easel among the shadowy ruins that served as the hangout for so many of his gypsies, soldiers, and peripatetic friars.132 The message that the artist intended to convey with these paintings is unclear, but given the visual art environment into which such representations would have emerged in the early eighteenth century—alongside works like Giuseppe Maria Crespi’s (1665- 1747) The Artist in his Studio (c. 1735, Wadsworth Athanaeum, Hartford) or Luis Egidio Meléndez’s (1716-1780) Self Portrait (1746, Louvre)—they clearly belong in a different class. Magnasco’s representations of the “beggar painter” push the boundaries of even the most all- encompassing category of self-, and should rightly be read as genre.133 He does adhere however to one crucial convention of painterly self-representation in that he surrounds himself with the objects of his creative life, but in a strange and amplified way. Whereas (1609-1660) had demurely sat with her palette and brush before a typical canvas, and Giuseppe Maria Crespi showed himself in an uncluttered home studio with books and assorted anatomical casts, Magnasco projected himself bodily into the environs of his “bizzare invenzioni” where he is surrounded by the inhabitants of his imagination.134 In these paintings, perhaps more than any other, Magnasco challenges his audience to see these figures as existing in an unreal, “anti- Arcadian” space where all of the low-lifes and outcasts can convene and be seen by the “pittor pitocco,” and through his eyes, by the wider audience.135 The conceptual leap from capriccio to

26 fiction is bridged by the viewer’s realization that he has seen each of these same figures many times before in the camps and halls and jails and galley yards of the artist’s picaresque oeuvre—a recycling of people, props, and motifs that is itself a caprice of episodic plotting.136

Chapter Four. Magnasco and Monasticism: Picaresque Premises of Piety

The fourth chapter will use similar methodologies to address Magnasco's multivalent approach to the portrayal of monastic life, religious fervor, and individual piety and spiritual reflection.137 A significant percentage of Magnasco's work is given to scenes of devotion, though within these pictures the preponderance of imagery is related, in style and mood, to the picaresque imagery that defines the artist’s oeuvre.138 Magnasco seemed simultaneously to pursue two approaches to issues of piety and spirituality: one highly expressive and dogmatic—his representations of monks and ascetics in prayer, processionals, and witness to personal ecstasy; the other much darker, moodier, and ostensibly more imaginary—his scenes of friars eating, drinking, and lazing about the misericord and refectory. In conjunction with the theses of the previous chapters, I argue that Magnasco at times treated monasticism as a subject of broadly picaresque derivation, employed to the end of fashioning scenes of emotion, pathos, and fanciful for the purpose of providing audiences with witty and satirical pictorial diversions.139 Through the waning years of the Counter-Reformation and triumph of enlightened thought in the intellectual contexts of secularism and skepticism, Magnasco appropriated the emotional and expressive value of pious imagery as a subject to be celebrated in stylized token images. 140 The theological tenets and the spiritual and lifestyle practices of monasticism became for Magnasco and his contemporaries little more than themes after which to devise virtuoso, and consequently incredulous expressions of modern style. Magnasco's lazy friars in paintings like Interior with Monks (c. 1725, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena) represent a new Enlightenment- era fashion of Catholic spirituality as fictions conceived by secular imaginations. The chapter begins with a short discussion of the critical history of picaresque attitudes toward the church, comparing literary and painterly representations of parochial and monastic

27 life, from both reverential and facetious viewpoints.141 Of overarching interest is how such “expressionistic” representations of faith, along with moral and carnal weakness, were employed by the Spanish and Italian writers and artists who provided the backdrop to Magnasco’s era. There exists a long visual history of anti-Church satire, but as one would expect, very little record in the more monumental and classically-based media of painting and . Most caricature and derisive imagery was shown in the relatively inexpensive etchings, engravings, and woodcuts widely distributed and collected throughout Europe after the Reformation. I will argue that the audience and cultural climate receptive to Magnasco’s work was fond of such facetious representations, and that the painter’s work was heir to the tradition of the vagabond friars of artists like Egbert van Heemskerk, Cornelius Dusart, and Jacques Callot. Magnasco’s pictures of monasticism are filled with the physical bodies of devotees. The scenes are tightly packed choreographies of tonsured heads, robe-draped arms and legs, hoods and sandals. The question of formal expressiveness—exaggerated postures, contorted limbs, mannered proportions—will be linked to the picaresque and transgressive genre arguments discussed in the previous chapters, with particular emphasis on the affirmative and subversive qualities of corporeality and costume. I will argue that, however stylishly, Magnasco succeeded in presenting supremely physical portrayals of devotion, and thereby communicated the idea of the human material basis underlying the asceticism common to the Capuchin and Camaldolite orders that he most often represented.142 Yet I will not argue that Magnasco’s paintings were intended to function as affirmations of their audiences’ true faith, as of fondness for monastic life, or as devotional instruments through which viewers could achieve the transcendental states shown by the ecstatic friars. I believe that the social and literary contexts of Magnasco’s oeuvre suggest a different, and more complex reading. Such scenes were more likely viewed as painted fictions, showing highly expressive friars/characters praying, meditating, writhing in spiritual catharsis. These scenes were painted by Magnasco to contrast with his complementary and contradictory visions of monasticism, in which feasting, grooming, and lethargy are displayed.143 Franchini Guelfi has argued that Magnasco’s treatment of monasticism was a painterly response to the intellectual climates of satire and religious skepticism local to both Florence and

28 Milan during the early decades of the eighteenth century.144 As discussed in the previous chapter, both were climates reinforced by the type of behaviors parodied in the picaresque literary tradition, wherein overt and public displays of religiosity (Magnasco’s scenes of contorted and ecstatic friars) often belied far more worldly pursuits of physical gratification (a similar group reclined and picnicking in a grotto.)145 Thus one type of monastic scene would be incomplete without the other, or better yet, the paintings of Capuchins in displays of piety show the very same friars/characters who later appear playing with cats and picking at their calloused feet and warming their backs at the monastery hearth.146 I will argue that his dichotomous approach to spiritual life reveals Magnasco’s artistic approach to be irresolute and skeptical, the critical attributes of the picaresque narrator.147

Conclusion

The study will conclude with a restatement of the principle thesis, and detail how each chapter has contributed towards a clearer understanding of both the formal and theoretical relationships between Magnasco’s treatments of his subject matter and the themes, motifs, and satirical mien standardized by the authors and critical historians of the Spanish picaresque literary genre. I will have demonstrated Magnasco’s importance as a painter who deliberately and effectively combined intellectual literacy and conspicuous style into complex and compelling works of art.

______1. A list of writers who have invoked the picaresque in their criticism would include Piero Camporesi, Hans Dürst, Fausta Franchini Guelfi, Oscar Mandel, Laura Muti, Georg Syamken and Miklos Varga. Harold Acton’s multiple, and arguably “picaresque” accounts of the trials and escapades and dynastic rigor mortis of the courts of Ferdinand II and Gian Gastone (The Last Medici, London, 1932, revised in 1958 and 1980) are twice alluded to by Fausta Franchini Guelfi in describing a general fondness for picaresque content felt by the late Medici: Alessandro Magnasco (Genoa: Cassa di Risparmio di Genova e Imperiale, 1977), 19-20; and Alessandro Magnasco (Cremona: Edizioni dei Soncino, 1991), 23. As recently as 2002, Franchini Guelfi continued to connect Magnasco, the Medici, and literary themes “come il romanzo picaresco” in

29 “Les peintures d'Alessandro Magnasco 1667-1749 au Musée du Louvre,” Revue du Louvre et des Musées de France 52, no. 5 (2002): 49-57. Carlo Giuseppe Ratti’s record of Magnasco’s collectors in Milan (c. 1720-1745) lists the Archinto, the Arese, the Borromeo, the Casnedi, the Gazzoli, the Lori, the Visconti, Count Doria, and a certain Ignazio Balbi, Postmaster General of Milan, while singling out Count Girolamo di Colloredo and a bookseller named Balieu as being especially fond of Magnasco’s “cappriciose invenzioni” showing encampments of sharpers and soldiers engaged in various activities. Franchini Guelfi (1977) elaborates on the intellectual habits of these and other individual patrons; see also Carlo Giuseppe Ratti, Delle vite de’pittori, scultori, ed architetti genovesi. Tomo secondo in continuazione dell’opera di Rafaello Soprani (Genoa, 1768-69.)

2. Three authors who have begun the discussion should be noted: Jesus Cantera Montenegro, "El pícaro en la pintura barroca española," Anales de historia del arte 1 (1989): 209-222; Janis A. Tomlinson and Marcia L. Welles, "Picturing the Picaresque: Lazarillo and Murillo's Four Figures on a Step," in The Picaresque: Tradition and Displacement, Giancarlo Maiorino, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 66-85; and Maiorino’s recent essay on visualizing the picaresque trope of scarce food and drink, as personified by Velázquez’s Waterseller of Seville, Giancarlo Maiorino, At the Margins of the Renaissance: Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque Art of Survival (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 55-77.

3. Apart from any association with analogical visual art forms, the role of the middle-class reader in elevating and promulgating the picaresque novel into a viable commercial genre is widely recounted. For varying approaches to the problem of interpreting the bourgeois response to picaresque social and economic tropes and narrative innovations, see Harry Sieber, Language and Society in “La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Peter N. Dunn, Spanish Picaresque Fiction: A New Literary History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Maiorino, 2003, 55-77.

4. For example see Janice Best, "The Chronotope and the Generation of Meaning in Novels and Paintings," Criticism 36, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 291-316; Catherine M. Gordon, “British Paintings of Subjects from the English Novel, 1740-1870,” Ph.D. diss., Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 1981; and Maiorino, 2003.

5. Magnasco was born and lived for nearly three decades in Genoa during a time when the Spanish exerted significant political and cultural control over the port city. The ascension of the Admiral Andrea Doria in 1528 signalled the end of the city’s historical status as a French satellite and the beginning of its alliance with Spain, after which an ostensibly independent Genoa relied heavily on Spanish money and military support. The city called for Spanish reinforcements during the French bombardment of 1684, and effectively remained a ward of the Spanish until the greater part of the Piedmont, Lombardy and Liguria were annexed by in 1713.

30 6. For the publishing environment of eighteenth-century Europe and the popularity of translations and reprints, see Leona Rosenberg and Madeline B. Stern, From Revolution to Revolution: Perspectives on Publishing and Bookselling, 1501-2001 (New Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 2002), 60-67.

7. Throughout this study I will refer to Peter Dunn’s Spanish Picaresque Fiction (1993) and the most recent Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel (2003) for the original dates of publication for the first Spanish editions of each primary text. The first picaresque novel, Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades, was published anonymously in Alcalá de Henares in 1554. The first part of Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de’Alfarache was published in 1599, the Segunda parte in 1604. ’s Novelas ejemplares were published in individual and combined editions after 1613. Francisco de Quevedo wrote La vida del buscón in 1605, but it was not published until 1626. Alonzo de Castillo Solórzano’s Las adventures del bachiller Trapaza dates to 1637 and Antonio Enríquez Gómez’s Vida y hechos de Estebanillo González, hombre de buen humor is cited by most scholars as the last of the true Spanish picaresque novels, published in 1646. See Harriet Turner and Adelaida López de Martinez, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel from 1600 to the Present (London: Cambridge University Press, 2003), xii-xiii; and Dunn, 1993, 5, 29-87.

8. Throughout this dissertation I will make reference to the processes of dialogism, as formulated by the Russian philologist Mikhail Bakhtin. In brief, the dialogic work carries on a continual dialogue with other works of art and/or literature. In Bakhtin’s words, “It does not merely answer, correct, silence, or extend a previous work, but informs and is continually informed by the previous work.” In addressing the dialogical potential of Baroque art, and relating it specifically to the tropes, iconography, and thematic content of picaresque literature, the same reciprocal theories apply: for instance, the source text first informs an audience’s understanding of a painting, and the painting henceforth informs a reader’s visualization of the narrative. Among the most essential resources are Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Helene Izwolsky, trans. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Thomas O. Beebee, The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994).

9. See Alexander Blackburn, The Myth of the Picaro: Continuity and Transformation of the Picaresqe Novel (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 201-216; and Dunn, 1993, 252-291,“Dissemination and Dissolution,” which addresses the blurring and merging of genres in the eighteenth century and the popular fate of the picaresque literary form:

10. See Piero Camporesi, The Land of Hunger, Tania Croft-Murray, trans. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996); Claudio Guillén, The Anatomies of Roguery: A Comparative Study in the Origins and the Nature of Picaresque Literature (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987); Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis:

31 University of Minnesota Press, 1982); and Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard. (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973).

11. For the earliest accounts of Magnasco’s life and career, see Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi, L’abecedario pittorico (Bologna, 1719); Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi, L’abecedario pittorico (Venice, 1753); and Carlo Giuseppe Ratti, Delle vite de’pittori . . . (Genoa, 1768-69).

12. Orlandi and Ratti both cite Stefano Magnasco as having trained in Genoa in the workshop of Valerio Castello. Other painters he looked towards were Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione and . Works from his Roman period (c. 1655–60) show him moving from Castello’s manner to a more precise draughtsmanship, rounded forms and a clearly defined and limited palette, indebted to Poussin and , a number of whose works he copied. See Federica Lamera: "Magnasco, Stefano" Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press, [September 16, 2004], http://www.groveart.com/

13. See Carlo Baroni, "Filippo Abbiati maestro del Magnasco," Archivo storico lombardo 77, (1951-52): 160-69.

14. For example, the depiction of extreme emotion in his St. Francis in Ecstasy (Genoa, Galleria Palazzo Bianco) was inspired by Francesco Cairo’s Dream of Elijah (Milan, St. Antonio Abate); Fausta Franchini Guelfi: “Magnasco, Alessandro” Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press, [October 10, 2003], http://www.groveart.com/

15. As indicated by numerous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century inventories that include his works and specify joint attributions. Throughout his career in Milan and Florence (1690s-c. 1735) Magnasco is also recorded as having collaborated with the landscape painter Crescenzio Onofri (c. 1632- after 1712), (1659-1734), Marco Ricci (1676-1729), and Clemente Spera (1662-c. 1742), a specialist in architectural ruins. See Marco Bona Castellotti, “Il ‘caso’ Magnasco: ragioni du una mostra,” in Alessandro Magnasco 1667-1749 (Milan: Electa, 1996), 11-16.

16. For historical and social contexts during Magnasco’s stay in Florence, sources include essays by Harold Acton and Klaus Lankheit in Twilight of the Medici: Late Baroque Art in Florence, 1670-1743, exh.cat., The Detroit Institute of Arts, March 27-June 2, 1974, (Wayne State University Press, 1974), 15-17; 19-24; J.R. Hale, Florence and the Medici, the Pattern of Control (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 185-196; Harold Acton, The Last Medici (London: MacMillan, 1980), 177-241; Christopher Hibbert, The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (New York, Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1980), 292-311; and Christopher Hibbert, Florence, Biography of a City (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993), 186-207.

17. See Marco Chiarini, “I quadri della collezione del Gran Principe Ferdinando di Toscana’, Paragone 26, no. 301 (1975): 53-108, 303, 305; and Maria Letizia Strocchi, “Il gabinetto

32 d’‘opere in piccolo’ del Gran Principe Ferdinando di Toscana a Poggio a Caiano,” Paragone 26, no. 309 (1975): 115–126; and Paragone 26, no. 311 (1976): 83–116.

18. Leo Planiscig, "Alessandro Magnasco und die romantisch-genrehafte Richtung des Barocco," Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft 8 (1915): 244-245; and Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 96, 105.

19. Included among these works are The (c.1710, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), The Entrance to a Hospital (c.1710, Müzeul des Arta, Bucharest), and The Sack of a City (c.1710-12, Müzeul Brukenthal, Sibiù): Fausta Franchini Guelfi, “Magnasco, Alessandro” Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, [October 10, 2003], http://www.groveart.com/

20. Published in Florence in 1617 as a series of fifty prints showing beggars, peasants, strolling musicians, cripples, courtiers, and soldiers.

21. Quoted in Oscar Mandel, The Art of Alessandro Magnasco: An Essay in the Recovery of Meaning (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1994): 177. See Alessandro Morandoti, "Magnasco a Milano: la realtà della città e il panorama del collezionismo privato fra "vecchia" e "nuova" nobilità," in Alessandro Magnasco 1667-1749 (Milan: Electa, 1996), 51-64.

22. Ratti, 1768-69, reprinted in Mandel, 180.

23. Mary Newcome, “Genova e Magnasco,” in Alessandro Magnasco 1667-1749 (Milan: Electa, 1996), 69-76.

24. Ratti, 1768-69, reprinted in Mandel, 186.

25. Ratti, 1768-69, reprinted in Mandel, 186.

26. Ms. 44, Archivio Storico del Comune di Genova.

27. Storia de' pittori scultori, et architetti liguri e de forestieri che in Genova operarono scritte da' Giuseppe Ratti Savonese II, (Genoa, 1762). Fausta Franchini Guelfi incorporated the Magnasco chapter of the Storia into the article “Magnasco inedito: contributi allo studio delle fonti e aggiunte al catalogo,” Studi di storia delle arti 5, (1983-5): 291-328, 427-42. English- language translations of both the and published Storia were included as an appendix to Mandel, 171-187.

28. See Frank J. Fata’s translation of Ratti’s published chapter on Magnasco, offered in English for the first time in the exhibition catalogue Alessandro Magnasco (1667-1749): an Exhibition held at the J.B. Speed Art Museum and the University of Michigan Museum of Art, 1967 (Louisville: J.B. Speed Art Museum, 1967). For the unpublished manuscript, see Oscar Mandel’s translation, presented as Appendix A; Mandel, 171-187. Ratti’s list includes: “chapters of friars; processions; monks at study; missionaries

33 preaching; thieves assaulting people on the highway; barbers’ shops, sharpeners, carpenters, and similar craftsmen; scoundrels playing cards; rogues showing children the magic lantern; guardrooms with soldiers intent on various exercises or mechanical arts, and similar things.” “Al tocco” painterliness is most thoroughly documented by Philip Sohm, Pittoresco: , His Critics and Their Critiques of Painterly Brushwork in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Italy (London: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 22, 238-239. Sohm shows that Ratti waffled in the Vite in his attitude toward the “painterly” versus the “smooth” manner, arguing in favor of the overarching strength of the Genoese school. In reference to style and brushwork, Magnasco was singled out by Ratti as especially meritous, Mandel, 173, n.1.

29. Luigi Lanzi, The History of Painting in Italy From the Period of the Revival of the Fine Arts to the End of the Eighteenth Century: Translated from the Italian of Abate Luigi Lanzi, Volume 3, Thomas Roscoe, trans. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), 286-287.

30. Lanzi, 287.

31. Lanzi, 287.

32. Lanzi, 287.

33.For a full record of the early articles, see the bibliography of Alessandro Magnasco 1667- 1749 (Milan: Electa, 1996), 383.

34. Together with the extensive but unpublished records of the Italian painter-collector Italico Brass, Geiger's work represents the resurrection and foundation of Magnasco scholarship. Geiger organized the first recorded Magnasco exhibition in 1914, a widely reviewed event, even in wartime Berlin. Even with the great expansion of the Magnasco corpus, Geiger continued to derive his biographical notices from Ratti, and Geiger’s Magnasco looks like a painter who loved painting but had otherwise no particular commitments to any social or theological agenda.

35. Maria Pospisil, Magnasco (Florence: Fratelli Alinari, 1944). Both Franchini Guelfi and Mandel mention the relative laxity of Pospisil's work.

36. Laura Muti and Daniele de Sarno Prignano, Alessandro Magnasco (Florence: Edit Faenza, 1994).

37. Edigio Martini, “Magnasco e la pittura veneta,” in Muti and Prignano, 105-117.

38. Geiger, 1949, 33.

39. Quoted in Mandel, 71.

34 40. Among the most egregious are Emile Bernard, "Alessandro Magnasco," Gazette des Beaux Arts 82 (1920): 351-361;William Gaunt, Bandits in a Landscape: A Study of Romantic Painting from Caravaggio to Delacroix (New York: The Studio Publications Inc. 1937); Roberto Papini, “Il mondo di Alessandro Magnasco,” unpublished lecture (1938) in Geiger, 1949; and Renato Roli, Alessandro Magnasco (Milan: Fratelli Fabbri, 1965).

41. Leo Planiscig, “Alessandro Magnasco und die romantisch-genrehafte Richtung des Barocco,” Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft 8 (1915): 238-248.

42. Planiscig is the first writer to bring picaresque literature to bear on Magnasco's art, but it should be noted that his account of the picaresque included not just the Spanish novels, but later German and French works of picaresque derivation: “Der ‘Gusto picaresco’ des Francesco Quevedo, dem in der Weltliteratur Lesages ‘Gil Blas de Santillane’ folgte . . . und der deutsche Simplizius Simplizissimus”: Planiscig, 243.

43. For anthologized presentations of many of the early beggar texts, see C.J. Ribton-Turner, A History of Vagrants and Vagrancy and Beggars and Begging (Patterson Smith: Montclair, NJ, 1972); and Laurence Fontaine, A History of Pedlars in Europe, trans. Vicki Whitaker (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). Of special interest is Syamken's reading of Magnasco's paintings of Capuchin friars in relation to Dutch allegories of idleness, contrasted by the artist himself with companion paintings of nuns spinning, and playing music, all these intended as allegories of industry, Georg Syamken, Die Bildenhalte des Alessandro Magnasco 1667-1749 (Hamburg, 1965), 136-138.

44. Syamken, 20, 44-49.

45. Hans Joachim Dürst, Alessandro Magnasco (Teufen: A. Niggli, 1966).

46. Dürst, 85, 131.

47. Regrettably, this beautifully illustrated study was published in a limited edition, and is less accessible than it deserves to be: Fausta Franchini Guelfi, Alessandro Magnasco (Genoa: Cassa di Risparmio di Genova e Imperiale, 1977). The author published a somewhat shorter, though much more widely available volume in 1991: Fausta Franchini Guelfi, Alessandro Magnasco (Cremona: Edizioni dei Soncino, 1991).

48. Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 96.

49. Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 96.

50. Franchini Guelfi, 1991, 22-23.

51. Franchini Guelfi, 2002, 49-57.

35 52. In support of this thesis, Franchini Guelfi cites the Italian literary historian Alberto Del Monte’s account of the widening of the readership of Spanish picaresque novels into Italy, and subsequent diffusion of picaresque imagery into the Italian Baroque literary imagination: Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 116, n. 123. See Alberto Del Monte, Itinerario del romanzo picaresco spagnolo (Florence: Sansoni, 1957), 112-122.

53. See Best, 291-299.

54.. Mandel's work is extremely ambitious in his often repeated wish to “know what's going on,” but I confess here my own desire to focus a bit more narrowly on what's going on between Magnasco and the history of ideas derived from the picaresque literary phenomenon.

55. See Mandel, 157-161.

56. In his introduction he laments the lack of serious scrutiny of Magnasco’s paintings, and notes that there have been no doctoral dissertations on the artist, despite the breadth and quality of his representation in museum collections around the world: Mandel, 13, 16.

57. Mandel, 13.

58. Despite a rather breezy declaration by Giovanna Perini that “a lot is known about Magnasco,” very few archival resources pertaining directly to the artist have come to light. The sum of primary source material used by all of the authors on Magnasco compose a very short list: bare depth entries in parish records; a near contemporary Life by Giuseppe Ratti filling three or four pages in a volume of biographies; a very few unremarkable mentions in contemporary documents: Giovanna Perini, “Genre Painting in Eighteenth-Century North Italian Art Collections and Art Literature,” in John T. Spike, Giuseppe Maria Crespi and the Emergence of Genre Painting in Italy (Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 1986), 84; cited in Mandel, 14, n. 2.

59. Blackburn, 19.

60. See Chandler, 78-183.

61. Parker, Literature and the Delinquent, 4.

62. Peter N. Dunn, The Spanish Picaresque Novel (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1979), 11-12.

63. See Yakov Malkiel, "El núcleo del problema etimológico de picaro-picardia," Studia hispanica in honorem R. Lapesa, vol. 2 (Madrid: Gredos, 1974), 307-342; summarized in Dunn, 1979, 12.

64. Blackburn, 19.

36 65. Authorship of the work, which was published anonymously, is generally attributed to Fernando de Rojas (c. 1465–1541), a converted Jewish lawyer about whom little else is known. Stephen Gilman addresses the origin of the anomic outsider as the voice of the picaresque hero by contrasting the life of a sudden converso in fifteenth- and sixteenth- century Spain: “As marginal men, they were “condemned to live in two worlds” and compelled “to assume in relation to the worlds . . . the role of a cosmopolitan and stranger.” Dwelling in the shadow of the Inquisition, they suffered extreme tension and instability. “Suspicious of each other,” as Gilman describes them, “suspected by everybody else, the conversos lived in a world in which no human relationship could be counted on, in which a single unpremeditated sentence could bring unutterable and unbearable torture . . . a world in which one had constantly to observe oneself from an alien point of view, that of the watchers from without . . . a world of simulation and camouflage interrupted by outbursts of irrepressible authenticity.” See Stephen Gilman, The Spain of Fernando de Rojas: The Intellectual and Social Landscape of “La Celestina” (Princeton University Press, 1972), 104, 85; quoted in Blackburn, 15, 217, 249.

66. Published shortly thereafter in an expanded version with twenty-one acts as the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (1502, Madrid).

67. “Celestina, La.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2005. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 31 May 2005.

68. “Picaresque novel.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2005. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 14 Jan. 2005.

69. Blackburn, 12.

70. I would summarize the definition of “culture hero” as a mythological or historically embellished hero specific to some group (cultural, ethnic, racial, religious, etc.) who changes the world through political action, invention, or discovery.

71. “Nothing demonstrates the meaning of the all-controlling social order more impressively that the religious recognition of that which evades this order; in a figure who is the exponent and personification of the life of the body: never wholly subdued, ruled by lust and hunger, forever running into pain and injury, cunning and stupid in action . . . His function is to add disorder to order and so make a whole, to render possible, within the fixed bounds of what is permitted, an experience of what is not permitted.” See Karl Kerényi, “The Trickster in Relation to Greek Mythology,” in The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, Paul Radin, ed. (London, 1956); also quoted in Blackburn, 13.

72. See Dunn, 1993, 31. Dunn cites Caroline B. Bourland for including among these influences the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio (translated into Castilian in 1496)—pillaged for individual stories—together with the collections of other Italian writers, notably Matteo Bandello, Giovanni Francesco Straparola, Franco Sacchetti, Masuccio Salernitano, and

37 Francesco Sansovino. See Caroline B. Bourland, “Boccaccio and the Decameron in Castilian and Catalan Literature,” Revue Hispanique 12 (1905): 1-232.

73. See The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, Peter Brand and Lino Pertile, eds. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 154-156.

74. See for example Donato Pirovano, Modi narrativi e stile del 'Novellino' di Masuccio Salernitano (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1996), 70-88.

75. Dunn, 1993, 32.

76. Blackburn, 7.

77. Claudio Guillén, Literature as a System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 71.

78. Though concrete sales records are virtually impossible to come by, Part I (1599) should rightly be considered a best seller. Within two years it went through sixteen printings, and in his eulogy to Part II (1604), Luis de Valdés mentions twenty-six printings and 50,000 copies sold during its first five years of publication. See Guzmán Álvarez, Mateo Alemán (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1953) 80. Cited in Bjornson, 258.

79. Bjornson, 44-45.

80. Guzmán says: “Todos somos hombres y tenemos entendimiento...también eres miembro deste cuerpo mistico, igual con todos in sustancia.” (“We are all men and have understanding . . . you too are a member of this mystical body, equal to everyone else in substance”); Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache, in La novela picaresca española, ed. Francisco Rico (Barcelona: Planeta, 1967), 266, 268.

81. Though the viable candidates for picaresque novel number in the dozens, this study will focus primarily on the content of ten works held to be the most widely read, reproduced, and representative of the genre: Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (1554); Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache and Segunda parte de “Guzmán de Alfarache” (1599, 1604); Francisco López de Ubeda, Libro de entretenimiento de la pícara Justina (1605); Miguel Cervantes, Novelas ejemplares (1613); Vicente Espinel, Vida del escudero Marcos de Obregón (1618); Francisco de Quevedo, La vida del buscón, Ilamado don Pablos (1626); Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, Las aventuras del bachiller Trapaza (1637); Antonio Enríquez Gómez, Vida y hechos de Estebanillo Gonzáles, homre de buen humor. Compuesto por el mismo (1646); Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (1668); and Alain René Lesage, Gil Blas de Santillane (1715, 1724, 1735).

82. Bjornson, 50.

38 83. See for instance, Claudio Guillén, "Genre and Countergenre: The Discovery of the Picaresque," in Upstarts, Wanderers or Swindlers: Anatomy of the Pícaro, Gustavo Pellón and Julio Ridríguez-Luis, eds. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986), 67-80; Claudio Guillén, The Anatomies of Roguery: A Comparative Study in the Origins and the Nature of Picaresque Literature (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987); Dunn, 1993; Anne J. Cruz, Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).

84. Fonger de Haan, An Outline of the Novela Picaresca in Spain (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1903) 8.; quoted in Dunn, 1993, 6.

85. Chandler, 2-3.

86. Chandler, Chapter 3, 78-183.

87. Chandler, 8-14.

88. Blackburn, 14.

89. Blackburn, 14-15.

90. Blackburn, 18-22.

91. Blackburn, 54.

92. See Richard Bjornson, The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 6-8.

93. Bjornson, 13.

94. See the first two chapters of Maiorino, 2003, 3-35.

95. Most recently Dunn, 1993, 5, 29-87.

96. Blackburn, 3-4.

97. Bjornson, 166, 207.

98. Guillén, 1987, 267-268.

99. See Ulrich Wicks, “The Nature of Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach,” PMLA 89 (1974): 165-181, quoted in Dunn 1993, 6. See also Ulrich Wicks, Picaresque Narratives, Picaresque Fictions: A Theory and Research Guide (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 10-22.

39 100. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 45.

101. Wicks, 241; quoted in Dunn, 1993, 6.

102. Dunn, 1993, 6.

103. Dunn, 1993, 13-14, 16, 20.

104. Hayden White, “Literary History: The Point of It All,” NLH 2 (1970): 173-185, quoted in Dunn, 1993, 28.

105. Dunn, 1993, 27: “An egregious example is the late-nineteenth century idea of the picaresque as the product of a vainglorious empire whose subjects were too proud or idle to work.”

106. Dunn, 1993, 7.

107. Dunn, 1993, 27.

108. Maiorino, 2003, 6.

109. Several other authors have argued for the influence of the Spanish novel on the development of a low-life vocabulary among painters in Golden Age Spain. See Marianna Haraszti-Takács, Spanish Genre Painting in the Seventeenth Century (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1983); Barry Wind, Velazquez's Bodegones: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting (George Mason University Press, 1987); Steven N. Orso, Velázquez, Los Borrachos, and Painting at the Court of Philip IV (London: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

110. Mateo Alemán called Seville the “Babilonia de pícaros.” Authors and painters of this new genre alerted audiences to the causes of poverty as well as to the exploitative thinking of those who bore some responsibility for it; Maiorino, 2003, 12.

111. This is the spirit of works like The Grape and Melon Eaters (c.1650, Munich, Alte Pinakothek) and Young Boys Playing Dice (1665-75, Munich, Alte Pinakothek). See Jesus Cantera Montenegro, “El pícaro en la pintura barroca española,” Anales de historia del arte 1 (1989): 209-222.

112. Montenegro; and Xanthe Brooke and Peter Cherry, Murillo: Scenes of Childhood (London: Merrell Publishers Ltd., 2001).

113. See Wind 1987; Maiorino 2003; and Tomlinson and Welles, 66-85.

114. In the Magnasco literature, it is almost universally held that the widespread influence of the Bamboccianti (the Dutch expatriate Pieter van Laer [1592-1642] and his followers) set the stage

40 for the development of small-form low-life genre painting in Italy and Spain. The continued appreciation of paintings by the Bamboccianti at the court of Grand Prince Ferdinand de Medici (1663-1713) provides a direct link to Magnasco and supports the idea of their formative influence on his newly chosen subject matter.

115. Alejo Carpentier, “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Duke University Press, 1995) 89-108.

116. See Piero Camporesi, The Land of Hunger, Tania Croft-Murray, trans. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996); and Piero Camporesi, Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1989), 12-45.

117. Though born in the Duchy of Lorraine, Callot worked for the sophisticated, hyper-elegant Medici court in Florence from 1612 until Duke Cosimo II's death in 1621.

118. See Salvator Rosa’s A Friar Tempted by Demons (1660-65, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome). Two paintings, A Friar Tempted by Demons and Anchorites Tempted by Demons, were acquired by the National Gallery in Rome with an attribution to Magnasco. This attribution was maintained until 1997. The discovery of the monogram signature "SR", made during a recent restoration, has enabled the attribution of the painting to Rosa. Such a history is not unique. A number of more valuable “Rosas” have likewise been reattributed to Magnasco.

119. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Helene Izwolsky trans. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); and Deborah J. Haynes, Bakhtin and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

120. Included among these studies would be Frances Barasch, The Grotesque: A Study in Meanings (The Hague: Mouton, 1971); Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton University Press, 1982); and Peter Stallybrass and Allison White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).

121. Foremost among the contemporary scholars concerned with these writers is the Italian cultural historian Piero Camporesi, see Camporesi, 1989; Camporesi, 1996; and Piero Camporesi, Exotic Brew: The Art of Living in the , Christopher Woodall, trans. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).

122. For a particularly useful record of these and other predilections, see J. Wesley Childers, Tales from Spanish Picaresque Novels: A Motif Index (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977).

41 123. See also the provocative essaay by Thomas J. Roberts, When is Something Fiction? (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972).

124. See James S. Ackerman, "Gian Battista Marino's Contributions to Seicento Art Theory," Art Bulletin 43 (1961): 326-336; Morris William Croll, "The Baroque Style in Prose," in Style, Rhetoric and Rhythm, J. Max Patrick ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 207-233; Nils Erik Enkvist, Linguistics and Style: On Defining Style (London: Oxford University Press, 1964); Sohm, 1991; Philip Sohm, "Maniera and the Absent Hand: Avoiding the Etymology of Style," RES. Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 30 (1999): 100-124; and Philip Sohm, Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy (London: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

125. Though directed primarily at written resources, the analytical for deconstructing fictional texts developed by literary theorists Wolfgang Iser, Hans Robert Jauss and Tzvetan Todorov are often more concerned with content and thought/reception processes than with linguistic elements. The expansion of discourses of fictionality to visual images is nowhere discouraged by these widely influential scholars, and much of contemporary reception and genre theory in art history expands on their mutual interest in audiences’ contributions to artistic meaning. See Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,1978); Iser, 1993; Jauss, 1982; Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); Todorov, 1973; Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, Wlad Godzich, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); and Tzvetan Todorov, Genres in Discourse, Catherine Porter, trans. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

126. See Franchini Guelfi 1977, 30-44; Franchini Guelfi 1991, 21-30; Camporesi 1996; and Matthew Vester, “Social Hierarchies: The Upper Classes,” in A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance, Guido Ruggiero, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 227-242.

127. Castellotti argues for understanding Magnasco as a visual artistic component of what she calls “dissacrazione” - or religious skepticism. “That certain paintings by Magnasco represent an instrument of anticlerical propaganda at the disposal of a class of ‘progressive’ aristocrats is attested by the general situation concerning the relations between political and church power in Milan.” See Marco Bona Castellotti, “L’Arcadia a Milano ‘reazione’ cattolica e ‘progressimo’ laico,” in Settecento lombardo, R. Bossaglia and V. Terraroli, eds. (Milan: Electa, 1991), 30. See also Geiger, 1949, 33.

128. At its inception, did the picaresque represent a widening of liberal thought and expansion of humanism (“Umana cosa é”) to the periphery of the academy, the studio, and patrician palaces? Consider Dunn’s sense of a “literature of consumption”—technically inferior, morally lax, and validatory of the aristocratic worldview, Dunn, 1993, 286-290.

42 129. Included among these are Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (c. 1715, Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa), Satire of a Nobleman in Misery (c. 1719-25, The Detroit Institute of Arts), The Barber Slave at the Docks (after 1730, Italico Brass, Venice), and Pícaros at Table beneath the Ruins (c. 1725, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence).

130. Muti and De Sarno Prignano catalogue only six works that could be considered as portraits. These, together with The Hunting Party of Crown Prince Ferdinand II (c. 1706-07, Wadsworth Athanaeum, Hartford) are the only images that appear to include figures modeled after actual people.

131. Four canvases are of particular note: The Painter among Beggars (w/ Clemente Spera) (c. 1710, A.S. Drey, Monaco); The Painter’s Studio (c. 1730, Louvre, Paris); The Painter’s Studio (c. 1733-35, Narodny Galeria, Prague); and The Beggar Painter among Gypsies, Musicians, and Vagabonds (c. 1738-39, Museo Luxoro, Genoa).

132. Foremost among the practitioners of this art would be the great masters of , Diego Velázquez, Artemesia Gentileschi, van Rijn, , and Anthony van Dyck, each of whose many self portraits represent the culmination of the post-Renaissance process of artistic self-examination and conceptual deconstruction. The best of each of their self portraits delivering to viewers a clearly descriptive representation of the sitter’s/artist’s likeness, while exploring questions of identity, , and the artist’s role in society.

133. See Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion Press, 1991); Joanna Woodall, Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); and Shearer West, Portraiture (London: Oxford University Press, 2004).

134. Spike, 1986, 168.

135. Bona Castellotti, 252.

136. See related discussion of the phenomenon of episodic plotting in the development of the picaresque novel genre in Andres Ferrada, “La textura picaresca y meta-picaresca en Moll de Daniel Defoe,” Revisita Signos 36, no. 54 (2003): 177-182; and Dunn, 1993, 8-14.

137. My reading of Magnasco’s religious paintings is based on nine key works, most of which were produced during Magnasco’s second Milanese period: Three Capuchin Friars Meditating in their Hermitage (1713-14, , Amsterdam); Three Camaldolite Monks at Prayer, (1713-14, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam); Landscape with Capuchin Friars in Procession, (1720- 30, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan); Confession of the Capuchins and Communion of the Capuchins, (1720-25, Ritiro di San Pellegrino, Bologna); Interior with Monks, (c. 1725, The Norton Simon

43 Museum, Pasadena); The Friars’ Barber, (1725-35, Museo d’Arte Occidentale e Orientale, Odessa); The Observant Friars in the Refectory, (1736-37, Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa); Capuchins in Supplication, (1730-40, Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid).

138. Magnasco’s monks and friars are almost always cast in squalid, dark and threatening surroundings, dressed in coarse robes, threadbare and gaunt.

139. R.W.B. Lewis has written at length on the many associations to be drawn between the picaresque hero and the pilgrim, or person undergoing a process of spiritual renewal or conversion, R.W.B. Lewis, The Picaresque Saint: Representative Figures in Contemporary Fiction (Philadelphia: Lippencott, 1958). J. Wesley Childers also refers to several parochial motifs; Childers, 1977.

140. Wietse de Boer provides the most recent comprehensive treatment of piety in public life during late Counter-Reformation, and centers his arguments in the ecclesiastical seat of Milan, the civic context from which Magnasco might have partly derived his interest in spiritual intensity. See Wietse de Boer, The Conquest of the Soul: Confessions, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (: Brill, 2000).

141. See Claudio Guillén, 1987; and Maiorino, 2003, among others.

142. Italian Camaldolites are also called the White Benedictines, well known for their reclusiveness in remote mountain-top hermitages.

143. I should note here that Mandel’s monograph addresses the “meanings” inherent to Magnasco’s ambiguous and seemingly contradictory stance towards monastic life and practice. But, to my mind, Mandel offers little critical insight into the literary and artistic precedents for such ambivalence, and the author pursues a strange thesis of “meaninglessness” in the minds of his contemporaries that gives Magnasco a decidedly modern, but ultimately unsatisfying reading.

144. Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 192-219.

145. Compare for instance Alessandro Magnasco’s Spiritual Exercises of Monks in a Ravine (c.1735-40, Berl Collection, Vienna), with his Monks Eating in a Grotto (c.1740, Szépmüvészeti Mùzeum, Budapest).

146. Magnasco’s Interior with Monks (c.1725, Pasadena, Norton Simon Museum) and the monumental The Observant Friars in the Refectory (1736-37, Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa) offer the most comprehensive and detailed example of his approach to leisure in ordered life. Though Mandel committed his monograph to the former work, I have found only one, brief reading of the refectory scene, Bona Castellotti, 1996, 248-251.

147. Joan Arias, Guzmán de Alfarache: The Unrepentant Narrator (London: Támesis, 1977), 55.

44 CHAPTER ONE

THE PICARESQUE IMAGE IN SPAIN AND ITALY

In order to better understand the nature of Magnasco’s incorporation of picaresque imagery into his paintings, this first chapter will provide an analysis of the influence of the Spanish literary genre on the representation of analogous subject matter in selected examples of Southern European art before 1700.1 While the specific characters and plots of picaresque novels were seldom translated into wholly synonymous paintings or graphics, many Late-Renaissance and Baroque artists adopted picaresque formulae and conventions into their scenes of beggars, thieves, soldiers, and scullery maids. Though the prototypically picaresque novella Lazarillo de Tormes was first published anonymously in Burgos in 1554, it was not until the publication of Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (Alcalá, 1599), Lopez de Ubeda’s La Picara Justina (Madrid, 1605), and Miguel de Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares (Madrid, 1613) that the formal tenets of the genre were fixed and reinforced in multiple contemporaneous novels.2 On a practical level, Lazarillo de Tormes was not widely available to readers until after the publication of Guzmán de Alfarache some fifty years later, when multiple publishers saw fit to print new editions of the earlier novella in response to the widespread popularity of Alemán’s work. Thus, any visual-art category of “picaresque” would most viably date to after the turn of the seventeenth century.3 In the larger context of the study of Magnasco’s relationship with the picaresque, this first chapter will serve two functions. Firstly, it will identify and explore some of the most compelling examples of the adaptation of picaresque themes and iconographic motifs by seventeenth-century artists. The discussion will range in focus from graphic illustrations published in the earliest editions of the novels, to a set of pen and ink drawings inspired by Lazarillo, to a number of contemporaneous genre paintings and prints from Spain and Italy,

45 which I have divided into two subcategories which I call “picaresque naturalism” and “picaresque romanticism.” Secondly, it serves to assess the means by which other art historians have employed the details, themes, and iconography of the picaresque genre toward the interpretation of Baroque works of art. By construing the methodological strategies used by earlier scholarss in their attempts to link literary and visual culture through a common genre categorization, I will identify the strengths and weaknesses of such intertextual analysis. My critrical reading of Alessandro Magnasco’s paintings in Chapters Two, Three, and Four will thus be presented as an expansion of this dialogue, in which visual art and picaresque literature are understood to inform each other.

The Early Frontispieces

The history of the intersection of the literary form with art should begin with a record of the very first picaresque images—the illustrated title pages of the two 1554 editions of Lazarillo de Tormes, one published at Alcalá and the other at Burgos (Figures 1 and 2). They are rather crude woodcuts vaguely adapted from different chapters of the novel, but each emphasizes Lazarillo’s role as an observer of human folly. To my knowledge, while reproduced recently in a number of critical histories of the picaresque, neither of these prints has been subjected to art historical analysis.4 The Alcalá title page shows Lazarillo as a servant to the blind beggar: he points to the man’s walking stick with one hand while pointing to his own seeing eyes with the other. He stands atop a stone obstacle: he might guide the blind man around it, or he may lead him to trip. The blind man is drinking from the wine vessel that would be Lazarillo’s short-term undoing (in a sick bed with a smashed face and broken teeth) and long-term reward (as the public announcer of wine sales in Toledo) in the house of the Archpriest of San Salvador.5 The image is a clever synopsis of the novel’s overarching theme of the fall and rehabilitation of humankind through one and the same means. Lazarillo’s worldly destiny as the cuckolded wine-monger for a conniving priest is far less important than the salvation delivered through the sacred blood of Christ. The eye contact that the line-drawn Lazarillo makes with the viewer attests to this understanding. In this earliest instance of an artist adapting picaresque content into a visual

46 medium, specific characters from the novel are represented without any geographic context or embellishments of setting; all emphasis is placed on the dynamic between the two characters with the wine as an alternately mitigating and aggravating plot motif. Thus, the illustration’s readiest interpretation is that the draft of life-giving wine, while inebriating, will nonetheless steer the shortsighted around life’s obstacles and into heaven. The woodcut, though rough in its facture and form, emerges as a remarkably pithy distillation of the moral message behind Lazarillo’s testimony to his inquisitor. The second title page is not so direct in its allusions to the novel’s subtexts of despondence, confession, communion, and redemption. The composition is less integrated, as it presents three independent images—a youth, a cleric, and a church building—that may not have been designed originally with Lazarillo in mind, but which combine to summarize Lazarillo’s attitude toward the church. Three of seven chapters take place in the environs of a church, and it is arguable that Lazarillo’s most pernicious masters were clergymen. The author of Lazarillo de Tormes is thought to have been a converso, a Jew who remained in post-1492 Spain in the guise of a Christian, and the novel satirizes those who profess their guardianship of the sacraments while stealing, coveting, and fornicating. The novel was banned by the Spanish Inquisition in the Index of Valdes (Valladolid, 1559) but such was its popularity that it continued to circulate, and an expurgated edition known as the Lazarillo castigado (Lazarillo punished) was published in 1573.6 In the Burgos title page a somber Lazarillo looks upon the priest as if to derive understanding from his upright example: the folded hands atop the walking stick mimic the posture of an attentive pupil. The real and rather more subversive meaning of the exchange is invested in the walking stick itself, which is deliberately shown to be crooked. If Lazarillo is a pilgrim trekking along life’s highways, the crooked stick betrays two of his most defining penances: first, his repeated subjection to punishing beatings at the hands of the priest at Maqueda; and second, that “his legs wouldn’t hold [him] up out of sheer hunger.”7 This print subtly alludes to one of the central theses of the picaresque, the pervasiveness of disguised hypocrisy among the clerical classes. The priest stands between Lazarillo and the church which provides sanctuary; it is only through his intercession that the boy may partake of its “universal” offer of misericord. In a theological environment of Renaissance-era Catholicism,

47 there were few if any direct routes to God available to a poor, illiterate child. Given a grudging or pernicious priest, such members of the laity had little . The small graphic from the Burgos edition shows the priest clinging to his official vestments, with his back turned to the altar; he is more interested in keeping an eye on the behavior of others. As Lazarillo reported, “There isn’t anyone whose sight was as good as his,” a careful allusion to the surveillance apparatus of the Church of the Inquisition.8 The artist who produced this woodcut understood the nuanced message of disdain contained in Lazarillo’s story, and his frontispiece likewise enshrouds its criticism in laconic descriptions of two figures and a church building. As in Lazarillo, it is the relative position of each character that convey the moral. The finely engraved frontispiece to the 1599 Madrid edition of the primera parte of Guzmán de Alfarache shows the author, Mateo Alemán, pointing to an depicting the spider-snake allegory that Guzmán twice mentions in telling his life’s tale (Figure 3).9 On one occasion Guzmán expands upon the idea, speaking the words that the graphic artist would use as a basis for the emblem:

Everything is turned around, ephemeral, and full of intrigue. You will not find one man with another; all of us are living in ambush for each other, like the cat for the rat or the spider for the snake—the spider which, finding the snake off guard, descends a thread, grasps the snake by the neck and holds fast, not letting go until it has killed it with its poison.10

Richard Bjornson briefly discussed this frontispiece in the context of the dissemination of the picaresque genre and Alemán’s vocal defense of the moralizing nature of his novel in the face of its popular as a rogue’s tale. In Guzmán’s symbolic terms, the society into which he is cast—a landscape of corrupted topoi encountered episodically after his expulsion from his childhood home in Seville—is variously characterized as a battlefield, a turbulent ocean, the Antipodes, or a card game in which each player tries to maximize his own gain while seeking everybody else’s ruin.11 Alemán’s favored motif of the spider descending its thread toward the head of a sleeping snake emblematizes the way people regard each other in these predatory circles. In this example of a visual artist appropriating content directly from a picaresque novel, the physical matter behind the author’s implicit comparisons is envisioned; the words spoken by

48 a character in describing an abstract facet of human behavior are translated verbatim into a graphic depiction. Mateo Alemán is shown beneath two mock crests, the heraldry of which the artist derived from the author’s metaphors describing the ambuscades that disguise people’s motivations behind facades of honor and respectability. The true message of the man’s genealogy is hidden in another portrait prop, which Bjornson overlooked in his eagerness to identify the crest with his thesis pertaining to Alemán’s desire for validation as a writer of moral weight. Alemán rests his left hand on a book, itself resting on a box with tiny Stars of drawn at the corners; Alemán too was a converso whose knowledge of duplicity for the sake of self preservation was intimate. In his dedication to Don Francisco de Rojas (the Marqués de Poza), Alemán expressed a fear of vulgar readers, whom he describes as “cazadores” (hunters) lying in wait for “nuestra perdición” (our wretchedness).12 Even as they succeeded in wounding their prey, these “lectores hostiles” (hostile readers) would never explain why they wanted to harm him in the first place.13 Though this frontispiece ostensibly serves to introduce readers to the author’s person, the transgressive of the hidden Judaica and spider and snake crest combine to summarize the novel’s parody against the heroic tradition, with its pretensions to hereditary virtues. The character Guzmán de Alfarache spends seven years in Italy questing for his family identity, only to discover that his own life in the margins—as the unlucky son of a Genoese Jew—was in many ways more exemplary than those spent in subterfuge alongside lords, in the residences of ambassadors, and in the palaces of cardinals.14 Alemán sought to describe what he considered to be a true picture of human destiny and to demonstrate how people were conditioned to turn their backs upon this picture, for fear of recognizing themselves in the representations of shiftless, conniving misfits.15 At the same time, and in keeping with the popular perception of the genre as entertainment, Guzmán de Alfarache often alludes to the picaresque life as an “almíbar” (sweet syrup) to be savored, a “bocado sin hueso” (mouthful without a bone), a “lomo descargado” (unburdened back) and an “ocupación holgada y libre de todo genero de pesadumbre” (leisurely occupation free from all sorts of worry).16 As if in response to Alemán’s schizophrenic challenge to the “misreading” of his Guzmán as “El Pícaro,” Lopez de Úbeda’s Libro de entretenimiento de la pícara Justina (The

49 Entertaining Life of the Rogue Justina) (Madrid, 1605) presented just that sort of savory, unburdened rogue as its protagonist, but without the introspection of the confessional. With neither cares nor duties nor guilt, Justina reconciled the literary representation of base characters by reaffirming the moral and aesthetic values of the privileged classes that comprised its readership.17 Justina did not presume to edify its audience by describing a high society that failed to abide by its own frequently proclaimed ideals.18 Justina was a naughty devil whose misadventures brought her alternating measures of pleasure and ruin, justly dispensed by fate and the authorities to match her desserts. According to Bjornson, this vision of the picaresque life exemplified by Justina was distinctly appealing in the increasingly secular atmosphere at Philip III’s court, where women even adopted the custom of disguising themselves in ragged clothes and claiming to be dressed “a lo picaresco.”19 The stories of Guzmán and Lazarillo were both underlain by themes of desengaño, the disenchantment and spiritual restitution by which the wretched and self-indulgent might recognize the proof of divine mercy. While these themes were lost to many readers—who may have assumed that pícaros led free and happy lives—it is the promise made to the passengers on board “La nave de la vida picaresca,” Juan Baptista Morales’s engraved frontispiece to the Madrid edition of La pícara Justina (Figure 4). Alexander A. Parker is credited with having rediscovered the image, and he reproduced it as the frontispiece to his own seminal history of the picaresque, Literature and the Delinquent (1967).20 Whereas Alemán’s anonymous portraitist had sensibly borrowed symbolism from Guzmán alone, Morales, under the presumed guidance of the author Úbeda, treated the sum literary contents of the picaresque genre to an emblematic rephrasing, with special emphasis placed on a festive mood and the matériel of merrymaking, stocked in defiance of the existential hardships true to the lives of poor people. In the only scholarly treatment of this early frontispiece, Richard Bjornson described the engraving in the context of the evolution of the picaresque genre following the publication of Guzmán.21 At the moment of this print’s creation, the literary genre itself was undergoing a transformation. Authors sought to invest their comic writing with purposeful moral and theological philosophy, while widening circles of readers came foremost to appreciate the diversionary aspects of the novel’s portrayals of roguish adventurers. Morales’s complex

50 frontispiece reveals the equally complex nature of a genre that was at once diagnosing social ills, prescribing adages for understanding complex human relationships, and inventorying the details of life among beggars, thieves, and traveling musicians. Morales straddled the disparity between authorial intent and the audience’s growing insistence upon approaching the works as by crafting a complex image about the experiential nature of . The “Ship of Picaresque Life” is steered by Time across the River of Oblivion toward a nearby port, where the figure of Death waits and holds out the promised desengaño.22 A banner flying from the foremast proclaims “el gusto me lleba” (“pleasure conveys me”), but an inscription on Time’s tiller reads “llebolos sin sentir” (“conveys without noticing”). Present are all the principals of the picaresque universe invented to date: “La Madre Celestina,” in dark spectacles; “La pícara Justina,” crowned with laurel; a tambourine-shaking Guzmán “Pícaro alfarache,” whose satchel reads “pobre y contento” (“poor and content”); and Lazarillo, who paddles alongside in a dinghy together with the stone “Toro de Salamanca” upon which his head was bashed by the blind man. Atop the mast sits the infant Bacchus, representing life’s intoxicating powers. A sleeping woman is shown on the side of the ship, inscribed with the word osciosidad (idleness). Around the border are boxes containing images of musical instruments, food, drink, and gambling paraphernalia; a letter appears in each square like a game board, spelling “El aguar de la vida equipage” (the baggage of the picaresque life.) Úbeda’s decision to represent Justina, Celestina, Guzmán, and Lazarillo in a single picture and to associate them with a life of sensual pleasure reaffirmed an ideological assumption that must have been congenial to socially elite readers. Merchants and craftsmen and petty nobles enjoyed reading about pícaros—and even imitating them in superficial ways—but no matter the pleasures of drinking, dancing, eating, playing music, gambling, devising clever ruses, and making witty speeches, they would never abandon the prerequisites of their respectable lives to experience the actual hardships of lower-class existence. Úbeda’s implicit judgment of picaresque insouciance served to reassure readers that their own life’s concerns were more serious and valid than the trivial pursuits of pícaros. The pícaro appealed to readers who felt morally and socially superior to him, because he offered entertainment without seeking sympathy for his sufferings or questioning society’s responsibility for his corrupt behavior.23

51 Perhaps furthest afield from the simple concept of illustrating content from a picaresque novel was the approach taken for the frontispiece to Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (Mömpelgard, 1668) (Figure 5). Though geographically removed from the Spanish cultural context of the early novels, elements of the picaresque tradition had reached Grimmelshausen in several forms.24 The author had certainly read Aegidius Albertinus’s adaption of Der Landtstörtzer Gusman von Alfarache (Munich, 1615), together with the anonymous German translations of Lazarillo (1618) and La pícara Justina (1627).25 Charles Sorel’s French picaresque farce, Vraie histoire comique de Francion (Paris, 1622), and Paul Scarron’s Roman comique (Paris, 1651, 1657)—themselves both closely adapted from the model of Guzmán—were especially influential precedents for Simplicissimus.26 Simplicissimus reflects a fusion of conventions adopted from romance, satire, history, emblem books, religious allegory and astrological tracts, and the book’s frontispiece presented readers with a visual model for understanding such a multivalent work of fiction.27 The copperplate engraving draws from the German tradition of emblem design—an image accompanied by a motto that places the object in a context of figurative meaning, and tagged with a subscriptio that elaborates on its significance. There is virtually nothing in the frontispiece adapted from the author’s words, and I would not call this “picaresque” so much as produced in tandem with an important book from within the genre. While perhaps true to the underlying picaresque themes of dissembling and sarcastic accusal, the chimerical imagery is not derived from the novel, which ranges over serious accounts of warfare, the economics of beggary, and the machinations of church and court. This departure is especially interesting as the print is thought to have been devised by Grimmelshausen himself.28 The character Simplicissimus is re-imagined as a bizarre composite satyr-Phoenix-fish,29 an imaginary beast with no textual reference in the novel, though he is gesturing obscenely toward the magical “Gaukelbuch” (book of illusions), a rare resource that the elderly protagonist exhibits in the marketplace at Strasbourg.30 Although the popular etymology that traced “satire” to “satyr” is demonstrably false, the association was conventionally employed by seventeenth- century artists and satirists.31 The cognizant beast crushes seven masks underfoot—the vain facades of respectability that hide the vices and follies of humankind. Grimmelshausen

52 identified these as the masks of the verkehrte Welt (topsy-turvy world), worn anywhere that people blindly pursued transitory, superficial pleasures and ignored the consolations of a spiritual life.32 Traditionally the satyr adopts many such masks and believes in none of them.33 Like him, the narrating Simplicissimus has worn many disguises, and he now consigns them all beneath the maxim “Der Wahn bertrucht” (Delusion deceives), words that Grimmelshausen had inscribed in all authorized editions of all of his later works.34 In my discussion of prototypical picaresque images, Grimmelshausen’s frontispiece marks the outer fringe where established graphic art and folk traditions (the satyr as censorious impresario introducing a work of satire) brushed against the overarching theme of the novel.

Early Illustrations: Bramer and Elsheimer

As northern European authors adapted the form and conventions of the Spanish picaresque into their native literary traditions, so too did northern artists explore the new subject matter in producing some of the earliest cycles of illustrations drawn directly from the canonical texts. This practice is seemingly unique to the novels’ northern audiences, as no such graphic illustrations survive from sixteenth- or early-seventeenth-century Spain. By far the most thorough of these efforts was Leonard Bramer’s seventy-three drawings after the first and second parts of Lazarillo de Tormes (after 1635), now in the Graphische Sammlung, Vienna (Figures 6, 7, and 8).35 To my knowledge these drawings have not been subjected to any degree of art historical analysis, a deficit that I look forward to filling more completely in a later research effort. The illustrations, while small and crude, always conform closely enough to the text to show that Bramer was a careful reader who registered the facts and episodic details of each scene.36 In contrast to the cryptic emblematic approach seen in the frontispieces for La pícara Justina and Simplicissimus, Bramer’s illustrations are straightforward visual documents of Lazarillo’s adventures and a rare instance in the history of the picaresque where an artist is known to have quoted directly from an author’s narrative descriptions.37 Figure 6 represents one of the most important scenes from the novel’s opening tratado: Lazarillo, just warded to the blind beggar, is taught his first painful lesson in incredulity at the

53 foot of the bridge leading into Salamanca, as his new master “knocked my head into that devil of a bull so hard that I felt the pain from its horns for three days. And he said to me, ‘You fool, now learn that a blind man’s servant has to be one step ahead of the devil.’ And he laughed out loud at his joke.”38 Bramer’s pen and watercolor depiction of Lazarillo and the blind man efficiently translates the characters’ threadbare vesture, and when viewed alongside the text it is easy to read the boy’s naïveté and the man’s sick satisfaction at delivering a dose of pain to his young charge. It is even possible to discern a smile on the line-drawn lips of the beggar. Figure 7 shows Lazarillo in the house of the pauperized hidalgo, in a scene from the third tratado when the starving master begged crusts of bread and a boiled cow’s hoof from his equally hungry servant, who struggled to eat as much and as quickly as possible so as to avoid losing his whole supper to this parasite. The boy watched in a quiet stupor as the rascal stood before him and “put the cow’s hooves into his, along with three or four of the whiter pieces of bread” and “chewed the meat off every little bone better than any hound of his would have done.”39 Of course the scheming squire has no hounds; his life’s investment is in the one tailored suit of clothes in which he parades around the streets of Toledo. His rented accommodations are bare but for a hollow silver chest, a bamboo bedframe with a filthy mattress, and a chipped jug. Bramer communicates the contrasting ironies of public éclat and private spareness by showing the hidalgo in his pompous regalia stooping to beg from the barefoot Lazarillo who sits on the floor, leaning against the idle bureau Figure 8 is a scene from the fifth tratado, when Lazarillo goes to work for the seller of papal indulgences. Shown is the climax of the episode: a “constable” has interrupted the pardoner’s sermon with accusations that the man is a swindler and his indulgences are forgeries. The constable confesses that he had earlier conspired to help the pardoner in his scheme and split the profits, but that his conscience now compels him to stop the fraud. The pardoner stands by quietly as his accuser rails against him as a “double-dealing liar.”40 When it is the pardoner’s turn to speak, he prays to God that the true deceiver be revealed and summarily punished for his malice. As Lazarillo reports, “My reverend master had hardly finished his prayer when the crooked constable fell flat on his face, hitting the floor so hard that it made the whole church echo. Then he began to roar and froth at the mouth and to twist it and his whole face, too,

54 kicking and hitting and rolling all over the floor.”41 As if by a miracle, the pardoner’s call for God’s mercy on the constable delivers him from his suffering. “And there was such a rush to buy the pardons that there was hardly a soul in the whole place that didn’t get one: husbands and wives, sons and daughters, boys and girls.”42 Bramer’s interpretation of the scene relies on several formal precedents that attest to the years he spent in Rome (1619-1625), during which he was most influenced by the works of Caravaggio and the .43 The “constable” reclines in a showy posture comparable to Caravaggio’s ecstatic St. Francis (c. 1595, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; Figure 9). The credulous parishioners stand in for the tending , while the crucifix in the hands of the indulgence hawker marks the invisible focal point of St. Francis’s . An awed bystander raises his hands in an orans gesture similar to Mary of Cleophas in Caravaggio’s Entombment of Christ (c. 1602-03, Pinacoteca, Vatican; Figure 10). In the novel, the episode of the pardoner wryly parallels the Christian trope of accusation, trial and condemnation, death and resurrection, but with the two charlatans alternating the roles of Jesus, Pilate, and God the Father. That Christ’s resurrection was presaged by the raising of Lazarus was not lost on the novel’s author, whose title character survives many near-deaths, but whose earthly deliverance from the agonies of hunger and homelessness depended on the expediencies of several corrupt churchmen. The historical record is unclear as to Leonard Bramer’s intentions for these drawings. It is possible that they were drawn with the prospect of making reproductive engravings to fund an illustrated edition of the novel.44 There is no indication that the drawings were widely known or copied, and of the more than two dozen later editions of Lazarillo de Tormes that included illustrations, none quoted from Bramer’s compositions.45 While there is no evidence to link Bramer’s illustrations to any subsequent effort to represent the picaresque genre in printed or painted form, in the context of this study, and in comparative descriptions of Magnasco’s paintings, they will serve to mark the most literal example of a text to image relationship between a picaresque novel and a work of art. Adam Elsheimer, has the distinction of being the first artist to adapt the subject of a painting directly from an episode in a Spanish picaresque novel, Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache, a small on copper popularly known as Il Contento (c. 1607, National Gallery of

55 Scotland; Figure 11).46 Guzmán was first translated into Italian by the Venetian scholar Barezzo Barezzi in 1606, and the novel was an immediate bestseller, going through four editions before 1620. Based on the date of the painting, Elsheimer most likely would have consulted a first edition. He had traveled to Venice at the end of the sixteenth century, and he lived in Rome from 1600 until his death in 1610.47 The subject of this, one of Elsheimer’s most refined and beautiful paintings, a work copied at least five times by the artist’s contemporaries, was unknown to art history until 1964, when J. I. Kuznetsow established its dependence on Guzmán.48 In Chapter 7 of the primera parte, the hero narrates the fable of how Jupiter sent Mercury down to earth in order to abduct the god Contento, to whom the people had given undue honor, and then to deceive the people by “placing under the same shape the god Dissatisfaction in his stead.”49 Alemán had himself adapted the story from two sources: Leon Battista Alberti’s satire Momus, first published in Rome in 1520,50 and Antonio Francesco Doni’s Mondi celesti et infernale e gli accademici pellegrini (Venice, 1549).51 The Spanish author, however, gave the tale a Christian turn in the archetypically picaresque lesson that the hero Guzmán draws from the fable: “Now don’t you see, how there is no Content upon the earth; and that our true Content is only in Heaven. And, therefore, till you meet with it there; do not look for it here.”52 Though Elsheimer’s Il Contento was based on an episode drawn from a Spanish picaresque novel, it is not itself typical of the tropes of picaresque visual art: there are no dirty urchins, no rascally soldiers in long moustaches, no muleteers, no street musicians, no dice games. Ironically, among Baroque paintings, it stands virtually alone in having its source definitely identified in the picaresque canon, while nominally representing the tradition of mythological painting. It is at once the painting with the most direct and unassailable textual associations with Guzmán—the most widely read work from the genre—and yet would be unrecognizable as such for three hundred years because few if any scholars would think to look for a source myth buried in the pages of a Spanish novel. It shares its iconography with a vague, invented story set loosely in the time of classical antiquity, as told by a Mercederian friar who joins up with Guzmán and his muleteer friend as they wander outside the village of del Pédoro.53 Elsheimer appropriated the story from Guzmán, together with its descriptions of “the Feasts, the Sports, the Bankets, the Musicks, all the delights and joyes,” but eliminated any contextual

56 associations with its having been told as an edifying aside in a work of comic fiction.54 Thus, Elsheimer’s painting reproduces a scene that was described in the picaresque narrative, but which is not itself picaresque.

Picaresque Naturalism in Spain: Velázquez

The paintings that are most readily analogized with the Spanish picaresque literary phenomenon and which form the basis for a substantive hypothesis of the “painterly picaresque” were first created in Spain in the early decades of the seventeenth century and broadly reflect in theme and content the core tenets of the genre. Scholars of Spanish Baroque genre painting have long sought to fix relationships between the indigent, rhopographic naturalism of the picaresque novel and the detailed representations of beggars, taverners, musicians, and old crones that interested seventeenth-century painters and their patrons. There are very few records of the thoughts and motivations behind most Baroque artists’ choice of subject matter, and it is seldom valid to assume a literal connection between a specific image and a text. The most common approach to exploring such intertextual associations is to recognize commonalities between artists’ and writers’ use of metaphoric imagery. Using this strategy, Diego Velázquez’s Old Woman Frying Eggs (1618, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh; Figure 12) may be identified as iconographically and thematically related to a scene from the fifth chapter of Guzmán de Alfarache.55 Velázquez's Old Woman is most often classed among his bodegones—tavern scenes in which it seems at times as if the people are of secondary importance to the pots and ladles arrayed on tables or suspended from kitchen walls. Old Woman Frying Eggs shows a variety of substances, probably selected in part to demonstrate the artist's ability to paint them convincingly: copper, , straw, pewter, , the skin of onion and melon, wood, and eggshell. It is a painting about food and eating, and specifically the sort of eating that went on in the picaresque environs of inns and roadside kitchens.56 As with all literate Sevillians, Velázquez would have known the episodes contained in Alemán's best-selling Guzmán, and he might even have expected his audience for Old Woman Frying Eggs to recall a scene from the fifth chapter:

57 This new world was nothing but a miserable tavern, which I entered all in a perspiration, covered with dust, and dying with fatigue and hunger. I asked for dinner and was informed that there was nothing but fresh eggs in the house. ‘Fresh eggs!' cried I; ‘well, I must be content; make haste . . . and prepare me an omelet.' The hostess . . . was a frightful old woman.57

In the history of the "painterly picaresque," Velázquez’s early works represent a concept that I have termed "picaresque naturalism." In addressing the corporeal concerns of the picaresque universe, he employed his brush to emphasize the real, material nature of the spaces that picaresque protagonists inhabited.58 Peter Dunn has argued that picaresque novels were read as mirrors of the social conditions of their times: “The incorporation of material from the world of everyday was a rejection of the mode of romance and thus an important step toward the institution of the modern novel.”59 Authors often spent pages describing the small details of a room or a person’s dress, emphasizing the corporeality of characters and the physical fabric of the foods, housewares, and equipment used to sustain daily living in the economic margins. Guzmán observed that the “omelet, plate, bread, drinking pot, salt cellar, salt, napkin, and hostess appeared to be precisely the same color.”60 While Velázquez did use a great deal of brown, these are meticulous renderings of real people. The boy Guzmán is quite fleshy—it is only his first day on the road—and the woman conveys no “distemper,” or “fumes of stinking breath.”61 Rather than apodictically illustrating Alemán’s words, Velázquez used the picaresque landscape to locate the earth-toned naturalism that would later give character to his portraits and history paintings. The famished hero of Guzmán dined at a roadside tavern on an omelette of spoiled eggs and unhatched chicken embryos “whose beaks were already so hard as plainly to show what they were”; Velázquez’s frying eggs are perfect specimens of yolk and white suspended in a pot of clean oil. 62 But Velázquez’s choice of subject matter is too close to the picaresque scenario to be mere coincidence, and scholars have sought ways of incorporating the interpretive value of literary metaphors into our understanding of period audiences’ appreciation of these paintings. Barry Wind acknowledged the discrepancies between the small details of the episode from Guzmán and this painting, and so shifted his analysis to the discussion of egg symbolism and lore, seizing on what he called the “theme and similar intention” shared by Velázquez and Alemán.63 Wind digressed from the narrowly picaresque word—those directly sourced in

58 Lazarillo or Guzmán—in search of textual devices through which such egg imagery could have be interpreted by the seventeenth-century viewer. The emblem book Ova paschalia sacra emblemata (1634, Munich) includes a derelict figure eggs as a of hypocrisy, and associations between the egg and hope, alchemy, and the Virgin Mary were widely included in iconographic compendia.64 In Velázquez’s case, the picaresque interest in a young character’s founding into the hypocritical adult world seems more applicable. To quote Wind, both Velázquez and Alemán present “juxtaposition[s] of coddled naivete and hard-boiled craftiness seasoned with the slightest flavor of .”65 Eggs are an appropriate fulcrum for the theme of initiation, and they are not only a part of the character Guzmán’s awakening. Wind introduced support for the wider applicability of picaresque literature as an interpretive device in Velázquez’s painting by drawing from works other than Guzmán. In a particularly picaresque episode from Don Quixote a young novice is fed two fried eggs by the bawdy and shameless Teresa Panza.66 The Spanish proverb writer Gonzalo Correas said that “Lo Nuevo”—the new, the youth, and/or the virginal—should be given an egg.67 Since one aspect of youthful initiation is sexual, Velázquez may have intended his viewers to sense a subcurrent of eroticism in his depiction of the carafe of inhibition-reducing wine, the shadow of the knife penetrating the dish, and by the visual pun of the erect pestle in the old woman’s mortar—observations that Wind made, but which seem hyperbolic to me, especially when compared to the tentative treatment of sex in Guzmán.68 The novel presents a much subtler gesture of innuendo that Wind ignored, one overlaid with a maternal tenderness that more closely approximates Velázquez’s beldam: “She wished to kiss me; but I turned quickly round to avoid this felicity.”69 As an example of art historical criticism which drew textual support from the picaresque novel, Wind’s discussion demonstrates the limits of analysis based on iconographic parallels between words and images. Wind asserts the utility of the picaresque document in premising a narrative context in which the exchange between the boy and old woman would make sense, but misreads the episode in the novel in shaping his thesis of sexual salaciousness. My dispute with the extremity of Wind’s metaphors (based upon my reading of Velázquez’s painting as a more warmhearted and sheltering encounter between the boy and the woman) does not, however, imply a rejection of the associative power of the picaresque novel in acculturating

59 viewers into the social strata where youthful pícaros buy lunches from egg-frying grannies. As clearly as thematic and iconographic analogies may be discerned, the equally valent attributes of comic tone and satire are often elusive in paintings.70 Due to their facetious verbal nature, expressions of picaresque humor in genre painting are difficult to isolate: “the napkin, which looked as if it had but newly cleaned the oven”; “some water in a vessel . . . out of which her fowls generally drank.”71 It is not possible to paint a pitcher sarcastically. But the physical matter of the itinerant’s biography—the napkin, the vessel, the tattered clothes, tanned skin, communal feasts, and movable devices for gaining wealth (musical instruments, repertoires of songs, gambling paraphernalia)—could be captured in scenes chronicling the picaresque habitat. Literary theorist Helmut Hatzfeld paired the two greatest Spanish practitioners of their respective arts—Miguel de Cervantes and Diego Velázquez—under a rubric of such parallelisms: “an affinity of inclinations and a similarity in the perception of nature and reality by the two artists,” centered on the picaresque environments of Andalusian Seville.72 The tavern life portrayed in most any of Velázquez’s prototypical bodegones—works like Peasants at the Table (El Almuerzo) and Musical Trio (Los músicos)—drew its plastic descriptions from actual places like the Molinillo Inn on the outskirts of Seville, where travelers ate and slept on journeys between Andalusia and Castile,73 and the favorite hangout of the delinquent musicians cum card sharpers Rinconete and Cortadillo from the third of Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares: “with a pleasing air, though ragged, rent, and disheveled . . . dressed in Flemish collars, stiff with grease . . . [they] were sunburned, their nails dark bordered, and their hands not too clean,” (c. 1620, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; Figure 13; c. 1617-18, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin; Figures 14).74 Similarly, Velázquez’s The Servant (c. 1618-19, Art Institute of Chicago; Figure 15)—a racially anomalous representation of a scullery maid—may have been adapted from Cervante’s La ilustre fregona (The Illustrious Kitchen Maid), the sixth of Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares. Velázquez was seventeen when the Novelas were first published in 1616, and the painter- apprentice might even have known Cervantes, who lived in Seville for years and was a frequent visitor to Pacheco’s house.75 The details from the chacona sung and danced by the servants, mule drivers, water carriers, and stable boys fit with the physiognomy of Velázquez’s servant girl—“Esta indiana amulatada, / de quien la fama pregona” (This dusky Indian wench, / Who, so

60 rumor assures).76 Marianna Haraszti-Takács drew from Helmut Hatzfeld’s thesis of Velázquez’s and Cervantes’s shared outlook on nature in her identification of the painted servant’s relationship to the fabled mulatta, quoting Don Quixote’s proclamation that “Toda afectación es mala,” the key phrase behind Hatzfeld’s arguement for the artists’ conceptual affinities. While both men may have disdained aesthetic affectations for their own sake, the argument for relating The Servant to the kitchen maid from the Novelas ejemplares, first posed by Gaya-Nuño, hinges on the relative uniqueness of a dark-skinned girl among all other models available for Velázquez’s composition and its relation to Cervantes’s bawdy dance-song. As with the Old Woman Frying Eggs, the picaresque was an inspiration, not a text to be illustrated. A literal illustration of the festive dance would have been incompatible with Velázquez’s disciplined personality and education (let alone with the staid atmosphere of the Pacheco shop), but given the vocational and ethnic particularities of Velázquez’s subject, the sixth novela, written by the most successful parable writer of the period, is one possible, if subtle, source for his enigmatic kitchen maid.77 Mentioned by no art historian, and yet in my estimation the most telling element in associating the text with the painting, is the theme of La ilustre fregona itself. Among the Novelas ejemplares, it is Cervantes’s tale of character assassination; the “indiana amulatada” was not a sybaritic coquette, but a hardworking girl falsely accused. Velázquez’s servant’s humble visage and distracted but industrious demeanor are in keeping with the moral of the story: she toils in solitude as others spin lies about her. Even more instructive in their parallels are the descriptions from the sixth tradado of Lazarillo de Tormes—when Lázaro works selling water for a capellán—and Velázquez’s iconic Waterseller of Seville (c. 1623, Wellington Museum, London; Figure 16). Much of the narrative of Lazarillo de Tormes is set within reach of water: “I was actually born in the Tormes River, and that’s how I got my name.”78 In five of the seven tratados, major scenes are crafted around thirst, water jugs, and rivers.79 After several years of demeaning servitude under a series of exploitative masters, Lazarillo gets his first real break carrying water on weekdays for a Toledo chaplain. He even does so well that he works for himself on Saturdays.80 While selling water, he plans for a future of learning and leisure. Over four years he saves “enough to buy [himself] a good secondhand suit of clothes . . . a jacket made out of old cotton, a frayed coat with braid on the

61 sleeve and an open collar, and a cape that had once been velvety.”81 This was Lazarillo’s “first step towards enjoying the good life because now [his] hunger was satisfied.”82 At this point, two lifestyles are pitted against each other, the first hereditary (Lazarillo’s low-born lot to serve) and the second shaped by the picaresque pursuit of cultural comforts (his assiduousness on matters of dress and public comportment.) To quote the historian Giancarlo Maiorino, “The first we associate with minimum cost of subsistence, the second with a higher standard of living, which, as an unfolding achievement, can be both actual and potential.”83 We are made to confront both of these lifestyles in Velázquez’s painting: the youth dressed in a stylish dark jacket and splayed collar, and the old water seller in an earth-toned jerkin, the detached sleeves of which are serviceable, while at the same time suggesting raggedness. For Lazarillo, selling water was a temporary occupation; he can now afford to buy a glass from the portly old man, whose ultimate lot in life is to bear his great metaphoric counterpart—the pot-bellied jug, the vessel of living waters—and to pour out servings to paying customers. The composition follows a circularity of subsistence—possession (the water seller’s inventory), transmission (to the youth), and consumption (on the part of the adult who is drinking in the background).84 The story of Lazarillo’s rise from childhood penury under the attrited blind man up to a relatively comfortable adulthood of moral compromise and resignation in the house of the dirty old archpriest is an account of the three ages of man. Whereas the anonymous author portrayed an itinerant and humorous routine measuring distribution against profit (young Lazarillo’s endurance of hyperbolic suffering at the hands of his elders in exchange for breadcrumbs and onions), Velázquez inverted this distribution in a closed space where the three ages are turned upside down in the essential apologue of humiliation that underlies picaresque economics. Francisco de Quevedo described just such an old aguador in his Sueños (1606-1620), a literary source that Velazquez also well knew, as he is thought to have painted the most famous portrait of the author (after 1640, Apsley House, London; Figure 17):85 “‘The torn and poverty- stricken state of my clothing,’ he replied, ‘should indicate that I am a man of honest deeds and given to speaking the truth . . . for I am called the Undeceiver.’”86 Such a quote goes to the heart of picaresque naturalism as it was adapted and translated into paintings by artists like Velázquez.

62 From a moral standpoint—within and apart from the picaresque universe—poverty is associated with rectitude and personal integrity. The wise aguador is a part of the commercial world into which Lazarillo is drawn, but, he (unlike the scheming boy) is unmoved by it. The “cape that had once been velvety” no longer holds any appeal because it is irrelevant to his soul’s destiny. Regardless of the trim of one’s jacket, selling water is a lot from which a humble man may derive Christian satisfaction. The aguador is not unhappily resigned to his fate (as the cuckolded but title-proud Lazarillo will find himself the butt of ridicule); rather he is confident in the truth behind a contemporary proverb: “People of Toledo, people of God, water belongs to Him, and we only sell it.”87 For the youthful pícaro, the transfer of water is acquisitive and superficial; his thoughts focus on the immediate sensory gratifications of food and drink—“So there I was, starving of hunger. Even if I hadn’t anything to eat, I would have felt a lot better just being able to look at it.”88 He fills his stomach every chance he gets, and seldom plans ahead for the next thirst or appetite that will no doubt come in a few short hours. Velázquez shows the boy distractedly reaching for the glass; he will have a drink, his thirst will be quenched, and he will move on. The boy does not carry his own wineskin or jug; he gambles that another aguador will be nearby the next time he wants a drink. For the old man, the transfer of water is dispensational and spiritual; his plain clay jug is the treasure-filled “jar of clay” from 2 Corinthians 4:7, evoking the selling of water as an evangelical calling.89 For Lazarillo, it was a business activity, and he wasted no time in weighing its assets and liabilities.90 The man stands before us tanned and weathered by his labor, while the boy has scrubbed himself clean of his earlier penury as a street vendor. But under the tenebrous lighting, their stories converge. Velázquez’s painting reveals a subdued interplay of glazed and unglazed clay, of wrinkles and young flesh, and of a miracle-bestowing goblet that symbolizes a redemption shared by both protagonists.91 Carrier and vessel and recipient are bound together in a portrait of an activity that foregrounds both the Waterseller’s and Lazarillo’s respective rhopographies: the representation of humanized realities composed of common stuff (both here centered on the staple of water), realities that contrasted markedly with the classicized fantasies of history and faith presented in both the visual and literary art forms that preceded this era of

63 Counter-Reformational ardor.

Picaresque Naturalism: Murillo

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was the leading religious painter of his native Seville, but his admiration of Velázquez’s naturalistic genre works is widely acknowledged, and the artist may even have owned a bodegon himself.92 Murillo’s many paintings of street urchins, porters and basket haulers, gamblers, and Celestina-like scenes of sexual procurance have led historians to assume that the artist was at least familiar with the picaresque novel and probably sympathized with its critical exposé of societal wrongs endured by the young and vulnerable underclass of seventeenth-century Spain. As with Velázquez, there is no direct evidence to link Spanish picaresque literature and Murillo’s paintings: the novels were not illustrated and the situations depicted in Murillo’s genre scenes do not correspond precisely to any particular episode from them. Yet an inventory of his estate did include a copy of Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache among his possessions.93 Peter Cherry recently addressed the assumption that Murillo’s genre painting in toto was inspired by the picaresque literary tradition, citing Cervantes’s Rinconete y Cortadillo as one viable influence, as it describes “the adventures of the two children of the title as members of a Sevillian criminal confraternity.”94 I disagree with his assumption that Rinconete and Cortadillo were children, as the narrative places them in the very adult contexts of drinking houses and gambling dens, but the boys of Murillo’s genre paintings do exhibit several themes that relate them to the underlying psychological portrait of childhood indigence common to Lazarillo and El Buscón.95 Though the etymological range of the term pícaro is not known, seventeenth-century sources do not refer to the youths in Murillo’s genre paintings as pícaros, nor is the term applied to any of the eponymous heroes of the picaresque novels, the generic term chulito, which meant ‘boy’ or ‘lad’ in Sevillian slang, being preferred.96 While specific titles and inventory references do reveal important philological associations among period audiences (William Jordan and Peter Cherry have noted several instances where the juvenile protagonists of some early-seventeenth- century genre paintings by other artists were inventoried as pícaros),97 there are substantive

64 relationships between Murillo’s subject matter and key tropes of the picaresque that an erudite viewer would have recognized.98 One especially multivalent example is Murillo’s The Young Beggar (c. 1649, Musée du Louvre; Figure 18). The boy is about eight or ten years old, just the age that most pícaros find themselves adrift from their childhood homes.99 The presence of the basket and water jug suggests that we are looking at a mozo de la esportillo, or ganapán (basket boy), a vagrant child laborer who made his living carrying wares from the markets to people’s houses, running errands, and selling fruit and water.100 These petty mercantile attributes first bring to mind Lazarillo, who served three masters in the guise of an esportillero, but there are other picaresque characters who took up the office for a time: Lope del Asturiano in Cervantes’s La ilustre fregona;101 Estebanillo from La vida y hechos de Estebanillo Gonzales;102 and even Alemán’s most emulated Guzmán de Alfarache, who passed from simple begging to become a cook’s porter upon his arrival in Madrid.103 The youths Rinconete and Cortadillo worked the markets of Seville and described the tools of their trade as “small bags, new or clean, for bread, and three palm-leaf , two large and one small, to carry meat, fish, and fruit.” 104 According to the Asturian boy who directed the basket economy of San Salvador Square, “The work was easy, there was no tax to pay, and there were days when he earned five or six reales, on which one could eat, drink, and make merry like a king, without need to find himself a master to whom he would have to give security.”105 The dilettante author the Marqués de Montebelo went so far as to dedicate his dubious Tercera parte de Guzmán de Alfarache (c. 1650, Madrid) to just these sorts of errand boys, who he enviously praised for their simple, independent lives, in contrast to the care-worn life of a gentleman.106 It is safe to assume that Murillo’s urchin is affiliated with the Sevillian street markets, but it is more difficult to argue that this itchy boy alone in a hovel represents the “wistful” and “eternal pleasures” of a life of vagabondage.107 Many Golden Age Spanish proverbs celebrated an imaginary ideal of freedom enjoyed by homeless children—“Enbiar muchachos a bendimia, es kosa perdida”—referring to youths who left their masters in summer in order to live freely in the fields off the fat of the land.108 Brook and Cherry argue that Murillo’s patrons would have read associations like these in paintings like The Young Beggar—abridgements of the popular

65 perception of picaresque texts as diversional accounts of carefree living.109 But Brook and Cherry disregard a number of other equally valent proverbs from the period, which would analogize a more psychologically complex (and contradictory) reading of the image of the lonely boy: proverbs like “Al perro flaco, todos son pulgas” (“To the skinny dog, all are fleas”), which references hoarding and solitary eating as activities that connote more profound wants; or “Quien con perros se echa, con pulgas se levanta” (“If you lie down with dogs, you'll get up with fleas”), suggesting the debased circles into which such an orphan would likely fall. Both of these Baroque-era proverbs—no doubt well-known in the Seville of Alemán, Cervantes, and Murillo—subtly reiterate the picaresque topos of trying to live a life of self reliance amongst conniving rivals and exploitative authorities, adding thematic depth to Murillo’s image of an unattended flea hunter.110 It is not possible to gauge whether Murillo’s street urchin is beholden to a master, but having one would not preclude the boy from hiding out for a meal. While some picaresque heroes gainfully subsisted on their wits alone, Lazarillo’s biography is a series of profitless indentures, and this flea-bitten ganapán might be bound to an absentee boss. The second and third tratados of Lazarillo de Tormes moments similar to Murillo’s vision; while the parsimonious priest and ruined hidalgo are away, Lazarillo sneaks food—through stealing or begging—and finds a quiet place to eat. In Lazarillo’s words, “I think that hunger lit up my path to these black solutions: they say that hunger sharpens your wits and stuffing yourself dulls them, and that’s just the way it worked for me.”111 Murillo’s scene prominently features a water jug—a domestic essential found in both the priest’s and hidalgo’s dwellings. The jug confounds poor Lazarillo as he seldom has any food to wash down, so he sees it as cruel and mocking: “I drank, but not much, because being thirsty wasn’t exactly my trouble.”112 In the end, when the beggared squire absconds without paying his rent, Lazarillo is left behind to settle matters with the militia and landlady, who reluctantly accept the jug as defrayment. While in no sense illustrating these intricate plot lines, Murillo’s painting shows topical subject matter, and the tone of the work conveys the pathos and humility of the young and indentured but abandoned hero for whom relief comes in the occasional moment of eating without fear of having his meal taken away from him. This pathos is especially visible

66 when The Young Beggar is compared with some of Murillo’s other childhood scenes, for example Boys Eating Fruit (c. 1650, Alta Pinakothek, Munich; Figure 19). The solitary mentality of the urchin is clearly removed from the happy fraternity of these melon and grape eaters.113 But both works are equal parts fantasy, as they were each painted immediately after the terrible Seville plague of 1649 and at the height of the ensuing famine. Murillo knew the value of food, and “it was as if he painted with the eyes of a hungry man,” just as picaresque novelists focused on the quest for food as a primary motivation for their characters’ actions.114 By many measures worse than the perpetual hunger that the picaresque hero suffers was the possibility of being exploited sexually, and several art historians have argued that Murillo’s Four Figures on a Step shows a young boy beholden to an abusive harridan (c. 1655-60, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth; Figure 20). In an article called “Picturing the Picaresque,” Janice A. Tomlinson and Marcia L. Welles discussed this image, guided by a thesis that the painting’s disguised meanings may be understood through the analysis of the comparable treatment of sexually seditious subject matter in picaresque works like La Celestina and Lazarillo de Tormes.115 The authors approached the painting from the point of view first established by Jonathan Brown in an article written in 1982, which argued for including Four Figures on a Step within a group of Murillo’s paintings of urban prostitution inspired by the works of the Flemish painter Michael Sweerts and the Italian Bamboccianti.116 In attempting to arrive at a definition of the pícaro, the literary historian Claudio Guillén rhetorically asked, “Should one attempt a portrait of him, alone and with no background (as in Murillo’s paintings of young ragamuffins)?”117 Rosa Torrijos López discussed the painting, which she titled Familia de mendigos, in defining the picaresque in seventeenth-century painting, but based her thesis on a general comparison of subject matter, and drew no formal or conceptual distinction between Murillo’s beggar children and this more obscure scene.118 Unlike the artist’s earlier representations of distracted ragamuffins, the Four Figures on a Step engage the viewers directly. Tomlinson and Welles were challenged by this directness to find out who the figures were, to learn more about them by analogizing the image with picaresque presentations of sexual subversion, the thematic thrust that they perceived to be operating behind the surface details of the subtle painting. In my estimation, Tomlinson and Welles exceeded the limits of what is

67 convincingly readable in a genre painting—particularly with their anachronistic assumption of Baroque audiences’ receptivity to blatant sexual meanings. But their text-based methodology asserts the role of the imagination—as shaped by exposure to literary conventions—in informing audiences’ more general receptivity to picaresque topoi, a thesis that I do share with the authors. Three of Murillo’s figures make eye contact—an attribute likened to the picaresque narrator’s first-person engagement with his or her audience—while the fourth figure, according to Tomlinson and Welles, is made by the old alcahueta to expose his bottom in a cruelly suggestive pose of availability.119 Brown had argued that the view “is suggestive of forbidden sexual practices that obviously titillated one of the artist’s patrons,” and Tomlinson and Welles further drew from George A. Shipley’s thesis pertaining to Lazarillo’s abusers in shaping their argument of Murillo’s detached practice of literary simulation after Lazarillo’s implied case of pederasty.120 It is important to note that this reading of sexual innuendo in Murillo’s painting has been challenged, most recently by Peter Cherry, who emphasized the “protective” gesture of the “short-sighted grandmother,” whose “stare seems to ward off, rather than invite the viewer.”121 Whether the work was intended to convey an attitude of exploitation or shelter, it is picaresque in its assertive dialogism, presenting an alternative to what Michael Fried would call an “absorptive image”—represented in Murillo’s oeuvre by the self-engrossed boy hunting fleas who denies or ignores the presence of the beholder.122 By openly displaying themselves for their viewers’ consideration, the four figures on a doorstep convey the inherent first-person theatricality of Celestina’s bagnio (bordello) and Lazarillo’s confesional, two early tropes of the genre which derived their narrative potency from well-known sites of public performance, however opposite in their moral bearings.123 The motivation behind the telling of Lazarillo’s story hinged on two instances of sexual impropriety, each only indirectly alluded to in the text.124 The references to these situations were subtle, but ready enough to subject the novel to a number of Church censorship efforts in the later decades of the sixteenth century. Lazarillo is told in the first person as a deposition to “Vuestra Merced,” an inquisitor who is investigating the ambiguous “caso” at hand—an assumed reference to the illicit ménage à trois between Lazarillo’s protector, the Archpriest of San Salvador, the Archpriest’s domestic servant cum concubine (Lazarillo’s wife), and Lazarillo

68 himself.125 The second instance—and a possible referent for Murillo’s display of child sexual abuse—is obliquely recounted in the fourth tratado: Lazarillo has gone to work for a friar of the Order of Mercy, “who was really devoted to secular business . . . . He gave me the first pair of I ever wore, but they didn’t last me a week. And I wouldn’t have lasted much longer myself trying to keep up with him. So because of this and some other little things [otros cosillas] that I don’t want to mention, I left him.”126 Literary historian Harry Sieber has argued that this narrative fragment showed an ashamed Lazarillo practicing “self censorship”; his silence in regard to the “otros cosillas” became the “practical solution for the suppression of illicit activity.”127 An article by B. Russell Thompson and John K. Walsh offers further confirmation of Sieber’s thesis by documenting the Mercedarians’ popular reputation for lubricious behavior, summed up in the proverb “Cuando vieres a un fraile de la Merced, / arrima tu culo a la pared” (“When you see a Mercedarian priest, press your arse against the wall.”)128 Although the fourth tradado was expurgated in the 1573 edition of Lazarillo, the uncensored version continued to circulate (and was reissued alongside the redacted version as early as 1605), along with knowledge of its original insinuations of sodomy. While difficult to prove, Tomlinson and Welles identify Murillo’s Four Figures on a Step as a “resonant image,” and argue that historically it would have been understood as such, pointing out that the hole in the child’s pants was twice painted over in echoing acts of censorship.129 “Foremost in the painting’s illusionistic space and contiguous to his bared buttocks, are the boy’s shoes—“apparently new, unused, and clearly incongruous with his ragged dress.”130 According to Tomlinson and Welles, an allusion is clearly being made to that “first pair of shoes” given to Lazarillo by the Mercedarian friar.131 I find this narrower assertion quite tenuous as it glosses over the infant “victim’s” complete recontextualization among a pair of young prostitutes (the tarted-up boy and veil-lifting girl) and a procuress.132 It is also unclear to me whether the boy’s shoes are, in fact, new. However, the authors’ suggestion that historical audiences would have imagined a relationship between Murillo’s painting and Lazarillo effectively demonstrates my more general thesis of “picaresque naturalism”—that Baroque painters drew inspiration from the canonical works of the literary genre and incorporated related

69 thematic nuances into their visual representations of analogous character types.133 If the boy on the ledge is not Lazarillo himself, it is a boy whose present lot in life is very similar to what Lazarillo endured for a time, and a viewer’s presumed knowledge of the novel would have enriched the moral didacticism of Murillo’s scene. If, in fact, Murillo intended for viewers to see the painting as representing a sleeping boy and his grandmotherly guardian whose hands comfort his head in her lap, the ambiguous roles of the sneering trollop and grinning rent- boy added a prurient dimension that would have directed viewers’ imaginations to comparably equivocal social or literary contexts in which one would expect to see such dichotomous pairings. Foremost among the literary contexts were the picaresque stories like La Celestina and Lazarillo in which youthful innocents were cast into the corrupted company of tempters and abusers. Few would have missed the allusions to abuse that Lazarillo describes, though he equivocates with the skill of a master rhetorician. Similarly, Murillo’s audiences would have seen the painting of Four Figures on a Step as an indirect yet certain suggestion of a child’s exposure to sinful potentialities.

Picaresque Naturalism: Ribera

Of all the examples of picaresque naturalism in Spanish baroque painting, Jusepe de Ribera’s Blind Old Beggar comes closest to presenting the viewer with a literal representation of Lazarillo, and it has received surprisingly little critical attention pertaining to this association (c. 1632, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin; Figure 21) .134 While Ribera derived his figure of the blind man from a contemporaneous painting of the Sense of Touch (c. 1632, Museo del Prado, Madrid; Figure 22), the boy is unique to this composition—a handsome individual whose face is nowhere else repeated.135 He looks to be about ten years old, too young to be the blind man’s son, but roughly the age at which Lazarillo served his first master. He is dressed in tatters, but carries himself with a dignity and élan that suggests a self-awareness comparable to that of the novel’s narrator. He smiles slightly and makes forceful “first-person” eye contact with his audience, asserting the fact that this is his story being told. Ribera’s Lazarillo appeals to the viewer as the blind man holds a cup, with a piece of paper that bears the inscription, “Dies Illa /

70 Dies illa,” identified by Craig Felton as “a repetition of the second phrase of that segment of the Requiem Mass announcing the Last Judgment: ‘Dies Irae, Dies Illa’ (Day of Wrath, that day).”136 Such words of piety do not preclude Ribera’s having alluded here to the blind beggar’s rather un- Christian duplicity as Lazarillo described it. After all, they too made their living by hawking rezos: “At his job he was sly as a fox. He knew over a hundred prayers by heart. He would use a low tone, calm and very sonorous, that would make the church where he was praying echo. And whenever he prayed, he would put on a humble and pious expression—something he did very well. And he wouldn’t make faces or grimaces with his mouth or eyes the way others do.”137 While most art historians with good reason categorize Ribera’s Blind Old Beggar as an emblem designed to inspire Christian charity, this only partially accounts for the character dynamics of the painting. The function of the boy as the intercessor between the blind man and the world, both within the painting and in our own space, casts him in the lead role and demotes the blind man to the role of exemplum. The raison d’etre behind the beggar is summarized by the excerpted phrase of the Requiem mass; he is a flat charater, a bearer of a thesis that he need not even speak, as the words are clearly legible on the paper label of his alms cup. The boy is alert and cognizant of the audience for whom he performs. He has the potential for physical growth—unlike the old and decrepit blind man—and with his maturation will come knowledge and wisdom. Ribera deliberately painted him with an intelligent face, implying an intelligent mind. The audience could readily imagine him writing a formally picaresque tale of his life as the ward of this mendicant. In Ribera’s painting we see the two figures emerging from darkness. In a painting where the sense of sight is paramount, the brightly lit areas are important to note. The blind man directs his spiritual gaze upwards as his head is bathed in divine luminance; in a later episode Lazarillo will trick the man into jumping face-first into a stone column. Lazarillo’s face is similarly alight, but in his case with the luminance of knowledge gained through the hard knocks doled out by the master who grips his shoulder. The author of Lazarillo de Tormes described the physiognomies of many of the book’s characters, but Lazarillo is never himself described. Lacking even a physical appearance, Lazarillo exists not only without roots but without boundaries; he could be any boy whose

71 fortunes have dislocated him from his childhood home and made him subject to his own survival instincts.138 In his chopped haircut and purposely torn shoulder seam, Ribera’s young figure fits the part.139 Ribera sets the boy and his master wandering through a shadowy space; there is a narrow ledge, the suggestion of a rear wall, but no explicit geographic context or implied domesticity. Albert Camus called this feeling “cosmic homelessness,” and Ribera’s choice of a Judgment Day prayer (the ultimate homecoming) pairs well with the road philosophy of the itinerant pícaro.140 Ribera’s iconic Club-Footed Boy (c. 1642, Louvre, Paris; Figure 23) shares this peripatetic thrust (walking stick, open sky and landscape, well-worn path) and prayerful plea, but it is difficult to make a case that the mendicant boy was meant to represent a particular literary pícaro, as Edward Sullivan attempted in a 1977. I doubt Sullivan’s assumption that the Club- Footed Boy might have been viewed as a “symbological” representation of Lazarillo. 141 While Francisco de Quevedo, the author of La vida del buscón, himself suffered a childhood deformation to his foot that required him to walk with a crutch, the fictional Lazarillo, Guzmán, Pablos, and Estebanillo are each assumed to be physically fit (minus a few teeth), despite the routine and near-fatal beatings they receive at numerous hands.142 Virtually all art historical writing on the Club-Footed Boy has identified the painting as sincere in its emblematic thesis of Christian transcendentalism, with no suggestion that the boy might be concealing the wits or deviousness of a pícaro. On the contrary, the boy communicates serenity and joy in a powerful illustration of Ignatius Loyola’s call for mercy toward the poor, conveyed by the inscribed sheet DA HIHI ELIMO SINAM PROPTER AMOREM DEI (Give me alms for the love of God.)143 Thus, not all realistic, sympathetic representations of wayfaring beggars in seventeenth-century Spanish painting necessarily refer to the literary genre, directly or obliquely. One might argue that the Club-Footed Boy is no less emblematic of the first-person pícaro-narrator than the blind old beggar’s boy guide: they both make assertive eye contact with their audiences, engaging the viewers’ attention and professing their own right to be seen and heard. Yet by the literary measures drawn in the discussion of the Blind Old Beggar, the club- footed boy is a flat character who habitually repeats his message of Christian charity to anyone who pauses to read it from his slip of paper. Unlike the blind man’s boy guide, Ribera has

72 contained the club-footed boy within the confines of the written message; the work is text- specific, but the text is found within the work. This eliminates the need to solicit associated meanings from literary sources outside of the painting and diminishes the need for intertextual interpretations inspired by picaresque novels. The Club-Footed Boy is not a picaresque painting because it is not sufficiently equivocal in its inherent meanings to require the process of dialogism that was fundamental to the literary genre. Though no doubt concerned with the material life of this unfortunate boy, Ribera does not imply that his is a life of personal growth and learning; the salvation that the picaresque hero seeks through his application of various unwholesome enterprises is virtually guaranteed to the club-footed boy, if only through the beatific grace extended from God to the physically meek and humble—qualities seldom exhibited by the headstrong pícaro. In keeping with Peter Dunn’s caution against overextending the rubric of “picaresque,” and by focusing on very specific narrative, iconographic, and thematic commonalities, a viable category of “picaresque naturalism” emerges.

Picaresque Romanticism in Italy

Should Caravaggio’s paintings of bravos, gypsies, and card cheats be counted among the works of picaresque naturalism? It was Caravaggio’s compositional and stylistic innovations that paved the way for painterly naturalism in Italy, Spain, and the northern countries; it is without dispute that Velázquez and Ribera would not have painted their bodegones and tenebristic beggars but for Caravaggio’s formal influence; and the artist’s early choice of subject matter is clearly in keeping with the literary genre’s emphasis on the urban lives of young deviants. The problem with identifying Caravaggio’s early genre paintings as being derived from the picaresque is that they pre-date the writing and widespread popularization of the major novels (Guzmán de Alfarache, La vida del buscón, Estebanillo González), and thus could not have functioned dialogically with the texts at the time they were created. The question of whether there were dialogical associations understood by later audiences—even ten or twenty years later—who did have knowledge of the literary genre compels the consideration of a second category of picaresque painting that is further removed from the material translation of

73 picaresque tropes and specific iconography that we saw in Spanish genre painting, but which engages the themes, character types, and contexts of the picaresque in such a way as to imply conceptual affinities in the minds of viewers. This concept I have termed “picaresque romanticism,” as it extends from the imaginative aspect of novel reading, and relies on the receiver’s fanciful perceptions of lives and environments of roguish protagonists—the comic, the stylish, and the adventurous—as standardized in the picaresque narrative. It is appealing to posit a relationship between Caravaggio’s The Fortune Teller (c. 1596, Musei Capitolini, Rome; Figure 25) and Guzmán’s sexual education at the hand of a conniving tease soon after his arrival in Toledo—“a lively-looking woman, who had something roguish in her eye, and a pleasing face,”—but Caravaggio’s sujet didactique was in the private collection of the Cardinal Francisco Maria del Monte in Rome, Mateo Alemán was in Madrid, and the earliest Italian translation of Guzmán de Alfarache was published a full decade after the painting was painted.144 Likewise, Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps (c. 1596, Kimbell Art Museum, Forth Worth; Figure 24) is a virtual preface to Cervantes’s descriptions of the inequitable juegos de naipes played against dupes at the Molinollo Inn—“a deck of cards that were brown and oval in shape, for use had worn down the corners . . . . One carried a single-edged sword, the other a yellow-handled knife of the kind called cow stabbers.”145 But again, the Novelas ejemplares post-dated the painting, and there is virtually no chance of the image having influenced the author’s descriptions. What can be said with certainty is that Caravaggio, Alemán, and Cervantes each drew upon a broad, international interest in base and bawdy subject matter, and that their interconnected artistic environments facilitated an easy exchange of related literary and visual imagery.146 In short, watching or reading about a dupe getting taken in by the topa y hago (fixed card game) was good fun whether the audience was in Spain or Italy.147 This is not to say that the equally dynamic trade and diplomatic routes between Italy and the North did not shape the development of low-life genre painting in all regions of Europe. It is now universally held that the explosion of Italian and Spanish low-life genre images in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was primarily due to Northern (i.e., Dutch and Flemish) influences, both compositionally and thematically.148 The meanings of these paintings, however, were far more likely to be sourced in local texts. A painting of a buffoon cheated at cards might

74 inspire a German to think of episodes from Till Eulenspiel, a Frenchman of La vie genereuse, a Dutchman of the gypsy songbook Een Geusen Lied Boecxken, and a Spaniard of Rinconete and Cortadillo. A regional audience’s knowledge of specific texts would inform its orientations to related works of art, and a well-known work of art could become the basis for a text, but the question of intertextuality can only arise when a given audience is intellectually aware of both art forms. Were the image of Velázquez’s water seller to have moved into an environment without access to the picaresque novel, it would not be picaresque, because the assignation of that genre category to a painting requires an intertextual relationship (i.e. that the audiences perceive the works as related). Once the picaresque novel had migrated from Spain and entered the literary canon of other countries, the potential for tapping its contents as a reference in analogous expressions of visual art became valid. Throughout Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the literary environment was dominated by religious essays and high-principled philosophy. In contrast to these edifying forms, picaresque fiction played an important role in fostering the appeal of deviant images showing beggars, bravos, disbanded soldiers, and other social outcasts. Those who served as exemplars of corruption or vice in the scholar’s treatise were treated as heroes by the picaresque writer, and visual imagery underwent a comparable transformation. Picaresque texts were alternately read as elucidative primers, as social criticism, as entertainment, as a documentary reflection on modern life, or as a combination of one or more of these. Just as philosophical humanist writings had served as the textual inspiration behind many Renaissance artists’ efforts to humanize their painted representations of religious subjects, the picaresque emerged as a textual realm from which Baroque artists could plot an expansive visual cultural tradition of social deviance, represented by low-life itinerancy, the antics of misfits, and the celebratory atmosphere of gypsy and soldier encampments.149 As popular novels made play out of upstart swindlers, the audiences for genre paintings would see reflections of those characterizations in the jolly tavern scenes, and vice-versa. Caravaggio’s comic approach to a episode of card cheating (the slight of hand shown to the audience, the ready assistant with his eyes agog, and the oblivious gull fashionably dressed in black velour and lace) superseded the cautionary didacticism of the inherent proverb (Le disgrazie non vanno mai sole—“What money the cards

75 don’t take from him, the knife will”) so that the viewer laughs, just as the reader would laugh as the young and naïve Don Cherubin fell prey to the dice and fists of the double-dealing bravoes at an inn outside of Toledo.150 Under the designation of picaresque romanticism, Caravaggio’s Cardsharps would have had these textual associations appended to its range of possible interpretations as audiences read the novels and there met analogous characters who befooled unwitting marks in the public squares and taverns of Spain and Italy. While the question of the painting’s original meaning is not answered by the introduction of anachronous literary contexts, it is important to acknowledge that the contexts that influenced the reception of genre paintings changed over time, and that audiences will always have broad and continuing exposure to interpretive devices that would have been unknown to the creators of works of art.151 Even if Caravaggio did not himself read the adventures of Guzmán de Alfarache (though he could have known Barezzi’s 1606 translation), here was a low-life hero whose story resonated with the élan and sly humor exhibited by the artist’s bravos. It is no stretch to assert that the painting and novel share enough conceptual affinity to meet beneath a rubric that addresses the extant percolation of reception devices, a “word and image” category like picaresque romanticism. No less than Caravaggio, the development of low-life genre painting in Italy depended on the Dutch artist Pieter Van Laer (Bamboccio) and his Roman followers known as the Bamboccianti.152 In his 1984 dissertation on the subject, David A. Levine described “a new attitude about outlaws that developed in [Italy in] the seventeenth century . . . . This new interest was amply illustrated in picaresque literature of the period, in which robbers and bandits often play a major role.”153 In paintings such as Landscape with Morra Players, Van Laer crafted a scene comparable to the many episodes of lazy gaming and scheming described in virtually every picaresque novel (c. 1630, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; Figure 26). In Chapter 10 of Quevedo’s El buscón, Pablos describes the great lengths of time he spent in practice with his cohorts from the “thieves’ college,” honing his trick dice-throwing:

No money escaped me, for I was a full-blown sharper and carried dice, loaded with a new composition, for high and low throws, and I knew how to keep one palmed—so that it might be said that I was big with quadruplets but only brought

76 forth triplets. I also had my packs of cards, with long and wide cards for cheating.154

Again, Van Laer’s painting does not represent a literal adaptation of Quevedo’s motifs; rather, we see the common interest held by artists in visual and written mediums in describing the fanciful lives of schemers. In contrast to the severe, Counter-Reformation moralizing that underlies some of the Spanish examples of picaresque naturalism discussed earlier, the approach by Italian artists to subject matter shared by picaresque writers focused on the comic and diversionary aspects of the novels. For most foreign audiences, the “Spanish novel” was not viewed as criticism aimed at the social injustice of adolescent penury, but as a witty travelogue, in which, scene to scene, the audience joined the pícaro in visiting new places and encountering new thrills and dangers—coveys of bandits, acting troupes, and the Inquisitory alguazil.155 Where in Spain Velázquez had illuminated the Christian humanity of his aguador and fregona ilustre,156 painters in Italy seldom expanded on the economic and existential theses of the novels, instead using such picaresque character types as staffage in hybrid landscape and genre paintings—Italianate vistas showing shanty cityscapes, and the vast, ruin-strewn, in-between spaces through which vagabonds traveled, and where they sometimes lived.157 The characters Guzmán, Estabanillo Gonzáles, Simplicissimus, and the Bachelor Trapaza each left Spain to spend years wandering in the cities and countryside of the Italian peninsula, often living in encampments of brigands and disbanded soldiers. In his mid-century satire on Painting, the Neapolitan polymath Salvator Rosa was mercilessly critical of the Bamboccianti and his perception of the flippancy with which painters and audiences represented the criminal and destitute:

Today your artist thinks he doesn’t score Unless he paints a group of tattercoats . . . As so the living beggars, bare and pinched, cannot extract a penny piece from those who spend their cash on pictures of the poor . . . For what they shun in life they love as art.158

This excerpt of Rosa’s poem, however sarcastic in tone, also serves to confirm the

77 historically understood relationship between the elite markets for low-life genre (visual and written) and the pauperous objects and circumstances represented by these art forms. What the wealthy “shun in life they love in art,” and thus the engagement of the tasteful audience with the beggar was a relationship fueled by the receiver’s cultured imagination of life among the poor, an imagination informed by exposure to fanciful stories, encyclopedic beggars’ compendia, and pretty pictures staffed with stock character types readily drawn from the pages of picaresque novels. Despite his protest against the moral duplicity of the , Rosa himself had fallen under the influence of the Bambocciante as a young painter in Rome, producing works like Cardplayers (c. 1635, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte antica, Rome; Figure 27) and Beggars’ Encampment (c. 1640, Matthieson Gallery, London; Figure 28). Each painting postulates a world of the derelict that is at once ragged and sublime—scenes of itinerant gamblers and tousled gypsies set among cliffs and classical ruins.159 Rosa’s work further develops the category of picaresque romanticism, wherein artists draw from the subject areas exemplified by the picaresque literary genre, and then re-imagine it all in virtuoso displays of burlesque style. Foremost among the masters of this art form was the graphic artist Jacques Callot, whose career took off after a lengthy stay in Florence (c. 1611-1621), a cultural environment rife with theatrical and literary pageantry.160 Francis D. Klingender has likened Callot’s Les Gueux to the “Spanish and Italian pícaro . . . crafty and cynical, without illusions, and pitiless to life as life was pitiless to him,” designed by the artist with an eye to the inherent aestheticism that lay behind the novels’ descriptions of beggars and confidence men as people who were preoccupied with crafting adjuratory public images, foremost through the convincingness of their dress and deportment.161 The word “gueux” was the favored term for translating the Spanish “pícaro” into French; the pícaro Guzmán became the “gueux” in the earliest French translation of Alemán’s novel (Paris, 1600).162 In etchings like Le Mendiant au rosaire (c. 1622-23; Figure 29) and Capitano de Baroni (c. 1622-23; Figure 30), Callot transformed the sturdy vagrants of Caravaggio, Ribera, and Velázquez into costumed players modeled after descriptions like those from Chapter 22 of Guzmán de Alfarache, where Guzmán outlines the laws of begging: “That each beggar take especial care never to presume to wear anything new; that all his clothes be worn out, torn, or patched, nothing bringing more scandal [upon] our profession than begging in

78 good clothes.”163 While Alemán drew mostly from the sixteenth-century Liber vagatorum for his rules of mendicancy, Callot would have enjoyed access to a number of Spanish and Italian compendia of criminal types. These would have included Alfonso de Pimentel’s Guerras civiles de Flandes (1567), where Spanish pícaros were compared to the French “gueuz” or “guses,” false beggars, evil-doers, and mischief-makers encountered during the author’s foreign military service; and Rafaele Frianoro’s Il Vagabondo overo sferza de Bianti e Vagabondi (1621, Viterbo), which told of “the great masses of vagabonds seen everywhere in Italy.”164 Frianoro included among his list of thirty-four classes of vagabonds many that paralleled Callot’s Les Gueux: the Falsi Bordoni, or fake pilgrims, often adorned in oversized rosaries, who solicited alms because they said they could not conscientiously live on their own means during their pilgrimage;165 and the Formigotti, sham soldiers who claimed to have returned from some war against the heathen, and to have received a musket shot there which has obliged them to bandage their arms and feet.166 Works such as Frianoro’s and Callot’s functioned dialogically with the picaresque novel through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, similarly imagining mendicancy as an organized mythos of willing specialists whose tricks and handicaps were conceived as forms of performance art. Quevedo’s Pablos, el buscón, a thoroughly healthy young man, was recruited into his thieves’ guild to work as a false cripple alongside an Accaponi,167 a seasoned scallywag who molded phony ulcers onto his body with powder, toasted bread, and hare's blood: “I went around with my legs tied together in a leather bag, and slept on a surgeon’s porch along with a fellow beggar, one of the biggest rascals that God created . . . . He made up a big rupture, and he tied the cord round the top of his arm, thus making it appear as if it were swollen, maimed, and inflamed at one and the same time.”168 The literary pícaro did not run exclusively in indigent and criminal circles; there are many episodes during which protagonists come into money and recast themselves as urban dandies. Likewise, Callot moved freely between his Gueux and cycles of etchings like Les Caprices, which included scenes of rural banditry like La Caverne des brigands (c. 1616; Figure 31), alongside fashion plates like Le Gentilhomme à la grande canne (c. 1616; Figure 32). Klingender relates the formal quality of Callot’s portrayal of the fop to the “light and airy

79 caprices of the ,” and reads his bicameral approach to the pícaro theme as anticipating Lesage’s Gil Blas de Santillane, whose adventures ranged from the underground lair of a bandit king to the rarefied salons of Italian society.169 I do not see the need to look ahead one hundred years to Gil Blas when there is an equally compelling corollary to be read between Callot’s virtuoso Gentilhomme and one of Guzmán de Alfarache’s self-descriptions from Chapter 15, when the hero arrives in Toledo intending to act the man of fortune:170

It was here that I displayed all the fine airs I had seen practiced by other young fools at Madrid, and which I had performed at least twenty times over in the morning at my glass. The first thing I did was to choose a spot where I could be seen from head to foot. Then I thrust out my breast, and stood firm upon one leg, while I extended the other in so stiff a position that it scarcely touched the ground, showing by this means my fine stockings, and that I wore garters of the German fashion which were then in vogue.171

It is here, among the works of picaresque romanticism, that the picaresque body is explored in all of its permutations, and Callot’s deliberate choice of seemingly unrelated subject matter (constructed around the representations of economic and social types) is uncanny in its parallels with the episodic trajectory of the standard picaresque narrative. Over a thirty-year career, the artist’s eye ranged across the cultural landscape of Europe and selected for study those personalities who were used (and would continue to be used) by picaresque authors as the shaping forces behind the literary pícaro’s coming of age: the slummy muleteer resting in the shade, as in Le paysan se déchaussant (c. 1616, Figure 33);172 the motley crowd gambling in the courtyard of L’Auberge (c. 1616, Figure 34); the beggar on crutches from Les Gueux (c. 1622-23, Figure 35);173 and the two clotheshorses vying for the attention of an elegant woman from Les Fantaisies (c. 1635, Figure 36).174 While these graphics are not illustrations of scenes from any one book, Callot’s learned audiences would have brought a general knowledge of literary narratives to their contemplation of these prints, imagining contexts like Guzmán’s vagabondage in which such seemingly disparate character studies could come alive, and even interact along adventuresome plot lines.175 The picaresque novel and Callot’s prints are comparable and dialogical, firstly because of

80 the inherent serialism of the two art forms, which implies that meanings can and should be drawn through the comparison of any one scene or image with others from the group, and secondly because the histrionic caricature inherent to so many of the figures asserts them as stock types, the characteristic particularities of which would be drawn from the audience’s knowledge of the world of beggars, rogues, and dandies—possibly acquired through real-life interactions, but doubtlessly enriched by the many memorable portrayals presented in popular works of literary culture. The concept of picaresque romanticism is thus fueled by the ongoing intertextual dynamic between imaginative representations of the picaresque life and its practitioners as conceived by the minds of artists and writers through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries.

This chapter has applied period and modern writing toward the interpretation of a number of works of art associated with the picaresque literary genre. Expanding the profile of visual art “of picaresque derivation” beyond the limited number of early frontispieces and drawings that can be linked to specific novels, I have identified and explored some of the most important examples of artists’ intertextual adaptations of picaresque themes and subject matter through the elaboration of two formal subcategories: “picaresque naturalism,” represented by the rhopographic traditions of Velázquez and his Spanish contemporaries; and “picaresque romanticism” exemplified by Callot’s aesthetic departures. These works of art contributed dialogically to the development of a visual sense of the picaresque that encompassed the physical, material world of the novels’ settings (taverns, foodstuff, housewares, clothing), and the ephemeral, aesthetic contexts of the costumed self-presentation of the novels’ characters. Each of these senses would be formative in shaping the approach to picaresque subject matter taken up by Alessandro Magnasco, discussed at length in the next chapter of this study.

______

1. There is, of course, a long record of low-life genre in before 1600, from scenes of drunkenness and murder on calyxes, to ’s engraved revelries and ’s thieving bravos. But I will survey only the period during which artists could have been

81 engaged in a visual tradition derived from or developed alongside the picaresque novel genre. This is not to deny the fact that artists were doubtlessly continuing to find resource in the pictorial traditions of low-life genre apart from literary representations; rather I assert that the details and narrative conventions of the novel genre added a context to which artists could have alluded, or from which they could have drawn cross-referential subject matter.

2. I should also note that the manuscript for Francisco de Quevedo’s La vida del buscón probably dates to around 1605, though it was not published until 1626: Dunn, 1993, 5.

3. Barry Wind, "Pitture Ridicole: Some Late Cinquecento Comic Genre Paintings,” Storia dell'Arte 20 (1974): 25-35. This article is the first serious scholarly attempt to mark the moment in which genre painting could be viewed and interpreted alongside the picaresque novel.

4. See for example Bjornson, 22-23; and Blackburn, cover and frontispiece.

5. Anonymous, The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, His Fortunes and Misfortunes as told by himself, Robert S. Rudder, trans. (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1973), 13-14, 98.

6. The complete novel would again be reprinted at Milan in 1587 and at Bergamo in 1597. See James R. Stamm, “The Uses and Types of Humor in the Picaresque Novel,” Hispania 42, no.4 (1959): 482-486, n. 7.

7. Lazarillo de Tormes, Rudder, trans., 21, 29.

8. Lazarillo de Tormes, Rudder, trans., 30

9. Aleman’s personal attachment to the emblem is suggested by his repeated allusions to it and the fact that he had it and the Latin motto, “Ab insidiis non est prudencia,” printed in the upper right hand corner of his portrait in all approved editions of Guzmán and the Vida de san Antonio de Padua (Seville, 1604); Bjornson 261, n. 12.

10. Translated in Bjornson, 51.

11. Bjornson, 51.

12. Alemán, Francisco Rico, ed., 46.

13. Bjornson, 53.

14. Guzmán discovers that (as with the author, Mateo Alemán) his father was descended from a Genoese Jewish family of usurers and money changers. “When properly understood, the entire novel—its narrative, its religious doctrine, its anecdotes, tales, parodies, and allegories—constitute a converso’s eloquent plea for a recognition of his humanity and the legitimacy of his claims to religious and secular equality”; Bjornson, 46. To quote from Peter Dunn: “From Guzmán’s own apparently orthodox position, that

82 society seems more corrupt than the poor homeless pícaro who is obliged to adopt its customs if he hopes to survive”; Dunn, 1993, 47.

15. Bjornson, 68-69.

16. Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache, Francisco Rico, ed., 261; quoted in Bjornson, 69.

17. This assertion would shape the way in which both Lazarillo and Guzmán were interpreted by seventeenth-century readers—“within the context of a for picaresque subject matter among readers from privileged classes.” Bjornson, 66-67.

18. Harry Sieber describes La pícara Justina as a court buffoon, and the star of a witty roman-á- clef, in that López de Ubeda used the life of a pícara to satirize several real people in residence at the Spanish court of Philip III; it was “a private work whose full meaning is reserved for relatively few readers.” See Sieber, 1977, 26-28.

19. Bjornson, 69.

20. Blackburn 16; Parker has been praised by Fernando Lázaro Carreter for the discovery of the emblem in “Glosas Críticas a Los Pícaros en la Literatura de Alexander A. Parker,” Hispanic Review 41 (1973): 469-497. Ironically, Parker’s contention that Lazarillo de Tormes is not the first picaresque novel is refuted by this very emblem, which shows Lazarillo moored to the “Ship of Picaresque Life.” Noted in Blackburn, 218, n. 22.

21. Bjornson, 66-105.

22. The ostensible moral is obvious: while people like Justina, Guzmán, Lazarillo, and Celestina are leading picaresque lives and gratifying their worldly desires, they remain unaware that time is carrying them closer and closer to the puerto de la muerte, where all pleasures will be revealed as meaningless illusions. See Bjornson, 68-70.

23. Bjornson, 70.

24. For a thorough discussion of the picaresque novel in seventeenth-century Germany, see Alberto Martino, “The Reception of ‘Rinconete y Cortadillo’ and other Picaresque Novels by Cervantes in the German-Language Space,” Daphnis-Zeitschrift fur Mittlere deutsche Literatur 34, no.1-2 (2005): 23-135.

25. For general surveys of Grimmelshausen’s indebtedness to previous writers, see Arthur Bechtold, “Zur Quellengeschichte des Simplicissimus,” Euphorion 19 (1912): 19-66, 491-546; and Gunther Weydt, Nachahmung und Schöpfung im Barock: Studien um Grimmelshausen (Bern: Francke, 1968) 47-240, 393-419. Cited in Bjornson, 275, n. 1.

83 26. The question of Sorel’s influence is treated in Manfred Koschlig, “Das lob des Francion bein Grimmelshausen,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 1 (1957): 30-73. See also Dunn, 1993, 6; and Bjornson, 152-160.

27. Bjornson, 167, 170.

28. Bjornson, 167, 170.

29. “By allegorical extension, the figure also represents man, who possesses human features (reason and a soul) while remaining imprisoned in a beast-like body subject to desire, decay, and death.” Bjornson, 171-172.

30. “The pages of the book remain blank until a bystander blows upon them; at that moment, pictures appear—pictures which correspond to the individual’s own dominant preoccupations.” Bjornson, 172.

31. “The confusion between the words satiric and satyric gave rise to the notion that the satyrs who formed the chorus of the Greek satyric drama had to deliver ‘satirical’ speeches. Hence, in the [sixteenth and seventeenth centuries], the frequent attribution to the satyrs of censoriousness as a characteristic quality.”; Oxford English Dictionary, 1989 ed., s.v. “satyr.” “A satyr figures prominently in the frontispiece of Mescherosch’s Gesichte Philanders von Sittewald (1643) as well as in three of Grimmelshausen’s own works.” See Walter E. Schäfer, “Ser Satyr und die Satire,” in Rezeption und Produktion zwishen 1570 und 1730: Festschrift für Günther Weydt zum 65 (Bern: Francke, 1972), 197-202, 207-208, 219. Bjornson, 172, n. 10.

32. After the success of Der Abenteuerlich Simplicissimus, Grimmelshausen went on to publish several shorter novellas and pamphlets of entertainments, many containing later adventures of the same character. Included among these was Des abenteuerlichen simplicii verkehrte Welt (Adventurous Simplicissimus’s Topsy-Turvy World.) (1672). See Alfred D. White, “Johannes Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen,” in The Literary Encyclopedia [online database.] Profile first published 6/3/2006 [cited 11 Jan. 2006].

33. Masks of Difference: Cultural Representations in Literature, Anthropology, and Art (Cambridge University Press: 1994), 9-36. (“The Satyr Anatomized”)

34. Bjornson, 173.

35. The entire cycle is reproduced in two Twentieth-century editions: E. W. Bredt, Leben und Abenteuer des Lazarillo von Tormes. Mit 73 Tafeln nach Zeichnungen von Leonard Bramer (München, Schmidt: 1920); and The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, His Fortunes and Misfortunes as told by himself, Robert S. Rudder, trans. (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1973.)

36. As a painter, Leonard Bramer (1596-1674, known in Italy as “Leonardo delle Notte”) was influenced by the followers of Caravaggio, and particularly Adam Elsheimer. Most of Bramer's

84 paintings are small and dark, featuring diminutive figures set among antique buildings, ruins, or thick, dark woods, dramatically lit from one side or from behind. Bramer seldom concerned himself with fine details, which were often roughly sketched in—especially faces and —but concentrated more on composition and “preferred expressiveness to formal perfection.” This caused later critics to consider him a good psychologist but a poor draftsman. The Dutch art historian Jan Willem Noldus attributes this to Bramer's preoccupation with Italian Baroque art theory, with its emphasis on inventio as the highest artistic quality and the concetto as the basis of creation, ideas stronger in Bramer’s adopted Italy than in his native . Bramer rebutted the criticism by spending two decades pursuing supreme acts of disegno—drafting illustrations to great works of literature, including Lazarillo, Quevedo’s Sueños, Ovid, Virgil, and the . See J.W. Noldus: "Bramer, Leonard," Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press, [September 5, 2003], http://www.groveart.com/

37. This is in contrast to the Alemán portrait engraving, which borrowed symbolism from a discursive passage, and not from a narrative episode.

38. Lazarillo de Tormes, Rudder, trans., 8.

39. Lazarillo de Tormes, Rudder, trans., 65-66.

40. Lazarillo de Tormes, Rudder, trans., 67

41. Lazarillo de Tormes, Rudder, trans., 88.

42. Lazarillo de Tormes, Rudder, trans., 90.

43. See Noldus: “Bramer, Leonard.”

44. Leonaert Bramer: 1596-1674, Ingenious Painter and Draughtsman in Rome and , Jan ten Brink Goldsmith, et al. (Zwolle: Waanders, 1994), 60.

45. Included among the major illustrators of Lazarillo whose work I have surveyed are R. De los Rios from The Life and Adventures of Lazarillo de Tormes, Thomas Roscoe, trans. (London: J.C. Nimmo and Bain, 1881); Stephen Baghot De La Bere from Sir Clements Markham, ed. The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes. His Fortunes & Adversities. Translated from the edition of 1554 (printed at Burgos) With a notice of the Mendoza family, a short life of the author, Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, a notice of the work, and some remarks on the character of Lazarillo de Tormes (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1908); Michael Mathias Prechtl in Das Leben des Lazarillo von Tormes. Seine Freuden und Leiden, Helene Henze, trans. (Frankfurt: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1992); and Frank Martin in Gareth Alban Davies, ed. The Pleasant History of Lazarillo de Tormes, David Rowland, trans. (Newtown: Gwasg Gregynog Press, 1991).

46. Leonaert Bramer, Goldsmith et. al., 44-45.

85 47. The earliest German translation was published in 1615, too late for Elsheimer to have consulted the novel in his native language.

48. Joachim von Sandrart described Il Contento as Elsheimer’s greatest work. See Joachim von Sandrart, Academie der edlen Bau—, Bild—und Malerey-Künste (Nuremburg, 1675), A.R. Peltzer, ed. (Munich, 1925), 161. Willem van Nieulandt II—signed and dated 1616 (whereabouts unknown); Nikolaus Knüpfer’s copy of Elsheimer’s painting (1649, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich), and own version (1651, Staatliches Museum, Schwerin), where the word “Contento” is clearly written on the flying kite; and three copies by unknown followers of Elsheimer. See Keith Andrews, Adam Elsheimer, Il Contento (Edinburgh: The National Gallery of Scotland, 1971), 15-18. For Kuznetsow’s identification of Elsheimer’s work with Guzmán, see J.I. Kuznetsow, “Het werkelijke onderwerp van de werken van A. Elsheimer en N. Knüpfer bekend onder de naam ‘Contento of de jacht naar het geluk,’” Oud Holland 79 (1964): 229-230.

49. Mateo Alemán, The Life and Adventures of Guzmán de Alfarache, or The Spanish Rogue, John Henry Brady, trans. (London: J.C. Nimmo and Bain, 1881), 149.

50. First published in Rome in 1520, and translated into Spanish by A. de Almazán in 1553; later reissued in a 1598 edition. See Andrews, 2, n. 2.

51. The substitution of Contentment for Virtue in Alemán probably derives from the fable as it appeared in Doni’s Mondi celeste . . ., first published in Venice in 1562. See Andrews, 2-3.

52. Alemán, Brady, trans., 1: 151.

53. Alemán, Brady, trans., 1,:143.

54. Mateo Alemán, The Rogue, or the Life of Guzman de Alfarache, James Mabbe, trans., (London: Tudor Classics Edition, 1924), 152; quoted in Andrews, 3.

55. Though not the first to posit associations between Spanish Baroque genre painting and the picaresque, Barry Wind devoted a substantial part of his Velázquez’s Bodegones to the discussion of “Naturalism and Metaphor,” into which the picaresque novel figured heavily. See Barry Wind, Velázquez’s Bodegones (Fairfax: George Mason University Press, 1987), 81-114.

56. To quote Wind, 1987, 94: “The confrontation of a youth with an old woman cooking eggs is a set piece in two picaresque novels, Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache and Quevedo’s El Buscón. For Quevedo it is a tiny vignette..., as the young Pablos, while cataloguing the flaws of the low cuisine served at the school of the penurious Dr. Goat, described an old blind cook preparing eggs on Friday. But in Guzmán de Alfarache we find a far more elaborate and sharply etched image of a youth’s encounter with an egg-frying harridan.”

57. Alemán, Brady, trans., 1: 115-116.

86 58. The connection between Velázquez and picaresque literature has been treated in two short essays by the historian J.A. Gaya Nuño: J.A. Gaya Nuño, “Peinture picaresque,” L’Œil 84, no.12 (1961): 45-51; and J.A. Gaya Nuño, “Picaresca y tremendismo en Velázquez,” Goya (1970): 32-39.

59. Dunn, 1993, 19. If this is true for texts, it could also be true for images, and Velázquez has likewise been called an early father of , “without trace of the bucolic ideals or sciolist concoctions of humanism” that kept many of his artist contemporaries from exploring the material culture of life among the less advantaged; Haraszti-Takács, 32.

60. Alemán, Brady, trans., 1: 116.

61. Alemán, Brady, trans., 1: 115.

62. Alemán, Brady, trans., 1: 116-117.

63. For Wind’s discussion of Velázquez’s Old Woman Frying Eggs, see Wind, 1987, 93-96.

64. For more on egg symbolism see Maria Lioba-Lechner, “Ei,” Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte 4 (Stuttgart, 1958), 893-903; cited in Wind, 1987, 94, n. 78.

65. For this theme in Guzmán see Thomas Hanrahan, La mujer en la novela picaresca de Madeo Alemán (Madrid, 1964), 99; cited in Wind, 1987, 95, n. 81.

66. Wind, 1987, 95.

67. Gonzalo Corneas, Vocabulario de refranes y frases proverbiales (1627), Louis Combet, ed. (Bordeaux: Institut d'etudes iberiques et ibero-americaines de l'Universite de Bordeaux, 1967), 42; cited in Wind, 1987, 95, n.83.

68. On the erotic significance of the mortar see Manuel Criado del Val, “Antifrasis y contaminaciones de sentido erótico en La lozana andaluza,” Homenaje a Dámaso Alonso 1 (1960): 431-457; cited in Wind, 1987, 95, n. 84.

69. Alemán, Brady, trans., 1: 116.

70. For related discussions of the problem of identifying comic content in Baroque paintings, see Mira Pajes Merriman,“Comedy, Reality, and the Development of Genre Painting in Italy,” in Spike, 1986, 39-76; and Mariët Westermann, "How Was Funny? Strategies and Functions of Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century," in A Cultural History of , From Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 134-178.

71. Alemán, Brady, trans., 1: 116.

87 72. Helmut Hatzfeld, Artistic Parallels in Cervantes and Velázquez. Estudios dedicados a Menendez Pidal. 3 vols. (Madrid, 1952). 3: 265. See also Helmut Hatzfeld, “Quelques problèmes des bodegones de Velazquez,” BHB 41 (1973): 21-48; and Haraszti-Takács 31-35, n. 89.

73. See Michael Nimetz, “Genre and Creativity in Rinconete y Cortadillo,” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 10, no. 2 (1990): 73-93.

74. Miguel de Cervantes, Six Exemplary Novels, Harriet de Onís, trans. (Woodbury, NY: Barron’s Educational Series Inc., 1961), 163.

75. It is even recorded that Pacheco painted Cervantes’s portrait; Haraszti-Takács, 99-101.

76. Cervantes, de Onis, trans., 267.

77. Haraszti-Takács, 100.

78. Lazarillo de Tormes, Rudder, trans., 5; see also Maiorino, 2003, 55.

79. Lazarillo de Tormes, Rudder, trans., 25-26, 57, 93.

80. “On weekdays I gave my master sixty coppers out of what I earned, while I was able to keep everything I got above that. And on Saturdays I got to keep everything I made.” Quoted from Lazarillo de Tormes, Rudder, trans., 93.

81. Lazarillo de Tormes, Rudder, trans., 93.

82. Adapted from Maiorino’s translation: Maiorino, 2003, 67.

83. Maiorino, 2003, 55.

84. Maiorino, 2003, 57.

85. Velázquez is also closely associated with the Spanish painter and writer Félix Machado da Silva Castro e Vasconcelos, the Marquês de Montebelo (1595-1662), author of the picaresque novel A terceira parte de Guzmán de Alfarache, an unauthorized continuation of Mateo Alemán’s hero’s story. See Victor Serráo: “Machado da Silva Castro e Vasconcelos, Félix” Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, [March 15, 2005], http://www.groveart.com/.

86. “Mi hábito y traje dicen que soy hombre de bien y amigo de decir verdades, en lo roto y poco medrado, yo soy el Desengaño.” Translated in Maiorino, 2003, 58.

87. Quoted in Maiorino, 2003, 59.

88. Lazarillo de Tormes, Rudder, trans., 27-29.

88 89. “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed”; 2 Corinthians 4:7 (New International Version).

90. Maiorino, 2003, 59.

91. See Giancarlo Maiorino, “Picaresque Econopoetics,” in The Picaresque, Tradition and Displacement, Giancarlo Maiorino, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 11.

92. “A ‘bodegon’ attributed to Velázquez was listed in 1709 in the inventory of Murillo’s son Gaspar Esteban, valued at 30 reales . . . This may be the same picture listed according to the old terminology ‘bodegón’ in Murillo’s own inventory in 1682.” Quoted from D. Angulo Iñiguez, Murillo. Su vida, su arte, su obra (Madrid, 1981), 1: 124, 164, n. 31; cited and translated in Brook and Cherry, 16, n. 13.

93. Santiago Montoto, “La biblioteca de Murillo,” Bibliografia Hispánica 7 (1946): 464-479.

94. Brook and Cherry, 22-24.

95. For a thorough survey of picaresque childhood, see Antonio A. Gómez Yebra, El niño-pícaro literario de los Siglo de Oros (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1988).

96. Brook and Cherry, 21-23, n. 33.

97. See William Jordan and Peter Cherry, Spanish from Velázquez to Goya (London: National Gallery of Art, 1995), 189, n. 18.

98. To quote Peter Cherry, “While Murillo’s paintings of poor urchins are autonomous narratives, it is likely that in some respects these did evoke the mood of the parallel literary world of the picaresque for contemporary viewers familiar with this popular literature.” See Brook and Cherry, 22.

99. Quevedo’s Don Pablo, El Buscon, has thieving thrust upon him at the age of seven: Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, The Life and Adventures of Don Pablos the Sharper, Francisco Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., (Leicester: The Minerva Co., 1928), 12; Lazarillo’s fortunes turn for the worse at eight: Lazarillo de Tormes, Rudder, trans., 5; Estebanillo lost his father “before [he] had attained the ninth year of my age”; Anonymous, The History of Vanillo Gonzales (London: J.C. Nimmo and Bain, 1881), 2.

100. Brook and Cherry, 22-23.

101. Cervantes lauds the picaresque lifestyle of the market porters of Seville in La ilustre fregona, Cervantes, de Onis, trans., 277-279.

89 102. Estebanillo works as a porter in Murcia and Seville before pursuing his education at Salamanca. Anonymous, La Vida de Estebanillo González (Madrid: Epasa Calpe, 1968), 17-33.

103. Guzmán is engaged by a cook to run errands to and from the market, but his at the man’s greed finds him returned to the beggar’s trade after just a week. Alemán, Brady, trans., 269-273.

104. Cervantes, de Onis, trans., 170.

105. Cervantes, de Onis, trans., 170.

106. Parker, 1967, 17-18.

107. See Brook and Cherry, 23.

108. “‘Alón, ke pinta la uva.’ Dízese por los mozos ke no kieren servir, I dexan le amo en el verano, ke ai fruta I ké komer en el kanpo, I no frío.” See Gonzalo Corneas, Vocabulario de refranes y frases proverbiales (1627), Louis Combet, ed. (Bordeaux: University of Bordeaux, 1967), 49; quoted in Brook and Cherry, 23.

109. Brook and Cherry, 22-25.

110. For many more examples, see Juan de Mal Lara, Philosophia vulgar [1568], in Obras completas, 3 vols., M. Bernal Rodríguez, ed. (Madrid: Biblioteca Castro. Fundación J.A. de Castro, 1996).

111. Lazarillo de Tormes, Rudder, trans., 41-42.

112. Lazarillo de Tormes, Rudder, trans., 57.

113. Pablos, El Buscon steals a basket of grapes from a confectioner’s shop on the Calley Mayor in the sixth chapter of the novel; Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 64.

114. Quoted from Brook and Cherry, 24.

115. Tomlinson and Welles, 66-85.

116. Jonathan Brown, “Murillo, pintor de temas eróticos: Una faceta inadvertida de su obra,” A. Valdés, trans. Goya 169, no.71 (1982): 35-43; cited in Tomlinson and Welles, 68; and Jonathan Brown, Painting in Spain, 1500-1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 228.

117. Guillén, 1971, 75; quoted in Tomlinson and Welles, 66.

118. Rosa Torijos López, “El tema de la picaresca en la pintura española del siglo de oro,” in La picaresca: Orígines, textos y estructuras. Actas del I Congreso Internacional sobre la Picaresca (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1979), 167-190; cited in Tomlinson and Welles, 85.

90 119. Malcolm Jerome Gray cites this period term for a bawd or procuress in An Index to Guzmán de Alfarache (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1948), 2.

120. Brown, 1998, 228; and George A. Shipley, “‘Otras cosillas que no digo’: Lazarillo’s Dirty Sex,” in The Picaresque: Tradition and Displacement, Giancarlo Maiorino, ed. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 40-65.

121. Brook and Cherry, 102.

122. See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); see also Tomlinson and Welles, 73.

123. Guillén, 1987, 77-92.

124. The redacted publication history is reviewed in Guillén, 1971, 137-46.

125. See George A. Shipley, “A Case of Functional Obscurity: The Master Tambourine Painter of Lazarillo, tratado VI,” MLN 97 (1982): 225-253; see Tomlinson and Welles, 71.

126. Lazarillo de Tormes, Rudder, trans., 80.

127. Harry Sieber, Language and Society in “La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 57-58; see Tomlinson and Welles, 79.

128. B. Russell Thompson and John K. Walsh, “The Mercedarian’s Shoes (Perambulations in the Fourth Tratado of Lazarillo de Tormes),” MLN 103 (1988): 444; quoted in Tomlinson and Welles, 79.

129. Tomlinson and Welles, 80.

130. Tomlinson and Welles, 79.

131. Tomlinson and Welles, 79.

132. According to Wind, 1987, 87, the Spain of this era was a “hotbed of licentiousness, and travelers, well aware of Spanish passion, called attention to the Spaniards’ penchant for amorous adventures. In 1585, for example, Hendrick Cock wrote: ‘Public prostitution is so common in Spain that many first go to the bordellos upon entering a city before they go to church.”

133. When faced with such a painting, the seventeenth-century viewer would have sought to identify the implied meanings behind these figures, as they are not interesting for their physical or devotional properties. It has never been suggested that the works were portrait commissions. One pervasive source through which a wealthy art patron might associate with the poor and depraved was literary fiction.

91 134. Comparable, but less compelling due to the figures’ ages and suggested vocation is Francisco Herrera the Elder’s Blind Beggar with a Boy (El ciego y su lazarillo), oil on canvas, 71.5 x 92 cm, c.1630 (Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna); Haraszti-Takács, 172, cat. 41.

135. Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez speculates that Ribera used an actual sightless man to pose for these paintings. The identity of the boy is unknown. See Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez and Nicola Spinoza, Jusepe de Ribera, 1591-1652 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), 98, cat. 27.

136. Craig Felton and William B. Jordan, eds. Jusepe de Ribera, lo Spagnoletto, 1691-1652 (Fort Worth: Kimball Art Museum; Seattle and London: Washington University Press, 1982), 79; cited in Tomlinson and Welles, 71.

137. Lazarillo de Tormes, Rudder, trans., 10.

138. Blackburn, 13.

139. Lazarillo’s first master teaches him the art of looking the part by tearing up his one good set of clothes. Lazarillo de Tormes, Rudder, trans., 8-9.

140. Camus cited in R.W.B. Lewis, 26.

141. Sullivan, “Ribera's Clubfooted Boy: Image and Symbol,” Marsyas 19 (1977-78): 18.

142. Francisco de Quevedo, Dreams and Discourses (Sueños y discorsos), R.K. Britton, trans., (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1989), 1.

143. Sánchez and Spinoza, 147-149.

144. See Chapters 15 and 16; Alemán, Brady, trans., 1: 307.

145. Cervantes, de Onis, trans., 163.

146. To quote from Wendy Wassyng Roworth, “In Italy, Caravaggio’s low-life figures and the theoretical pursuits of the Carracci gave rise to an indigenous genre painting, and similar rough characters were the subject for picaresque Spanish paintings of common, sometimes comical, ribald peasants which may have been inspired by mock-heroic literature or perhaps intended to carry moralizing messages.” See Wendy Wassyng Roworth, “The Evolution of History Painting: Masaniello’s Revolt and Other Disasters in Seventeenth-Century ,” Art Bulletin 75, no. 2 (March, 1993): 219.

147. The reference to topa y hago is from Gray, 86.

148. Among the many advocates for the Northern derivation of Southern Baroque low-life genre painting are Svetlana Alpers, "Realism as a Comic Mode: Low-Life Painting Seen through Bredero's Eyes," Simiolus 8 (1975-76): 115-144; John T. Spike, Giuseppe Maria Crespi and the

92 Emergence of Genre Painting in Italy (Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 1986); Eddy de Jongh, Questions of Meaning: Theme and Motif in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painting, Michael Hoyle, trans. and ed. (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2000).

149. For more on this visual/textual expansion, see Camporesi, 1996, 15-44.

150. The Bachelor of Salamanca, Townsend, trans., 28-29.

151. See Bakhtin, 1981, 250; and Best, 291-295.

152. For general reference see David A. Levine, “The Art of the Bambocciante,” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1984; and David A. Levine, “The Roman Limekilns of the Bamboccianti,” Art Bulletin 70 (1988): 569-589.

153. Levine, 1984, 136-138.

154. Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 214.

155. Chandler, 60-79.

156. Maiorino, 2003, 3-17.

157. For a discussion of related examples from the art of the Bambocciante, see Levine, 1984, 108-155.

158. From Painting vv. 247-248; translated in Jonathan Scott, Salvator Rosa, His Life and Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 8, n. 20.

159. Scott, 44.

160. See “A Florence,” from Jacques Callot, 1592-1635, Paulette Chone, ed. (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1992); 145-225.

161. Francis D. Klingender, “Les Misères et Malheurs de la Guerre,” Burlington Magazine 81, no. 473 (1942): 205-206.

162. Sieber, 1977, 5, 46.

163. Alemán, Brady, trans., 2: 8.

164. Sieber, 1977, 6-7, 40. A number of authors reference Alemán’s use of the Liber Vagatorum, including Chandler, 12; and Guillen, 209. For a comprehensive study of Frianoro’s Il libro dei vagabondi, see Piero Camporesi, ed. Il libro dei vagabondi (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1973).

93 165. Guzmán described on multiple occasions the practice whereby a rogue would adopt the attire of a pilgrim in order to avoid pursuit and also to obtain alms. See Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache, Samuel Gili y Gaya, ed. (Madrid: Ediciones de “La Lectura” and Espasa-Calpe, S.A., 1936), 4 vols., 1: 160; 3: 113; and 4: 218. Cited in Gray, 80.

166. Cited in a modern reprint of C.J. Ribton-Turner’s 1887 anthology, A History of Vagrants and Vagrancy and Beggars and Begging (Montclair: Patterson Smith, 1972), 557-560.

167. This is a period term found in C.J. Ribton-Turner, 1972, 559.

168. Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 197-198.

169. “Gil Blas was the bridge between the earthy cynicism of the earliest novels and the graceful mode of the eighteenth-century comedy of manners.” Klingender, 206.

170. Though drawn from a different series, Robert S. Stone’s Picaresque Continuities uses a Callot etching—a comparable double image of a posing dandy—as its cover illustration, asserting the role of style and self-presentation in shaping the picaresque identity. See Robert S. Stone, Picaresque Continuities: Transformations of Genre from the Golden Age to the Goethezeit, (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 1998).

171. Alemán, Brady, trans., 1: 306.

172. The muleteer is a veritably ubiquitous stock character in most picaresque novels, the means by which the young pícaro is conveyed from aimless wandering to a point of adventure. References are found in Alemán’s Guzmán; Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares and Don Quixote; Carlos Siguenza y Gongora's Los Infortunios de Alonso Ramirez, among many others.

173. In one example, after a particularly brutal beating, Pablos, El Buscón was made to pay out all he owned to his nurse. “And so, to save further expense, I decided to go out on my crutches . . . . An expert beggar taught me the doleful phrases and the right tone of voice for cadging, and thus equipped I began practicing on the street.” Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 196.

174. In one of many such examples, Estebanillo Gonzáles and his friend Ferrairi split over their mutual affections for the lovely Engracia: Vanillo Gonzales, Ballantyne Press, trans., 135.

175. For a general account of Callot’s audiences and cultural milieu, see the introductory chapter of Esther Holden Averill, Eyes on the World; The Story & Work of Jacques Callot: His Gypsies, Beggars, Festivals, "Miseries of War", and Other Famous Etchings and Engravings, together with an account of his days (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1969).

94 CHAPTER TWO

PICARESQUE THEMES AND ICONOGRAPHY IN THE WORK OF ALESSANDRO MAGNASCO

This chapter presents a critical reading of the work of Alessandro to determine the applicability of the themes and iconography of the picaresque literary tradition to art historical discourse.1 In approaching his favored low-life subject matter, Magnasco worked in an artistic environment informed by the two traditions of picaresque representation described in chapter one—“picaresque naturalism” and “picaresque romanticism.” Though his own understanding of the intertextual relationships between literature and visual art forms would not have been codified as such, I argue that Magnasco’s oeuvre functioned dialogically with picaresque novels, with related satires, and with other artists’ representations of the characters and settings that constituted the picaresque landscape. My argument will begin with a comparison between Magnasco’s treatment of picaresque iconography and that of his predecessors, and follow with in-depth analyses of several of the artist’s most typologically picaresque paintings. While highly stylized, Magnasco’s artistic approach was keenly attuned to many of the most expressive formal and thematic nuances of the picaresque, dealing chiefly with picaresque authors’ shared emphasis on the long-suffering, physically malleable, and yet decoratively fashioned character types, an interest in what I have termed the “picaresque body.” By applying Bakhtinian genre theory together with contemporary art historical writing on related issues, I will demonstrate that the core concepts of corporeality, hierarchical transgression, and comic inversion that permeate the picaresque literary phenomenon are viably applicable to Magnasco’s pictorial interpretations of the genre. I should caution the reader that this discussion is not brief, but I have tried to structure the chapter in such a way that the thesis is propelled along a logical trajectory. Beneath each of the chapter’s ten subheadings, the discussion remains connected to the overarching thesis of thematic

95 and iconographic affinity between Magnasco’s paintings and the picaresque novel—an affinity that, practically described, constitutes the abstract, intellectual product of audiences’ intertextual and dialogical imagination of viable meanings behind each painting. By combining descriptions of Magnasco’s paintings with accounts of analogous content found in several of the most popular picaresque novels, I will demonstrate that Magnasco’s many representations of the characters and settings common to the “romances of roguery” are infused with dialogical potential: i.e., the viewer’s relative familiarity with topoi of the picaresque genre directly affects that viewer’s ability to interpret the painter’s work. I will begin this chapter by outlining the ways in which Magnasco was exposed to artistic and cultural influences that shaped his perception of contexts related to the picaresque genre. The court of Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici (1663-1713)—Magnasco’s temporary home at the turn of the eighteenth century—was renowned both for its erudition and its joviality. It was a setting where the wit and playfulness of the picaresque novel was enjoyed.2 During the years spent in this environment, Magnasco devoted his brush to representing imaginary scenes that, in many cases, paralleled the themes and settings of picaresque novels. William Gaunt has argued that by the time Magnasco left Florence he was painting pictures that were “alembic distillations” of the picaresque author’s inherent skepticism, humor, and affinity for vagrancy: “He loved to paint soldiers and robbers, monks and friars, the woes of the synagogue and the cruelties of the Inquisition, [turning] his canvas into a puppet theater whose dolls [had] furious and exaggerated gestures. . . . With their restless, flickering light, the pictures themselves [became] vagrant.”3 It is a concept with which I very much agree. After Florence, nearly all of Magnasco’s paintings featured such heroes of itinerancy as beggars, soliders, actors, and musicians. Magnasco’s tenure in Florence afforded him time to study the work of Jacques Callot. Numerous art historians have acknowledged the seminal relationship between Callot’s visions and Magnasco’s lively graphic manner, but to my knowledge none has analyzed the ways in which Callot’s multiple stylistic models facilitated Magnasco’s development of a repertoire of figural types analogous to the stock characters of low-life literature, a that would supply years of portrayals of picaresque characters and settings.4 Nor have art historians expanded their analyses to consider how the paintings after his exposure to Callot exhibit dialogical

96 properties—between individual works of art and topoi of the literary genre—forming a conceptual bridge to the comparable dialogism of the picaresque novel.5 This chapter corrects those oversights. The discussion follows with a series of thematically-specific treatments of Magnasco’s paintings, relating them to the presentation of comparable themes in the context of the picaresque narrative. I will start by describing Magnasco’s adaptations of Callot’s visions of warfare, corporal punishment, and Inquisition, and then proceed into a broader analysis of the painter’s pictorial approach to the picaresque body. This concept of picaresque corporeality is relevant to several essential metaphors of the body that pervade the literary genre: imprisonment (both physical incarceration and emotional anomie); abjectness (the wretched and dishevelled forms of beggars and derelicts, abused, yet comic in their contortions); and liberation (the psychological escape from despair conveyed by physiognomies of resignation). While drawing substantially from the critical writing on the picaresque by contemporary theorists including Frank Wadleigh Chandler, Claudio Guillén, and Ulrich Wicks, these metaphors are of my own devising, and the relationship between Magnasco’s art and the polygeneous “picaresque body” relies most heavily on parallels that I have discovered between the images and textual descriptions from period novels. In this way, I argue for the first time that Magnasco’s paintings, while showing no evidence of illustrating specific units of picaresque narrative, do convey several core thematic attributes common to picaresque stories, and do so by presenting stock character types—the rogue soldier, the prisoner, the gambler, the huckster, the basket boy, and the disenfranchised nobleman—in settings and circumstances that meet the prevailing contextual criteria established by the canonical works of the genre. The chapter thus concludes with informed descriptions of several of Magnasco’s most picaresque paintings, documenting the extent to which the artist employed the stock environments and personages utilized by novelists in crafting his painterly vision of the picaresque landscape.

Magnasco in Florence: Setting the Stage for Picaresque Paintings

Though the general details of Magnasco’s biography are often repeated in the literature,

97 art historians have not asserted the importance of the time he spent in Florence on the development of his approach to picaresque themes and iconography. Though any direct causal relationship is difficult to prove, the striking transformation that the artist’s personal style and subject matter underwent during the first decade of the eighteenth century—away from painting conventional religious scenes in the tenebristic manner of his Milanese education and toward idiosyncratic representations of stock characters from genre literature—would indicate that these were the most formative years of his long career.6 By the turn of the eighteenth century, Alessandro Magnasco was already well established as a painter of picciole figure,7 collaborating with Antonio Francesco Peruzzini on works like Procession of Capuchins (c. 1700, Rome, private collection; Figure 37) and The Shipwreck (c. 1700, North Carolina Museum of Art; Figure 38), but his exposure to the world of picaresque imagery in the visual arts can be most definitely traced to his time at the court of the Medici Grand Prince Ferdinando of Tuscany, between 1701 and 1709.8 At the invitation of Ferdinando, Magnasco and Peruzzini fled together to Florence from a politically unstable Milan, then caught in the midst of the War of Spanish Succession. It was a move that coincidentally paralleled the course of refuge taken by the quasi-fictional pícaro Estebanillo González, who had earlier retreated into the Italian peninsula from the Lombardian battlefields of the Thirty Years War.9 But whereas Estebanillo was forced to work as a professional buffoon in the traveling retinue of Ottavio Piccolomini, the Duke of Amalfi, Magnasco was welcomed into Ferdinando’s as an “hombre de buen humor.”10 The Grand Prince had over the preceding years amassed a comprehensive collection of Dutch genre paintings, from Rembrandt to Teniers to the Roman Bambocciante, collected in part as an extended gesture of antagonism toward the traditionally pompous and heroic art favored by his father Cosimo III.11 Ferdinando set about cultivating an environment of enlightened secularism that contrasted with his father’s exoteric predilection for the trappings of the most ascetic monastic orders (the Spanish Alcantara monks, the French Trappists), about which a Florentine contemporary wrote, “All public life has become a monstrous parody of monastic existence.”12 The Grand Duke “moved restlessly about his dominions,” but it was to touch relics, to promote the sale of indulgences, and to give luster to religious processions.13 Ferdinando

98 would have none of that pious posturing, and he filled his salons at the Villa Pratolino with musicians (Handel and Scarlotti), mathematicians (Liebniz), theater designers (Ferri and Bibbiena), and painters (Crespi, Onofri, Pellegrini, Sebastiano Ricci, Marco Ricci, and Magnasco). The Grand Prince went so far as to appropriate the cloister at SS. Annunziata, on St. Luke’s Day, 18 October 1706, for the first ever exhibition of paintings open free to the public, showing copious examples of “brio and impasto and bizzare invention.”14 We know few details about Magnasco’s travels and commissions during his time at court, but the letters of Lorenzo Magalotti record that the artist painted two landscapes at Leghorn for Prince Ferdinando, and a small piece for the Marchese Salviati, but that his most eager patron was the Marchese Andrea Gerini, whose country home was adjacent to one of the Medici estates.15 Magnasco’s Hunting Scene (c. 1706-07, Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum; Figure 39), painted in collaboration with Marco Ricci, offers a singular glimpse into courtly life at the Prince’s retreat at Pratolino, a jovial environment characterized by the cultural historian Jay Tribby as “Club Medici.”16 Ratti’s words give context to Magnasco’s painting. Prince Ferdinando, thinking he has found a covey of birds, points his gun across the clearing and releases his dogs, who rush ahead barking and snarling. The hidden quarry turns out to be the Prince’s fool, caught in the process of relieving himself behind a bush, and now doubly motivated to perform the act of defecation.17 Ferdinando’s wife, Princess Violante of Bavaria, politely lowers the rifle barrel with her hand.18 Both figures are distinguished from the courtiers and ladies in waiting by their fine clothes, and two members of the entourage have been plausibly identified as Magnasco and Sebastiano Ricci.19 Later historians have posited that the painting was likely commissioned by a Florentine noble and not Ferdinando himself,20 but Fausta Franchini Guelfi references this work as giving a good idea of “Ferdinando’s taste for a joke, for wit, for a jest bordering on the limits of triviality . . . a sharp satire on a moment’s fun of the court.”21 A description which, to my mind, logically matches Ferdinando’s reported playfulness with Magnasco’s non-serious approach to recording life in the Prince’s retinue. According to Carlo Giuseppe Ratti, the painting was much admired by Ferdinando, who had it hung at the Villa Pratolino, “in a principal room, to the entertainment of the court and all those who happened to see it.”22

99 No one has connected this scene with the underlying sociology of the picaresque literary genre. Even those art historians who are ready to assume an association between Magnasco’s beggar images and the picaresque have rather dismissively treated this painting as a mere documentary tableau.23 While Ratti’s record suggests that it originated in an actual occurrence, the circumstances depicted are thoroughly in keeping with the pícaro’s transgressive world-view as a character who is regularly subjected to physical and psychological debasement by authoritarian figures. Though this is latter-day analogizing, I find it remarkable that the most monumental and official of Magnasco’s Florentine paintings contains all of the elements of scatological comedy, mistaken identities, assertive social hierarchy, and ironical self- consciousness found in numerous picaresque episodes.24 Indeed, the use of the court buffoon as a stock type in Pablos, el buscón and Estebanillo González, and Simplicissimus’s direct experience with soiling himself before the Crown of Sweden, must be understood as prefacing examples, perhaps even known by Magnasco, of the artistic blending of high and low culture in a courtly setting.25 These widely read works of literature would have granted Magnasco similar license to represent a prince together with a shitting fool. Though staffed with a clique of aristocrats, Magnasco’s Hunting Scene follows the Florentine Filippo Baldinucci’s remonstrations against the sort of aesthetic snobbery that “obstructed the rightful appreciation and recognition of . . . unpolished and unidealized representations from nature.”26 This is the same cultural impulse that opened the way for the appreciation of picaresque novels among the upper classes throughout Europe.27 At an historic moment when grand princes were most likely to be posing for parade portraits against backdrops of pillars and bookshelves,28 here is Ferdinando featured in a candid moment, pointing a rifle at a man with his pants down, a literal example of Baldinucci’s puro lume naturale.29 There is much history to suggest that the scatological humor behind the humiliated jester was in keeping with a dynasty-long predilection among the Medici for speculation pertaining to bodily functions—pursued scientifically by the , and recreationally by the Princes Ferdinando’s and Gian Gastone’s social habits.30 Magnasco seized on this opportunity to represent his patrons’ affection for crude jokes, however decorously disguised in a woody landscape.31

100 This is not to say that Magnasco’s life in Florence was entirely sheltered from the world outside the palace walls, peopled in large part by hungry peasants, beggars, gypsy musicians, processing friars, and unpaid soldiers: the human staffage that the artist shared with the picaresque novel.32 To quote from Klaus Lankheit’s descriptions of Tuscany at the turn of the eighteenth century: “The administration of the country was in chaos. The great wealth of a few families contrasted with bitter poverty elsewhere, and the social situation of the people was desperate. Armed bandits roamed in the depopulated countryside. Peasants left their land untilled because droughts, heavy taxes, prohibitions against the sale of food, and epidemics combined to make work seem futile. Crowds milled before demanding work and bread with threatening fury. Banditry spread and brought with it the most severe penalties.”33 Fernand Braudel described the scene in Baroque Spain as “vagrants cluttering the roads . . . students breaking bounds and forsaking their tutors to join the swelling ranks of picardía, adventurers of every hue, beggars and cutpurses.”34 Harold Acton’s descriptions of Florence circa 1700, culled from period writers’ accounts of their travels in Tuscany, are quite similar in their personae, and reads like an inventory of Magnasco’s favorite motifs: “At least ten thousand monks and nuns thronged the city. Penitent whores, renegade Turks, and converted Jews, beggars, scavengers, paupers and tattered vagabonds completed a rabble which was only exceeded by that of Leghorn in heartless degradation.”35 Piero Camporesi drew from the writings of Barezzo Barezzi and Daniello Bartoli in his descriptions of seventeenth-century Italian life as one long encounter “with the professionals of vagrancy, with prostitutes and former camp- hawkers, with deserters, stragglers, demobbed soldiers, soldiers returning from the wars, with escaped galley slaves. . . . It was not unusual for a vagabond to become an outlaw (or vice versa) and for the luckless, once they reached the bottom of the social ladder, to take to begging and the roving life of uomini da nulla, worthless men, good-for-nothings and scroungers.”36 Magnasco, already a rather eccentric purveyor of monks and friars in procession before his arrival in Florence, must have been impressed by these mendicant multitudes, even if he may have witnessed only a fraction of the drama that Acton’s and Camporesi’s retellings convey.37 The painter’s penchant for diminutive forms in dramatic landscapes was further informed through his study of Ferdinando’s art collections at the Palazzo Pitti and the Villa Poggio a

101 Caiano, where much of the imagery touched on the criminal and decrepit.38 Included among the Prince’s inventories were hundreds of prints by Jacques Callot, and several examples of Salvator Rosa’s later fantasies—works like Scene of Witchcraft (c. 1670, Florence, Giorgiana Corsini; Figure 40) and Anchorites Tempted by Demons (c. 1665, Rome, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica; Figure 41).39 While stripped of the picaresque naturalism of Neapolitan Spain born by his forebear Ribera, Rosa’s “fancy pictures” did assert subject matter drawn from comparably fictional realms of legend and .40 Even if flagitious witches and tortured anchorites were as empirically “real” as blind beggars—that is, existent and recognizable people from the world of seventeenth-century Italy—the artist’s contorted brush strokes, combined with the grotesque dilapidation of the settings, communicated to viewers that these scenes originated in the imagination. This imaginary impulse exerted a strong influence on Magnasco’s conception of genre painting and its potential for displaying expressionistic physical effects. In one of many such parallels, Magnasco’s close study of Rosa’s alignment of dynamic composition, bravura style, and fantasic content can be seen by comparing a detail of Rosa’s figures of demons kicking and pulling on the friar’s belt (Figure 42) with a detail of would-be church burglars besieged by a legion of undead skeletons from Magnasco’s Sacreligious Robbery (c. 1731, Milan, Quadreria Arcivescovile; Figure 43). Likewise, Magnasco knew and borrowed from Rosa’s forays into more typologically picaresque subject matter. Soldiers Gambling (c. 1658, London, Dulwich Picture Gallery; Figure 44) was one many works by Rosa showing subjects that he called “romanzo,” paintings he professed to have produced reluctantly in order to appeal to the sorts of courtly patrons who “hated the poor but loved the painting because at court all that is valued is fiction.”41 Rosa developed a peculiarly dichotomous approach to the low-life imagery that was most readily associated in mid-seventeenth-century Italy with the circle of the Dutch expatriate Pieter van Laer (Il Bamboccio), a painter whose works the Medici collected extensively.42 Rosa felt that Bamboccio catered to the “prurient, crude tastes of a public that enjoyed wallowing in scatological humor and spectacles of the lowest moral value.”43 But the Medici inventories showed no indication of bowing to Rosa’s remonstrations; the kept an ample store of paintings of low-life subjects, and the library contained several Italian editions of picaresque novels.44

102 Magnasco, faced with literally hundreds of artistic representations of beggars and highwaymen, would likely have understood genre painting to be among the most widely enjoyed forms of art among upper-class collectors. These were paintings with divertive potential that far exceeded that of the staid portraits and devotional images that Rosa would have credited with high moral value. Even as Rosa railed in his satire on Painting against these bagatelle (trivia), these “portraits of filthy vagabonds,” “so very highly prized . . . in the princes’ galleries / resplendent in the finest gilded frames,” painted by “drunken Dutchmen,” he continued to make money painting analogous small scenes like Soldiers Gambling, itself a close cousin to the bamboccianti, represented by scenes like Michael Sweerts Soldiers Playing Dice (c. 1656, Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza; Figure 45).45 Magnasco derived many of his own vignettes directly from these Dutch and Italian sources—soldiers, bandits, or gypsies (and sometimes an amalgam of each) huddled around makeshift tables, playing cards or shooting dice. In paintings like The Players (c. 1725, Genoa, Private Collection; Figure 46), The Guard (c. 1740, Isola Bella, Borromeo Collection; Figure 47), and Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (c. 1715, Bassano del Grappa, Museo Civico; Figures 48 and 49), Magnasco adapted the broad formula of the gaming scene, and then incorporated numerous small details that registered his close knowledge of the Medici collection: the battlefield drum favored by Sweerts is employed by virtually all of Magnasco’s gamers. Flowing capes and robes envelope the seated men, cushioning their bottoms from the hard floors, stone blocks, or barrel seats; the punters’ cohorts stand nearby, some diverted, some watching. As Ernst Gombrich remarked, genre pictures such as these give a false impression of covering everything commonplace.46 Here it is the prosaic pick-up game, stakes being plied as a distraction by idle mercenaries in their lodges and encampments. In fact, the topics of genre painting were, on the whole, limited and repetitive. Artists competed less by exploring new subjects than by showing what they could do with themes already treated by their rivals and predecessors, both in the visual arts and in literary works. To quote from Piero Camporesi’s analysis of the blending of genres between media: “Deserters, soldiers of fortune, soldiers returned from war, tramps of uncertain origin, partners in crime, mingled in the canvases of painters and the writings of authors.”47 For example, the scenario of Marco Ricci’s Travelers

103 Attacked by Highwaymen (c. 1715, Private Collection, Belluno; Figure 50) parallels the Dialogo in furbesco tra Scatarello e Campagnolo assassini di strada (Rogue’s dialogue between Scatarello and Campagnolo, highway murderers) by the Italian picaresque poet-painter Bartolomeo Bocchini.48 And Giacomo Ceruti’s Evening at the Piazza (c. 1730, Museo Civico d'Arte Antica, Palazzo Madama, Turin; Figure 51) reads like a scrubbed homage to Antonio Pucci’s La proprietà di Mercato Vecchio (The Vendors of the Old Market), quoted below in a translation by Tania Croft-Murray:

Women of ill repute, fops, Robbers there are, basket men and fools Scurvy and scrofulous cadgers . . . Some live off deceit, some boast of little . . . Cheats and spade-bearers come out.49

Magnasco’s time in Florence exposed him to the potential for such intertextual relationships between creative writing and works of art—contemporaneously plied by such close cohorts as Ricci and Ceruti. Magnasco need not himself have witnessed scenes of beggared soldiers gambling in their hovels, in their shooting galleries, or under the crumbling colonnades of ruined temples to have a vivid mental picture of these activities, as the very same settings were described in the pages of Estebanillo and Rinconete and Cortadillo. Though the Medici diplomat and courtier Lorenzo Magalotti (1637-1712) lauded the existential “realism” of Magnasco’s bandit figures, these were not studies from life, and the same reference extolled the “absence of naturalism” in the painter’s fanciful settings, an oblique reference to their imaginative “moods”—their alternatingly dank and polished presentations of criminal life.50 Taking as fact the ubiquity of vagabondage in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italy, Magnasco well may have known the look of a thieves’ den, but there is no record of any social documentary impulse in the artist’s practice.51 Either way, Magnasco’s years in Florence provided him with copious actual and artful visual precedents, and a library of literary textual precedents as inspiration for his compositions. By utilizing a standard inventory of details (shiny helmets, breastplates, tricorn hats, barrels, baskets, lanterns, muskets), and, at times, by combining forces with collaborators whose expertise was in capricious architecture or landscape

104 painting, Magnasco went on to paint hundreds of virtually identical itinerant soldiers, gypsies, beggars, and gamblers in dozens of picaresque settings.

Magnasco and Callot: Staffing the Rogues’ Gallery

In order to better understand the conceptual relationship between Magnasco’s recycled gypsy-soldiers and analogous typologies from the picaresque literary genre, it is important to recognize the specific pictorial origins of many of his figural types. As a guest of Ferdinando’s court, Magnasco would have enjoyed access to one of the world’s most complete collections of the prints of Jacques Callot. Callot had worked in the Tuscan capital from 1612 to 1621, and his Medici patrons continued subscribing to his editions even after the artist returned to Nancy.52 Callot’s satirical subject matter was congenial to Magnasco and perhaps influenced him well before he came to Florence, but it was under commission of the Medici that the artist produced his first paintings drawn directly from Callot’s compositions.53 The earliest of Magnasco’s forays was The Hospital, painted in collaboration with an anonymous architecture specialist (c. 1708, Bucharest, Muzeul de Arta; Figure 52).54 Callot’s The Hospital, the fifteenth plate from Les Grands Misères de la Guerre was mined for its setting and plot—the church building, the public well, the soup line, the parade of injured bodies being checked into the hospital by a bearded doorkeeper, the laundry draped over the third-floor handrails (1633; Figure 53). One by one Magnasco copied Callot’s small etched figures into al tocco brush strokes: the legless veterans, the repoussoir figure huddled in the right corner, the hospital worker vigorously washing sheets in the community basin. It is a literal translation of the print into paint, where even the vertical and horizontal proportions of the canvas are made to echo Callot’s wide-angle view. But more importantly, Magnasco used Callot’s print as a study guide for representing lowly figures with élan. Callot’s Misères prints lacked none of his usual lightness of touch, and Magnasco seized on the printmaker’s penchant for representing virtually all of his figures as Commedia dell’arte-inspired mimes, however far removed from the slapstick routine were the actual war casualties whose plight both artists ostensibly documented.55

105 In Callot we find the prototypes for Magnasco’s many crutch-bearing, shawl-draped soldiers—the conscripted military populations from France, Spain, Italy, and Germany whose lot it was to feed the war, generation after generation: during the Thirty Years War that raged through Callot’s Lorraine, and seventy years later during the War of Spanish Succession that drove Magnasco from Milan.56 Though real-life veterans may have been crippled and hungry, the carriage of the artists’ invented veterans is more graceful than grim, a graphic adherence to the elevated, yet circumstantial voices granted to these men as admonitory characters in the picaresque novels of the period.57 These are the confreres of the boasting soldier that Guzmán watched bow and prance through a dinner at the Spanish ambassador’s home in Naples—“filthy, but worthy of the table of any prince.”58 These are the soldiers that Simplicissimus described as “causing trouble and suffering trouble, beating and being beaten: in a word, hurting and harming, and in turn being hurt and harmed—this was their whole life.”59 Callot’s theme in the Miséres (and correspondingly, Magnasco’s in his copies) is closely related to such disarming social commentary given literary form in Guzmán de Alfarache, Estebanillo González and Simplicius Simplicissimus: warfare leaves precious little to which its participants are able to return; the smells, sights, and general degradation of violent death and destruction are inescapable; and human dignity is a fragile veneer to be protected at all costs, because it is the only real currency by which a man may be weighed.60 Though Estebanillo and Simplicissimus are radically different characters—the first a drunken and unredeemable cad, the second a complex man who discovers the meaning of home through a decades-long process of losing his own—it is a satisfying coincidence that both of these later picaresque novels direct their protagonists through a gauntlet of historical war settings (both main characters spend terms as camp followers in Germany and Flanders and serve as jesters for army commanders) and that they do so through pages of prose describing raids, looting, field trials and executions, and the general absurdity of battlefield life.61 Callot could not have known these novels (published in 1646 and 1668), but Magnasco’s approach to the printmaker’s martial subject matter would have been informed by that additional half-century of literature in which the picaresque soldier was alternately cast as an existential hero, documentarian cynic, and amoral bounder deficient in seriousness and wed to mind-numbing

106 pursuits like cards and drinking.62 The Sacking of a Church (c. 1708-9, Sibiu, Museul Brukenthal; Figure 54) is another of Magnasco’s adaptations after Callot. He borrows the burning church, the manic crowds, the indifferent riflemen, the architectural details, and the distant city gate from The Devastation of a Monastery, the sixth plate of Les Grands Misères de la Guerre (1633; Figure 55). But this time Magnasco departed from using Callot’s forms alone. He incorporated a number of original depictions that would seem rather out of place if the artist’s intention were to recreate the scene of pillage as Callot had imagined it. As with The Hospital, Magnasco painted this work together with an anonymous collaborator who art historians presume provided the architectural renderings into which Magnasco inserted his small figural groups.63 This makes Magnasco’s departure from Callot’s figural models all the more interesting, as his contribution to the finished painting—sometimes characterized as a “copy” of Callot’s print—was mostly of his own invention. Granted, Magnasco stayed close to his source, showing soldiers, looters, fleeing churchmen and parishioners, but to a man they were represented differently. Callot’s swaggering platoons of riflemen were transformed into masses of stooped runners who appear to represent both sides of the conflict. Some carry pillaged metalwork, some hoist siege ladders, and some cover their heads and faces to protect themselves from assault. Magnasco used Callot’s setting as an experimental ground in which to practice his painterly approach to small figures, showing more than thirty dynamic sketches of bodies running, stretching, hauling loot, and shouldering arms. In Carlo Giuseppe Ratti’s words, “the attitudes could not be better and more wittily turned, and more effectively indicate the emotions they have to express,” which here center upon rabid aggression and fearful anxiety.64 Callot, on the contrary, presents an orderly inventory of the stolen church property as it is loaded into a horse-drawn cart. Half a dozen displaced nuns quietly gather in the left corner to lament the destruction of their home. A mounted company and several pikemen observe the seizure from across the cloistered square. Magnasco inserts three very different vignettes into these spaces, which together make for a continuous foreground that is psychologically detached from the frenetic activity occurring around the burning church. On the right, Magnasco fashioned a repoussoir scene of three soldiers relaxing on a grassy hillock; the barrel tops,

107 cannon balls, and broken crockery of a makeshift camp litter the space around them; the man in the middle casually points out to the violence. If these conscripts did have assigned roles to play in the siege, they have abandoned them to smoke and talk, and none seems motivated to reenter the skirmish. On the left, where Callot had splayed the body of a dead basket hauler at the nuns’ feet, Magnasco placed a kneeling woman with two young children, all quietly seated in the line of fire of a cannon, which points out from the edge of the painting. Though the woman glances up from the child’s head, none of the three appears alarmed by the havoc playing out in front of them. In the middle foreground, Magnasco shows a caped man seated with his back to us; he is smoking a long-stemmed pipe and the smoke wafts up from his hidden face. As with the other groups, he shows no alarm at what he is witnessing; he relaxes at his wooden table with a little bird at his side, perched on the rim of a small powder barrel. The woman with her children and this man may have been intended to represent a family. Though difficult to discern, the white form at the woman’s back looks like a sleeping dog, an of domesticity that would suggest that these are homeless itinerants.65 Fausta Franchini Guelfi has convincingly argued that Magnasco’s women, children, and swashbuckling men with capes and floppy hats were based upon similar representations from Callot’s Les Bohémiens (c. 1623; Figure 56).66 Though her analysis in touched on the commonalities between Magnasco, Callot, and the “genere picaresco,” she stopped short of identifying specific appropriations, and did not compare the characters in Magnasco’s works with types utilized in crafting picaresque scenarios relating to warfare.67 A brief comparison between the foreground figures from Magnasco’s The Sacking of a Church and Callot’s gypsy encampment scene shows that the painter appropriated the lazing men, the woman tending to the children in her lap, and even the small sleeping dog from this print. In many ways the most “picaresque” of Callot’s print series, Les Bohémiens, documented the peripatetic society through which most every picaresque hero moved. Guzmán, Pablos, Estebanillo, and Simplicissimus each tenured under gypsy law as thieves, card cheats, and pick- up soldiers, often joining up with roving families of delinquent mercenaries as they moved along the highways, in between battles.68 In identifying Magnasco’s gypsies with Callot’s Bohémiens, Franchini Guelfi did not have the research of Edward J. Sullivan at her disposal, whose 1977

108 study brought to light the role that “gypsy soldiers” played in seventeenth century cultural life. Special emphasis was placed on their regular employment as mercenaries for individual noblemen, and their occasional conscription into the armies of civil and national governments—assignments that mirrored the fictional portrayal of gypsy soldiers in Estebanillo and Simplicissimus.69 Particularly apropos for Magnasco’s favored presentation of these wandering people is one of Sullivan’s final assertions, drawn from Francois de Vaux de Foletier’s Mille ans d’histoire des Tsiganes (1970): “In these military forays [the soldiers] were often accompanied by their wives and children.”70 Thus, in a literal reading of Magnasco’s The Sacking of a Church, the painting combines subject matter from Les Grands Misères de la Guerre and Les Bohémiens in a way that could have been culturally and historically accurate: the melee for control of the church property was executed by mercenaries (whose body included gypsy soldiers) and is witnessed by the family members of some of those soldiers. This does not, however, address the strange disjointedness of Magnasco’s juxtaposition of the furious background with the foregrounded scenes of relaxed indifference, which I believe borrows from the existentialist themes of the picaresque novel’s approach to warfare. The figures nearest to us, the viewers, are also spectators, physically distanced from the action by compositional effects of . Though painted as if on a uniform plot of land, it does not seem possible that the chaotic crowd circling the church could step out of the fray and engage the gypsy man seated at his wooden table. The woman and her children are further removed by the suggestion of a slight rise, and the repoussoir soldiers at the right are quite elevated, looking down onto the violence. I believe that this painting marks one of Magnasco’s initial experiments with forms that emphasized the dialogical role that the picaresque audience plays in completing a work’s contemplative meaning. Viewers would have been encouraged by a combination of compositional devices—the vaguely theatrical architectural backdrop, the relatively vast space in which the action occurs, the intricate interweaving of human figures and precious scale—to approach the painting as a theatrical tableau over which their eyes would drift, pausing on one or another small figural group to study the interaction of the forms and scenarios, and then moving on.71 Of course, the painting is immediately legible on the whole as a scene of a burning church

109 and the chaos that ensues, but the presence of the gypsies and soldiers watching in the foreground is too compelling a detail to discount. These figures sit alongside the viewer, physically present, and yet psychologically apart, perched in Alemán’s “atalaya le la vida humana,” (the gallery from which human folly is observed) exploring the range of senseless violence playing out before them.72

Magnasco and Callot: The Beginnings of Picaresque Dialogism

Where do these observations fit into this study of the relationship between Magnasco’s paintings and the picaresque literary genre? Planiscig, Syamken, and Franchini Guelfi each posited theses that joined Magnasco, Callot, and picaresque novels through their shared interest in the lives and adventures of roguish types. As Franchini Guelfi described it, “nel romanzo picaresco che si trova la più calzante corrispondenza narrativa con tipiche composizioni magnaschesche.”73 But in the writings of these and other art historians, the designation of “pícaro” reads as a generalized surrogate for gypsy, brigand, beggar, and soldier—a character hodgepodge equivalent to the three figures who relax on the hillock while the action unfolds, but a type that no art historian has thus far related to any specific picaresque text or theme.74 I too believe that Magnasco’s soldier figures are picaresque, representing a type of lazy conscript that the picaresque hero regularly encounters and/or becomes.75 There are many textual examples that would substantiate Franchini Guelfi’s unsupported assertion of Magnasco’s conceptual affinity with el romanzo picaresco. In this instance, I would relate Magnasco’s treatment of warfare to the picaresque stereotype of martial life, in which the lay soldier is depicted as a shiftless opportunist, content to watch the battles that he is supposed to fight.76 After settling his mind on the “soldier’s life,” Estebanillo González first joined the French army, and being paid at Villafranca immediately deserted, crossing the front lines to fall in with a rabble of enlistees in the Italian paymaster’s queue.77 After receiving his preliminary salary, he pretended to be wounded, took sanctuary in a church, and so escaped duty.78 At the Battle of Nordlingen, Estebanillo distinguished himself by hiding in a ditch, cheering on both the Swedes and Germans depending on who was nearest to him at the time.79 Quevedo’s Pablos, el

110 buscón—perhaps the most widely peripatetic and vocationally diverse pícaro—served briefly as a soldier. He was forced into battle, from which he took refuge in a haystack, afterwards bragging of his valor, only to be summarily sold into gypsy bondage, stripped of his uniform, and dressed in the rags of the deceased.80 In short, Magnasco’s undutiful soldiers may be compared to a dominant topos of the picaresque, but this only confirms other art historians’ generalized associations linking Magnasco to the genre through iconographic similarities. I am also interested in providing a reading that dialogically engages Magnasco’s paintings with the literary form. Rather than simply citing the picaresque novel as a resource from which Magnasco could have appropriated motifs—bounderish character types, unsavory settings, “el aguar de la vida picaresca”—his paintings should be analyzed for the operative attributes of that same “picaresca,” in both their material trappings and theses.81 For a painting to be functionally picaresque—and for Franchini Guelfi’s intertextual analogizing to be valid—it must not only delineate the physical form of a beggar, basket hauler, card cheat, or gypsy soldier, but also facilitate the audience’s intellectual engagement with what Blackburn termed the “ethos of picarism”: earthy entertainment driven by moral and aesthetic purpose, designed to edify audiences by drawing both exemplary and cautionary observations from the lives of poor heroes.82 The most foundational technical attribute of the picaresque narrative is its dialogistic involvement of the reader as an informed confessor.83 This imparts to the reader a sense that he or she is participating in a direct exchange with the author or main character (thus, the symptomatic use of the first-person form, or interjected references to “lectores hostiles,” or “Vuestra Merced”).84 The picaresque author assumes that the reader understands the environment in which the pícaro lives, that the reader will bring to the narrative a certain background familiarity with the modern practices of begging, soldiering, and gypsy itinerancy.85 The reader would also be expected to contribute more abstract knowledge (of lifeways, of social hierarchies, of church doctrine) to the completion of any moral or satirical message implied through the events of the plot.86 The picaresque novelist writes an adventure that is vicariously lived and thematically fulfilled through the audience’s willing and reciprocating participation.87 I find this concept of dialogism especially applicable to the interpretation of Magnasco’s art.88

111 Magnasco’s paintings were from the outset works that defied easy categorization. Carlo Giuseppe Ratti never called Magnasco a painter of picaresque derivation, but he did class the artist as a painter of “extremely odd fantasies,” “whimsical [cappriciose] inventions,” and “little figures [rife with] witty allusions.”89 Magnasco’s commercial success among collectors must have lain in the intriguing properties what Ratti called “crowds of small figures never larger than a span [un palmo] in height,” the social, behavioral, and narrative contexts of which would have to have been provided by the viewers’ imaginations.90 His contemporaries did not write of the artist’s affinity with any specific literary texts, and yet the potential for audiences’ interpretations of his bandit and gypsy scenes must have been based in part on the predominant literary narrative contexts in which such characters’ lives were described. There are no labels or direct references with which to identify the assorted characters, and yet even Ratti called them “allusions.” To cite a more recent impression, registered by Piero Camporesi, Magnasco’s paintings transported viewers into “an extraordinary world . . . crawling with vagabonds, deserters, fortune tellers with magpies, bards, roaming muscians, crippled vagrants with trained parrots, tricksters who hoodwink youngsters with magic lanterns, highwaymen, bogus mendicants, brigands.”91 Camporesi follows by citing the artist’s “picaresque visions” as “a sign that such interdisciplinary rhetoric existed because of the force of a sad reality which brought together daily the most astonishing mystifications of poverty and misfortune.”92 Thus, according to Camporesi, Magnasco’s paintings may be read as conceptually picaresque without even being text-specific. They mark a point halfway between fictional genre and social and economic reality, hovering in the rhetorical space wherein bandits and professional beggars (a frightening and threatening populace on the ground) become the stuff of entertaiment.93 Unlike Elsheimer’s Il Contento or Ribera’s Blind Beggar, none of Magnasco’s scenes could claim to illustrate a discrete episode from Guzmán or Estebanillo, and yet the artist’s figures, again, to use Ratti’s responses, “composed of swift but very artful dabs,” expand from “gracious representatons . . . of great pleasure and taste,” into allusive characters when the viewer brings some familiarity with picaresque literature into their consideration.94 This allusive quality opens the door to a richer dialogism inherent to the concept of what I am calling “picaresque romanticism.” In addressing the question of intertextual dialogism, where the definition of “text” might

112 be expanded to incorporate works of visual art, Magnasco’s paintings are clearly dialogic with Callot’s graphic source material.95 Paintings such as The Hospital, or Sacking of a Church could not have existed without the formative influence of the printmaker’s representations of warfare, gypsies, and soldier life.96 The intellectual processes underlying the dialogism between Magnasco and Callot would have thrived in the environment of the Medici Court, where Magnasco’s presumed circle of collectors and admirers could have held the source in one hand (Callot’s Les Caprices, The Hospital, or The Devastation of a Monastery) while examining the newly painted version. It is easy to imagine a viewer picking out the quoted passages in The Sacking of a Church—the washing well, the church building’s rosette window, the city gate—while delighting over the discovery of novel elements—the tall figure pilfering the candle stand, the gypsy family with their dog, and the shirking soldiers. The particularly erudite viewer might have registered the echoes of Callot’s Bohémiens in Magnasco’s mother figure sitting alongside the mercenaries, but it is difficult to argue that all of the meaning of these paintings is invested in their direct and indirect borrowing from a printmaker who had lived and worked eighty years earlier, and whose Misères de la Guerre stylishly restaged allegorical horrors from the long-settled Thirty-Years War. What about that member of Magnasco’s audience who did not carry around paper copies (or mental images) of Callot’s oeuvre? These scenes of pillage and concomitant human suffering must have resonated with early-eighteenth-century audiences’ impressions of the world that they continued to live in, insomuch as warfare, brigandage, injured bodies, and crime and punishment were factors of life in a time of perpetual territorial and international hostilities.97 Yet no art historian has suggested that Magnasco’s paintings would have been viewed as historical tableaus.98 Neither Magnasco nor Callot presented any firmly dated costume detail or material that could couch these scenes as documentary: muskets and cannons underwent technological innovations, but they were long sticks and short cylinders both in 1630 and 1710;99 and the quartermaster’s inventory of a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century company of soldiers would have included wool capes, water and wine barrels, wooden benches, clay pots, lanterns, and playing cards.100 On the matter of gypsy clans and mercenaries, Sullivan suggested a certain timelessness in regards to their favored mode of dress—“with their large hats with huge plumes

113 and long curled mustaches,” “gypsy men dressed according to the fashions in the countries in which they lived”—a generic approach adopted both by Callot and Magnasco in their portrayals of the gypsy stereotype.101 Beyond any true-life resonances from the constant waging of war—which I do not doubt would have been more experientially real to a lower-class peasant/conscript than a Medici courtier—the more learned members of Magnasco’s audiences would have known similar scenarios from literary representations common to the picaresque narrative. And, more specifically, the allusive meanings to be derived from a painting of a ransacked church or a military prison could have been adapted from picaresque authors’ ambivalent theses on the same subjects.102 The mood of Magnasco’s painting is ambivalent. The Sacking of a Church is a dark and chaotic scene, but it is rendered without pathos. The act of pillage is almost comical in its indiscriminateness, as if the painter is uncertain whether this scene is tragic or diversional. It plays out like a violent episode of theater, with lumpen cheering punctuated by the wailing of victims caught in the fray. This ambivalence is particularly reminiscent of Simplicissimus’s description of the desultory approach plied by the plunderers of a large farmhouse:

Each fell to his appointed task: which task was neither more nor less than ruin and destruction. For though some began to slaughter and to boil and to roast so that it looked as if there should be a merry banquet forward, yet others there were who did but storm through the house above and below stairs. Others stowed together great parcels of cloth and apparel and all manner of household stuff, as if they would set up a frippery market. All that they had no mind to take with them they cut in pieces. Some thrust their swords through the hay and straw as if they had not enough sheep and swine to slaughter; and some shook the feathers out of the beds and in their stead stuffed in bacon and other dried meat and provisions as if such were better and softer to sleep on. Others broke the stove and the windows as if they had a never-ending summer to promise.103

The dialogical potential of Magnasco’s The Sacking of a Church thus incorporates related depictions of picaresque soldiers, together with the stories of the many “stormed, plundered, and ruinated edifices” that Simplicissimus described over the course of his conscription.104 As the pícaro reported the carnage in a literary style charged with existential humor (built up with wit and irony), Magnasco painted the scene with a stylistic verve that comparably diminished the real

114 human in exchange for aesthetic delights drawn from well-turned figures. Of course, when addressing an artist like Magnasco, whose work hews so closely to another’s, it would be disingenuous to ascribe such dialogical potential to one of his paintings while withholding it from the work that inspired it. And yet the real problem here—particularly in discussing Simplicissimus—is that Callot created his prints several decades before the comparable descriptions in Grimmelshausen’s text. As one example, Callot had prededed by thirty years Simplicissimus’s vivid descriptions of the pillaged farm with his Plundering of a Large Farmhouse, from Les Grands Misères de la Guerre (c. 1633; Figure 59). In a remarkable coincidence, the artist and writer presented the trope of “warfare intersecting domesticity” in a similar fashion—combining cruel tortures and wanton murders with elegantly posed rogues merrily proceeding through the pillage.105 Soldiers rifle through chests of silver, balance atop ladders to steal dried sausages, impale innocents with pointed rapiers, scatter the corpses of farm animals, and even roast a man alive in the walk-in fireplace, and yet the whole scene radiates comic animation. Though preparing to officiate the summary execution of a peasant (who begs for his life with prayerful hands as a dagger descends into his skull) the feather-headed officer in the back left corner points his dainty toe out with a dancer’s panache. Callot’s choice to depict his bandits performing ron de jambs amid the brutalizing of innocent farmers was a late- mannerist affectation, but one that would have shaped his audience’s perception of the whole enterprise of war as a pursuit as ephemeral and foolishly wasteful as this year’s hat. As Simplicissimus later said of the eagerness of soldiers to dance and celebrate amid brutal hostilities, “this disguise did make a mock of the whole human race by such wanton capers and monkey tricks: for I thought, had they human and God’s image in them, sure they would not act so unlike to men.”106 The conceptual proximity of these passages from the novel and the style and iconography of the etching provides us with an excellent example of latent, intertextual dialogism behind the concept of “picaresque romanticism.” Callot’s print, when originally created, could not have referenced the as-yet unwritten Simplicissimus, and there is no evidence to suggest that Grimmelshausen drew his verbal imagery from any exposure to Callot’s Misères, but once both works were available to the same audiences, common threads would have been traced between

115 them. Bound together by their tones of incredulity (favoring wit and aestheticism over moral despair), Callot and Simplicissimus enter into a dialogical relationship.107 While each work was and remained autonomous, the depth of the potential meanings to be derived from both expanded as audiences could reference the print while imagining Grimmelhausen’s descriptions: “Housewares of copper and tin they beat flat, and packed such vessels, all bent and spoiled in with the rest. . . . Pots and pipkins must all go to pieces, either because they would eat none but roast flesh, or because their purpose was to make there but a single meal.”108 And Callot’s viewers could likewise reflect on Simplicissimus’s philosopher-fool’s path, upon which he was thrust after having lost his own home to such a ransacking, during which his childhood maid was shamefully “handled in the bedstead” by a gang of troopers, in a fashion similar to the printmaker’s depiction in the background of his foray.109 Herein lies the potential for intertextual dialogism—the recognition that works of art that were not designed as “illustrations” do have thematic and iconographic affinities with works of literature, affinities that enrich the range of interpretations open to audiences. This potential would have carried over into Magnasco’s adaptations of Callot’s prints, and on into his later works. Were Magnasco to have painted a literal copy of Callot’s Plundering of a Large Farmouse similar to those of The Hospital and Sacking of a Church, I believe that it would be valid to categorize it as an example of picaresque romanticism, insomuch as the eighteenth-century viewer would have enjoyed access to Grimmelshausen’s text as one potential source from which to fashion an informed interpretation of the imaginary proceedings.

Magnasco’s Interrogations in a Jail: Introducing the Theme of Picaresque Punishment

When Magnasco did take on Callot’s Plundering of a Large Farmhouse as inspiration for a painting, he combined it with The Strappado (c. 1632-33; Figure 59), also from Les Grandes Misères. He produced a new hybrid scene, Interrogations in a Jail, which departed from Callot’s morality play about degenerate soldiering and atrocity in favor of a discourse on the adjudication of corporal punishment, another trope common to the pícaro’s life story (c. 1708, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna; Figure 57).110 It is not clear whether Magnasco collaborated

116 with a second painter on the architectural environment of this scene, but the “prison” was adapted from the design of Callot’s plundered farmhouse, with its arched cabinets turned into grated windows, its open door against the back wall, its long shelves piled with crockery, and its huge interior hearth with oval flue perched on scrolled corbels.111 In what is perhaps the cleverest allusion to Callot’s print, Magnasco took the figure of a halberdier poking with the tip of his weapon at some hanging food stores and transformed him into the seated interrogator who reaches up with a cane to prod the tortured prisoner. The table that Callot placed in the middle of the scene, around which a couple of ransackers gather to examine their stolen goods, is transformed by Magnasco into the interrogator’s desk. The round inquisitor, dressed in black with a blue hat is flanked by pikemen, and he reads from a book in which the viewer would presume to find the charges against the man now dangling from the strappado. What for, this dark brown vision of an inquisitorial den, with men chained to stone walls, trussed to sawhorses, bound with their legs in stocks, and having their arms broken by wantonly cruel implements? Is this scene charged with an “ethos of picarism?”112 Magnasco’s Interrogation is highly indebted to Callot’s imagination of cavernous spaces, frenetic bodies, and elaborate equipment of torture. Any viewer who knew the Misères would recognize the painting as compositionally derivative, and yet it is difficult to isolate the painter’s underlying theme, which does not draw from the episodic connectedness of Callot’s printed series. The painting has no prefacing narrative to exposit how these men came to be imprisoned.113 Once again, we could assume that Magnasco’s audiences would have known Callot’s Misères well enough to infer that these too were renegade soldiers receiving their due castigation, but the setting and the executors of the punishments—the cross-wielding interrogator and the shadowy monks praying beside the shackled prisoners—clearly represent the Holy Inquisition: court officers driven by a rabid faith to scour the countryside, objurgating sin as a capital crime.114 Magnasco lived in a world rife with crime, and he need not have consulted a work of fiction to encounter severe scenes of physical penalization. The Medici archives abound in descriptions of gratuitous punishment which Magnasco could have known.115 Period accounts of criminal justice in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Florence reflect a system that relished the exercise of punitive measures against the mildest infractions.116 According to Harold

117 Acton, “Even petty crimes were frequent and generally accompanied by atrocities, and the punishment of death became familiar.”117 Cosimo III was his own minister of Justice, whose “bigotry caused him to arraign his subjects for offences outside the scope of all ordinary laws, and his weak, yet tyrannical disposition [led him to] inflict upon them punishments outrageous in their cruel severity.”118 An official inquisitor was appointed by Cosimo III in 1678, a Dominican monk who traveled through the land and reported to the duke on the general state of morality.119 Speedy trials were valued, and all the paraphernalia to inspire terror were on public view at executions, including the strappado,120 known in Italy as cavalletto spagnolo, the “Spanish hoist” favored for the non-lethal agony it induced.121 Yet even within this prevailing atmosphere of punitive retribution, Magnasco’s re- contextualization of his punishment scene into an inquisitorial setting introduces numerous opportunities for intertextual dialogism with the picaresque genre, as religious persecutors were the authorities of which pícaros like Guzmán and Estebanillo were most afraid.122 The pícaro travels in constant fear of encountering the roving alguazil, or members of the “Holy Brotherhood,” whose mission it was to trick people into betraying themselves as misbelievers.123 Given the philosophically skeptical, converso backgrounds of many picaresque writers, the religious tribunals inherent to the Counter Reformation were insidious, fear-inducing forces with the very real threats of torture and death at their disposal.124 But the corrupt practices of the Holy Inquisition, also an object of the pícaro’s irony, first codified in Lazarillo’s testimony before his inquisitor, “Vuestra Merced,” and further explored in Carlos García’s picaresque novella La desordenada codicia de los bienes ajenos: Antigüedad y nobleza de los ladrones (Paris, 1619) in which the narrative takes place in a prison during a conversation between a worldly-wise confessor and the French thief Andrés.125 Among the many instances of picaresque encounters with law enforcement, Guzmán is unjustly imprisoned in Bologna after running afoul of an inquisitorial court in his efforts to have his property (stolen by the presiding constable) returned to him,126 and the Bachiller Trapaza encounters the Inquisition after a losing gambler falsely betrays him to the authorities on heresy charges, but he escapes summary execution by paying a small “fine” to the alguazil assigned to guard him.127 In Lazarillo’s words from Juan de Luna’s Segunda Parte de la vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, the sundry officers of the Inquisition are “folk

118 as holy and perfect as the justice they administer.”128 But before a pícaro is imprisoned and interrogated, he must be taken into custody, illustrated by a passage from Guzmán de Alfarache:

I perceived two men upon mules, who had very much the appearance of what they really were, riding up at a quick trot behind us, who having come up to us examined us attentively, as if they were looking for someone who very much resembled me. Their very looks were enough to make me uneasy; the Holy Brotherhood of which they had the honor to be members probably had not any among them of a more terrific appearance. They looked earnestly at me, and as I appeared rather surprised and even a little alarmed, they leapt from their mules without wanting any further proof, and falling upon me both together they threw me from my mule to the ground, then seizing me by the arm one of them said, ‘Ah! Mr. Rogue, have we caught you at last? Come, little wretch, give up the money; give up the jewels that you have stolen, or we will immediately hang you upon the tree that you see a few paces off.’ At these words they set to and pulled and cuffed me about so unmercifully that it was in vain for me to attempt to defend myself.129

Guzmán was here subjected to a case of mistaken identity, played deliberately against him by the two bandit clerics,130 who by decree represented the Inquisitorial Council of Cantillana, but whose duties in practice amounted to rolling defenseless travelers for money while reinforcing the terror felt by the general community.131 In the words of a Franciscan friar that Guzmán later meets on the road: “God keep every honest man from three Holies that are at this time in Spain, viz., the Holy Inquisition, the Holy Brotherhood; and the Holy Crusado. Especially if he be innocent, God keep him from the Holy Brotherhood; there may be some hope of justice with the two others, but all that can be said of this latter is, happy are they who do not fall into its hands.”132 Later in the novel Guzmán encounters a cristiano nuovo at the moment it is announced that an officer of the Inquisition will be moving into the house next door; the man “became so pale and thin that he rapidly wasted away to a shadow of his former self.”133 In Estebanillo González the corrupt Duke of Ossuna dreads “Holy Inquisition, whose dungeons I consider like a place from whose bourn no traveler returns.”134 Though painted some time after Interrogations in a Jail, Magnasco’s Transfer of the Prisoners caricatured the sport with which the alguazil treated their quarry (c. 1725, Frederic

119 Church’s Home, Olana; Figure 61). The mounted constables brandish their rifles and trumpets as if celebrating a hunt (a curved fox horn hangs from a nearby post), while the beasts of the chase are substituted with pleading prisoners. Their ranks include two witches in pointed hats, a trio of bearded and mustachioed soldiers, and one figure whose trim-fitting jacket and white collar reveal him to be a man of some means, probably corralled into the troopers’ dragnet for the purpose of extorting a bribe.135 The rabble travels through a shadowy landscape toward a vaguely ecclesiastical edifice, which reads like the front entrance to the prison from Interrogations, where similarly ragged figures are subjected to the tender mercies of the santo torturador. While Guzmán was spared the indignities of being strung along in such a chain of heretics, other picaresque heroes were not so lucky. Estebanillo González was arrested by the alguazil and conducted to the prison of the Holy Tribunal for practicing sorcery out of his quack cosmetics business.136 His descriptions of the internment share a number of general features with Magnasco’s portrayal of an inquisitorial pound: “a gaoler, surrounded by a band of guards, enclosed me in a dungeon”; “I lay in my dungeon, extended on a bed of straw in all the horrors of imprisonment, and vainly searching my mind to discover a possible cause for my apprehension”; “feeling all the violence of despair, [I] uttered my complaints so loudly, that I made the walls of my dungeon re-echo with my cries”; “one of the guards [gave] me five or six heavy blows with a musket across my shoulders”; “the gaoler conducted me under a strong guard to the tribunal of the Grand Inquisition, which was in a spacious hall”; “The judge, who was a member of the Holy Order of St. Dominic, was conspicuously seated in a magnificent chair at the extremity of a long table. He looked round him with all the arrogance of power. His secretary, a little priest, blacker than a mole, was seated on a stool opposite to him.”137 Though there is no way to ascribe a narrative trajectory to Magnasco’s Interrogations in a Jail, the similarities between Estebanillo’s and Magnasco’s settings—the great hall, the judgment table, the seated tribune, the paper-shuffling secretary, the guards with muskets—suggest that the author and painter both sought to represent the same kind of place, each in their own relatively hypostatized fashion. Estebanillo relies on verbal wit to communicate the satirical impulse behind his story—appealing to “enlightened judges,” “holy men,” and “illustrious reverences,”

120 with faux piety out of one side of his mouth, while secreting stolen doubloons from the guards, laughing in the face of his inquisitor, and openly cursing the machinations that led his commercial rivals to conspire to declare that “[this man’s] pomade has a cabalistic smell.”138 Magnasco’s scene achieves a similarly sarcastic ambivalence through the juxtaposition of pathetic captives, pipe-smoking soldiers, tormented prisoners, and hunchbacked brutes warming themselves beside the fire. The well-read viewer of Magnasco’s Interrogations would have had at his disposal a wealth of ambivalent references to the Holy Brotherhood from picaresque novels: Guzmán’s greedy highwaymen; Justina’s lecherous jailers; Pablos’s bribable prosecutor (whose mouth “may be stopped with a silver gag”); and Estebanillo’s pompous functionaries who live holed up in their penitentiary with reams of criminal charges to investigate, imposing capital judgments without any understanding of the predatory marketplace of connivance and scams outside the prison walls, where material necessity forces the pícaro into his unwholesome pursuits.139 Sometimes the pícaro is guilty. Sometimes he is innocent. But the portrayal of the character’s experiences of imprisonment and trial always sympathizes with the interred bodies, satirizing the captors’ motives as hidebound, corrupt, or brainlessly bureaucratic. Magnasco’s painting is much more suspensive than the picaresque narrative, where the authorial voice shapes the reader’s reception of satirical messages through caricature, hyperbole, and ironic plot twists.140 The painting cannot similarly rely on verbal cues to direct its audience’s thoughts to parody, and instead it presents a space in which a lack of clear understanding—the ambiguity of the location, the anonymous identities of the authorities, the secret charges against the prisoners—leads viewers to mistrust the process that is playing out before their eyes, adopting the sentiment of incredulity that motivates the pícaro’s engagement with similarly corrupt authorities. Taking Callot’s representations of soldiering, gypsy life, and crime and punishment as his pictorial inspirations, and drawing from the literary and sociological culture of la vida picaresca, Magnasco created paintings that—in their seeming inscrutability—invited viewers into a dialogue with the related iconography, themes, and narrative descriptions found in many of the most widely-read picaresque novels.

121 The Picaresque Body: Imprisoned

Magnasco repeated the subject of the inquisitorial prison in at least two other small canvases designed as pendants—The Interrogation (c. 1720, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt [lost]; Figure 62) and The Tortures (c. 1720, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt [lost]; Figure 63).141 As with the painting after Callot, Magnasco’s Interrogation presented the viewer with a shadowy dungeon where an interrogator prods his victims with a black cane while two monks scribble the proceedings into the court record books.142 Above the interrogator, in the exact spot where Estebanillo had marveled at “a large crucifix of white marble, finely sculpted and raised almost to the ceiling,” Magnasco places a representation of the Crowning of Thorns—symbolic of the unjust persecution that Christ endured, and ironically proclaiming the dubiousness of these prisoners’ incarcerations and subsequent tortures.143 In The Tortures, Magnasco mimicked the pícaro’s skeptical recounting of inquisitorial bureaucracy by centering the composition around the cloth-draped desk at which a young functionary pores over books and notes, while the prisoner hangs by his wrists several meters above the floor. An hourglass stands on the table, in keeping with the trial procedures outlined in the Instructio of the Holy Roman Office of the Inquisition (1639) and the manuscripts of the Spanish Suprema (The Council of the Supreme and General Inquisition), where torturing to death was discouraged in favor of more measured excruciation doled out in timed increments.144 To my knowledge there are no explicit scenes of inquisitorial torture in any of the picaresque novels.145 The closest I have found is a scene from Carlos Siguenza y Gongora’s Los infortunios de Alonso Ramirez in which Alonso is imprisoned by the Holy Brotherhood for a murder committed in self-defense by his mistress; he languishes for many days in chains, is beaten, and dragged all the way to the gallows before his misplaced pardon is “found” by a bribed official.146 The Bachiller Trapaza innocently falls into the clutches of the law together with a pair of contrabandistas; “torturas diversas” are alluded to (but not described), and Trapaza is then sentenced to banishment for two years.147 Lope, the water-carrier from Cervantes’s La ilustre fregona, is beaten and jailed in a dungeon “with two pairs of fetters,” after injuring a man in a fight over a mule.148 And Simplicissimus is once marched off to jail, and “adorned with iron

122 bands and chains on hands and feet,” but he is only threatened with the “horrible instruments of torture, which made [his] wretched plight truly grievous.”149 While protagonists are regularly hauled into the offices and interrogation rooms of the Santo Oficio, the episodes usually involve mistaken identities or petty vendettas, punished by short jail sentences or the extortion of bribes.150 Several literary scholars have focused on the overarching template of inquisitorial testimony as a structural model for the picaresque narrative as a confessional form, alluding to the sedulous torturers that authorities maintained for coercive purposes (which Lazarillo tacitly refers to as peligros [perils]).151 Yet the act of describing torture itself never entered the repertory of the picaresque narrator, most likely owing to the strict church-state censorship to which these author’s works were subjected.152 Magnasco’s interest in representing torture—and the specific iconography that he employed—clearly extended from his exposure to the various punishment scenes from Jacques Callot’s Misères, together with prints like Les Supplices, where half a dozen implements of torture were accumulated in a massive théâtre de la cruauté (c. 1630; Figure 64).153 Yet it was the painter’s initiative to relocate the tortures from the militaristic forum of publicly staged punishments into the secret dungeons of the inquisitorio, thereby visualizing a stock setting in which numerous literary pícaros encountered unjust punishments that contributed to their skeptical world views. By the late seventeenth century the inquisitorial apparatus had devolved to the point that writers, librettists, and cultural critics were free to locate their satires in these once terrifying prison environments—adapting the brutal legends of the Inquisition into their repertory of imaginative metaphor.154 Paintings like The Interrogation and The Tortures led Magnasco (in collaboration with Clemente Spera) to be commissioned to design a prison set for a production of Antonio Caldara’s opera Gioseffo che interpreta i sogni, staged by Charles VI’s Imperial Choir of Vienna in 1726.155 This effort survives as an oil painting, Joseph the Dream Interpreter (c.1726, Milan, private collection; Figure 65), the single instance in which one of the artist’s prison scenes can be directly linked to a source text, which, coincidentally, is related to the picaresque novel as an ancient prototype. Surprisingly, this painting has never been described in terms of its relationship to the picaresque literary genre. Giovanni Battista Neri’s opera libretto drew from the Old Testament story of Joseph, a

123 paleo-picaresque narrative of the peripatetic life.156 Maurice Bloomfield first linked Joseph to the picaresque literary phenomenon under a rubric that he termed the “Fortuntatas type”—the disenfranchised, crafty and adroit, but morally good son, whose lot was much like those of the picaresque heroes Guzmán, the Bachiller Trapaza, and Gil Blas.157 First came the sudden exodus from the domestic comforts of childhood: Joseph’s jealous brothers sold him into slavery. Always faithful to God in a fashion akin to the monk-raised Simplicissimus, Joseph was purchased by an Egyptian dignitary, thus beginning his episodic association with several masters of varying sympathies. Owing to his power to interpret dreams—like the pícaro’s intuitive reading of his masters’ motives—Joseph became his lord’s counselor (as did Guzmán while serving as Pompey’s valet and while working in the houses of the Roman Cardinal and the French Ambassador.) But a cruel turn of fate soon disrupted the , as Joseph was falsely accused of rape and imprisoned. Still faithful to God, Joseph served the head jailer and was promoted to custodian of the ward, at which point he was asked to interpret the dreams of the Pharaoh’s cupbearer, a fickle and conniving chamberlain who foreshadowed Mateo Alemán’s Mr. Nicola from the house of the Roman Cardinal.158 Forgotten again, Joseph sat in the prison for two more years until he was called to the Pharaoh’s court to interpret one of the Pharaoh’s dreams, at which point he was released to continue his journey. Magnasco’s painting of Joseph’s internment departs from the dank dungeons of his earlier interrogations, presenting a vivid vision of the common room of a Baroque-era prison. The sheer stone walls in bright grays, the towering arches, and the catwalks cobbled together from irregular brown boards are assertively scenographic, and the manacles, pulleys, suspended lanterns, cell blocks, and leg stocks are scattered throughout the composition like prop decorations. Magnasco’s penchant for theatricized tableaus was here granted an assignment, though it is unclear whether the production was ever staged.159 But given the relative legibility required of a work of set design (and the requisite absence of the artist’s preferred devices of extraneous, expressionistic brushwork, tenebrous coloration, and enigmatic character relationships) this painting serves well as a forum for discussing the painterly figural attributes that I will further draw upon in discussing Magnasco’s physical renderings of the picaresque body.

124 For a painting to be as fully and dialogically picaresque as possible, it is not enough that the iconography of a scene reminds viewers of the characters, settings, and episodes common to picaresque narratives (though this is, of course, the first measure of a painting’s viability as a picaresque text.) The artist should also engage the formal, corporeal attributes of picarism through the employment of compositional and stylistic devices that reinforce the novels’ overarching theses of self-realization by way of cycles of social ascendancy and amerceable degeneracy. This balance between the refined and the decrepit is summarized by Sherman Eoff as the pícaro’s striving for social advancement while struggling with the immediate exigencies of living: “The psychological portrait is essentially that of a self-conscious person who hovers wistfully on the doorsteps of respectable society, timorously bowing to those who dominate the social order, aspiring by way of circumvention to what is currently regarded as the proof of success, and comically disguising his futility by reference to the lowest common denominator of social practice.”160 The pícaro struggles to elevate himself above the status of rogue, while the fates work against his efforts, often casting him from the social imprisonment of a rigid class system into actual dungeons where he is subjected to further, bodily humiliations. In translating such a multivalent psychological portrait into a visual image, the artist must decide which external attributes to emphasize. Velázquez’s water seller, Murillo’s hungry ganapans, and Ribera’s blind beggar’s guide each present themselves as naturalistic, portrait-like representations of real people. They are physically weighty people, clothed in rough garments, with insightful facial expressions that attest to their psychological complexity. These attributes function dialogically with the genre’s emphasis on the pícaro narrator’s first-person appeal to the reader’s sympathies on matters of hunger, homelessness, and general economic deprivation, as he maintains the corporeal dignity of a faithful Christian who believes in the imminence of his soul’s redemption. Such paintings of picaresque naturalism from seventeenth-century Spain were highly invested in the Christian morality that underlay the novels’ resolutions: they are exemplary paintings, which illustrate the doctrine that man by falling into abject delinquency comes to realize both the need of God’s saving grace and the opportunity of eternal salvation for all men, however sinful.161 Magnasco’s paintings could never be mistaken for works of picaresque naturalism, as

125 they draw from the other side of the pícaro’s psychology—the picareque emphasis on the temporal social statuses communicated by physical deportment and material wealth—the well- dressed, well-posed body. The pícaro aspires to a comfortable and privileged position in the community, and using burlas and chicanery he strives to fool society into mistaking him for a nobleman (or at least a respectable man of business.)162 Pablos, el buscón may find himself destitute, bankrupt, and incarcerated, but before even food or shelter, his first concerns are always of his costume, the means by which the beau monde might recognize him as a person of quality, deserving of their embrace.163 Indeed, on one occasion it was his convincing dress that spared him a second night in jail.164 Great lengths were taken to ensure that inferior, third-hand garments were fixed in such a way as to effect the look of costliness,165 and special modeling techniques were employed in order to avoid detection: “We exercise care on windy days, when going up lighted staircases, or when on horseback. We study our attitudes against the light, walking with legs close together on a bright day and bowing from the ankles, for to open our knees would expose our windowed raggedness.”166 In later describing a scene of jailhouse culebra, Pablos witnesses the cruel stoning of his friend Toribio by a band of seasoned prisoners, but his deepest sympathies and regrets come at the bargain that his friend is forced to strike.167 In the face of the prisoners’ shivering nakedness, “Toribio asked them to let him get out and they should have his clothes as a pledge that he would pay up.”168 But the young man is subjected to further abuse, until “all his rags together wouldn’t have made a decent lamp wick.”169 He is then forced by his tormentors to get dressed in the delousing sheet, a styleless garment “full of fleas . . . giant fleas, fleas that would tackle a bull,” which Toribio wears for just a moment before throwing it off, cursing his luck, and scratching himself until he bleeds.170 The insult of nakedness is the cruelest insult to the posturing pícaro. It is not my intent to argue for any calculated iconographic similarities between the prison scene from Pablos, el buscón and Magnasco’s representation of Joseph’s life in jail, but rather to emphasize the role that costume and self-presentation plays in the picaresque vision of prison as a realm in which the body may be physically debased—stripped of clothes and their catering dignities—but where self-aware characters retain their self-identities. The pícaro often directly rejects the power of punitive authorities to make them miserable repentants, adhering to a higher

126 dedication to el alma de la vida picaresca. In Guzmán, when one condemned prisoner is urged to spend his last moments in prayer, he instead calls for wine and insists on playing cards.171 In Cristobal de Chaves’s Entremés famoso de la Cárcel de Sevilla (1627), a spectator witnesses the last moments of Paisano, who is about to be executed.172 His only concern is that he “die in style”: he joins his friends’ singing, attends to his clothing and external appearance, takes leave of his women—all in a spirit of elegant swaggering and confident self control. The figures from Magnasco’s Joseph highlight this picaresque emphasis on character as manifested in external style. The stock prisoners are rendered in muddy brown and gray impasto brushstrokes. The artist’s choice of color neutralizes and homogenizes any perception of individuality. The figure of Joseph—the moral hero of the narrative, the surrogate pícaro—is afforded boots, a short turquoise cape, and a stylish turban, setting him apart from his imprisoned cohorts who are naked but for a few rags and blankets. The prisoners recline, look down their noses, cross their legs, dangle from wrist irons, and pensively cradle their heads in their hands—all poses of resignation. The meaning of the painting is invested in the skepticism with which the prisoners look upon the talented and fashionable pícaro, who hovers wistfully on the doorstep of respectable society, waiting, as Pablos did, to ply his tricks against the guards in order to effect his release. Picaresque punishment is not delivered through lashes or torture devices, it is in the loss of hope that one’s lowly circumstances can be overcome, and incarceration reinforces the pícaro’s understanding of the liberating power delivered through a calculated investment in self-presentation.

The Picaresque Body: Abject and Sophisticated

It is evident from all of Magnasco’s work that he was supremely interested in representing the human form as an object of pliancy and and that he selected the narrative contexts for these forms from spheres of life in which the body is physically taxed—prisons, galleys, bandit roosts, open-air encampments, monastic settings. Though not exclusive in their commonalities, picaresque novels were, in Magnasco’s era, among the most fully developed generic art forms that delved into these environments. This fact alone

127 recommends the texts as a starting place for exploring potential correlative meanings (social, economic, philosophical) that contemporary audiences could have registered in Magnasco’s paintings.173 But the novels are not themselves defining resources for understanding the aesthetic approach that Magnasco took in translating his fantastic scenes from the page to canvas.174 Though picaresque texts abound with stylish descriptions—of the title characters, the members of various social classes, and the environments where the pícaro plies his trade—there is no one formal approach to the pictorial representations of Guzmán or Estebanillo that could be said to most faithfully render la vida picaresca; hence the coetaneous and equally valid fine-art categories of picaresque naturalism and picaresque romanticism. Both of these categories visually communicate essential theoretical attributes of the genre—a protean literary form that combines comedy, realism, moral and theological philosophy, satire, social transgressions, stately manners, and vivid descriptions of crimes, schemes, and the rules of beggary—but I do not find them equal in their power to inspire the imaginative faculties employed by the readers of these novels. In this, I find Magnasco’s more aestheticized “picaresque romanticism” to have an advantage. Velázquez’s waterseller and Ribera’s blind beggar clearly aver themselves as characters deserving of the dignified acknowledgment of the viewer; they are soulfully resigned to their relative destinies in a world full of wealthier people whose lots afford them the privilege of patronizing the poor. The humble figures represent the Christian-redemptive denouement favored by most picaresque authors—the point at which the pícaro recognizes the folly of pursuing such ephemeral rewards as money and social status.175 And yet the purposive resolution of the pícaro’s life story—most often in the custody of some legitimate authority (Guzmán’s galley master) or instrument of social control (Lazarillo’s Archpriest of San Salvador)—is not the picaresque story itself, which is a messy, peripatetic adventure filled with sundry bad influences, criminal escapades, hedonistic feasts, and bodily abuses, punctuated by the occasional moment of contemplative bliss—a long-form reflection on the existential value of free movement and thought.176 Though Magnasco’s figures are the refined executions of a masterful painter, from the point of signification they are analogously messy. Most often we do not know exactly who these characters are, where they are, what they are doing, or where they are going, but it is entertaining

128 to witness their exploits. The pedantic adjurations from Alemán’s atalaya (the dictates of picaresque moralism) are invisible. Instead, viewers are invited to study the physical forms and life-ways of beggars and brigands at their leisure—something that a polite person could not do in public (not to mention from within the inaccessible bandits’ roost or a jail cell.) What the viewer discovers is that the picaresque life is both raw and refined: Joseph is a prisoner, yes, but one who crosses his ankles with aplomb. The great majority of Magnasco’s characters are formally dichotomous in a manner that parallels the vital split within the pícaro’s psychology. The literary pícaro is an articulate locutor and a profanatory cad, an Augean beggar who pretends to fashion stardom. Magnasco’s picaresque bodies are hypostatized, elegant, and grotesque—seemingly disparate attributes that, when cast in amongst the low-life iconography of the picaresque prison, encampment, or gambling den, assert a homologous multivalence and strengthen the overall impression of intertextual dialogism with the literary genre’s presentation of low-life escapades carried out by style-conscious protagonists.177 In short, Magnasco’s figures are shown in the midst of the picaresque experience: as both abject and sophisticated. Whether looking at a scene like Magnasco’s Joseph, or a more typologically picaresque scene like Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (Figure 48), the emphasis on expressions of the pícaro’s invested materiality is everywhere.178 On thematic matters of the pícaro’s liberation through social delinquency, Gioseffo and The Interrogation may be analogized with the characters’ sundry imprisonments, while Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros is reminiscent of the many bandits’ hovels into which protagonists are regularly recruited.179 The viewer simultaneously confronts the dispossessed characters’ corporeal realism (the sinewy bodies, lean and hungry-looking), their ideational modishness (an assertive interest in fashionable self- presentation shown through dancer-like poses, and smart hats, boots, and brightly colored shirts and pants), and the matériel that constitutes el aguar de la vida picaresca (cards, dice, musical instruments, weapons, and prison chains.)180 In Rinconete and Cortadillo, Cervantes describes the legendary bandit Monipodio's house in two short paragraphs that read like a verbal prototype for Magnasco’s Den: "a brick-paved court . . . on one side stood a three-legged bench, on top of which was a water jar with a broken lip. . . [There were] fencing foils and cork shields hanging from four nails"; while descriptions of

129 the occupants run on for pages: "There were gathered there as many as fourteen persons of differing attire and stations . . . [D]ashing young blades, sporting long moustaches, . . . broad-brimmed and bell-crowned hats, . . . colored hose, . . . out-sized swords, . . . tall and of dark complexions,...deep-set eyes,...wide linen breeches,...large feet”; and the villain Monipodio “wore a baize cape that covered him almost to his feet. . . From a shoulder strap that crossed his chest and back hung a broadsword resembling the Moorish variety.”181 Though these are stock characters in a bandits’ roost, the picaresque emphasis on individual agency (to the end of social climbing) privileged observations that established hierarchies of style, threat potential, economic wherewithal, and power to grant benefice. Whether or not Magnasco intended for his Den to represent Monipodio’s house, his approach to painting a gathering of bandit soldiers was attuned to the picaresque author’s interest in describing the physical bearing of the people that the hero meets. In Romances of Roguery, Frank Wadleigh Chandler insisted on the primacy of the stock character in representing “society through the rogue’s eye.”182 To quote Chandler: “In the social world through which the pícaro forged his way, the army, the law, the Church, and medicine share the professional honors; while students, robbers, gypsies and Moriscos, hidalgos, and muleteers, barbers, players, and beggars are dramatis personœ of stock utility. These characters throng the romances of roguery. They come and go . . . with a careless and natural picturesqueness that succeeds in diverting attention from the lack of purpose or direction. The rogue knows them all, masquerades with them all, and they are the life and theme of the story.”183 Magnasco’s stock characters move freely between compositions, coming and going, alternately ornamenting his bandit dens, jails, and ruin-strewn landscapes like Halt of the Brigands (c. 1720-30, Hermitage, St. Petersburg; Figure 66), Soldiers Feasting (c. 1725, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Figure 67) and Soldiers and a Charlatan among Ruins (c. 1720- 30, Collection of A.S. Drey, Monaco; Figure 68). Above all other artistic attributes, these paintings convey “a careless and natural picturesqueness” that quite nearly elevates them beyond any narrative context into a purely aesthetic realm where contorted prisoners and decrepit gamblers become decorations to be enjoyed for their own sake.184 Just as most Baroque-era readers found amusement in the chronicles of Guzmán, Pablos, and Estebanillo, I imagine that

130 the vast majority of Magnasco’s audiences found his paintings to be amusements.185 But this is not to say that their stock staffage eschews deeper reading. When two or more of his paintings are viewed side-by-side, Magnasco is seen to have presented a panoramic vision of the life cycle of the picaresque body: at once lounging, feasting, inventorying stolen property, and fingering playing cards—la vida picaresca that will lead these rascals to perdition, imprisonment, the denial of their cherished libertas, twisting and pulling against chains, subjected to the lashes of anonymous functionary punishers186 And yet within any one canvas there is no innate sense of purpose or direction beyond description. To use one of Ulrich Wicks’s picaresque modes, the viewer confronts “a vast gallery of human types who appear as representatives of the landscape.”187 Whether cast before a dungeon wall, the cellar of a shooting gallery, or an abandoned temple facade, Magnasco’s painterliness—his flame-like brush strokes, accentuating sinewy musculature, peaked hats, and drapery folds—makes his figures tremble and vibrate with nervous energy, and yet they are always grim, stolid, and unsmiling. With their deep-set eyes, sharp noses, and whiskered chins, the gamblers from The Players (Figure 46) and the host from Soldiers Feasting (Figure 67) are as stony as Roman fountainheads (Figure 70), but unlike classical grotesque ornament (“light and playful in its manner”) these are players who lack playfulness.188 Would a viewer have laughed at Magnasco’s sullen gamblers and piercing inquisitors, or is there something more entertaining (and more existentially picaresque) in their grotesque moroseness?189 Wicks asserts “the affinity of picaresque for comedy,” while arguing more forcefully that the “picaresque satisfies our darker yearnings for demonic disharmony, ugliness, disorder, and evil.”190 Though superficially comic—filled with pratfalls, mistaken identities, salty descriptions, and verbal wittiness—the landscapes that the literary pícaro inhabits are “forever falling apart, disintegrating” at a rate faster than his schemes can set it right.191 From my point of view, it would be nearly impossible to read Magnasco’s paintings as expressions of picaresque comedy in the sense recently argued by Anthony Close, who premised that the most memorably “comic” characters from picaresque literature prove the saw that “the more extreme the character type, the funnier.”192 While I agree in principle that if a six-inch moustache is funny, a twelve-inch one is funnier, the extreme callousness of Magnasco’s

131 inquisitors and the bluntness of his gamblers and the dramatic pathos of his tortured prisoners does not equate them with funniness by comparable degrees. These men are not pulling pranks or dancing jigs, they are sitting silently, prodding convicts, reading criminal charges from ledgers, dangling from chains, smoking pipes, chickens, crossing their legs, and playing cards. These men by themselves are not laughable, and yet they are charged with a facetious aesthetic sense described by aspects of the Bakhtinian model of socially transgressive comic inversion: an often humorless comedy expressed through dark, seemingly impenetrable manifestations of pessimism.

The Picaresque Body: Liberation through Pessimism

In many literary histories of the picaresque, Mikhail Bakhtin is cited as having categorized the novels of Alemán, Cervantes, and Grimmelshausen among the “literature of fools” (Narren-literatur) wherein a typologically “comic performer” plies his contribution to “the history of laughter.”193 But the comic performer does not operate in a vacuum, and “laughter” is not always a physiological reflex, as the term has been expanded to include the process of becoming aware of the doleful, yet immutable, aspects of hierarchized life. In Bakhtin’s words, the picaresque genre is engaged in “inventing new ways of instrumentalizing ambivalence.”194 Bakhtin assigns the attributes of skepticism, moral degradedness, and physiological debasement to the human environments in which these performers most often orchestrate their satires, whether that environment is beggarly, judiciary, ecclesiastical, or regal.195 Though Bakhtin’s theories have never been applied to Magnasco, I would argue that many of the artist’s figures embody these very same attributes. They are lowly, dubious, and socially degraded denizens of “the lower stratum,” and yet they are nobly poised, whether playing cards or bowing before a magistrate under threat of torture.196 In categorical displays of comic inversion, the picaresque hero contrasts himself with these stock types while observing the ruinous (yet perfunctorily dignified) conditions of modern life outside the shelters of officialdom. The Archpriest’s house, the ambassador’s palace, the Viceroy’s court, these are the “legitimizing” realms into which the pícaro/upstart seeks

132 admission.197 But in the meantime, the pícaro blurs the class distinctions by describing the lives of derelicts according to societal concepts extracted from those stately environments: Pablos attends “the thieves college”;198 Guzmán’s tutor in the ways of pauperdom insists on obedience to “the laws of beggary”;199 Rinconete honors every mendicant and cutpurse he meets as “Your Excellency”;200 Pablos masters “thieves’ Latin” so as to become the “chief priest of the thieving crew”;201 and Monipodio assigns faux-noble titles to especially accomplished bandits.202 In other words, the comedy of the picaresque is invested in part in the reader’s acceptance of the genre’s pessimistic thesis that the disenfranchized can only superimpose the language and comportment of legitimate organs over their roguish behaviors, as there is no possibility of transcending the social boundaries between beggar and prince.203 Magnasco’s depictions of balletic chicken- carving dandies with their vast moustaches and sagging stockings (reminiscent of Estebanillo’s hyper-stylish dinner with the beggared hidalgo Don Gaspard) are funny, but according to the picaresque thesis, these destitute characters are hopeless to enjoy any social promotion.204 Thus, in resigned penury, they behave like the elites that they will never become. Among recent scholars, Peter Dunn and Laura F. Gorfkle have introduced the “material bodily principles” of the carnival ethos (Bakhtin’s overarching theory of the origin of the novel) into their discussions of comic heroes like the pícaro or the Quixote.205 In particular, these writers have emphasized the carnivalesque topos of the “ironical antagonist,” a street performer (in the social context of public festivity) or a literary character type whose outward miserableness—manifested in a joyless fixation on trivia (clothes, drink, songs, trinkets)—conveys his inherent pessimism about the chances of improving one’s station in life: an ambivalent posture that passively reinforces the hierarchical status quo.206 The picaresque hero can be the ironical antagonist (as was the seasoned rogue Estebanillo González) or he can be a novitiate to the environments wherein such caustic and abject personalities dwell (Lazarillo’s multiple encounters with characters who seem to enjoy tormenting innocent victims). In either case the preponderance of philosophically pessimistic character types—parsimonious priests, ruined hidalgos, prisoners serving life sentences—leads characters like Estebanillo and Lazarillo (and, vicariously, the reader) to conclude that life takes place in “an earthly purgatory,” and the best one can do is “to convert the dungeon into a place of comfortable repose.”207

133 Again, Magnasco’s scenes lack the novels’ narrative contexts from which to extract specific ironical messages, but as analogous pageants of stock types, they reference the stratified economic and social environments in which such ironies are born. Magnasco plays with the genre’s underlying constructs of social captivity and social liberty by taking the very same character types whose bodies were imprisoned in scenes like Transfer of the Prisoners and The Interrogation, and freeing them into Cockaigne-like landscapes like Halt of the Brigands, where their innate laziness is mantled with affectations of valiance, implied by the classicized setting and the torpid yet poised bearing of the patricians of this superannuated forum.208 Bakhtin would have registered a clear expression of carnivalesque inversion in Magnasco’s aggrandizement of gypsy soldiers and gamblers into courtiers. And Guzmán would have recognized the scene as representing the land of “Poltronia,” a legendary country where rogues lived like lords in peaceful recluse, unmolested by pestering authorities.209 An anonymous Bolognese author of the mid-seventeenth century described actual thieves lairs as “sanctuaries of lawlessness” where lazzaroni and mendicant soldiers would converge after a day full of larceny: “. . . after the hurly-burly of the crowd / Where we’ve all spent the day / We repair to our refuge / As dusk falls . . .”210 The graceful relaxation displayed by Magnasco’s figures is the relished libertas denied to the beggar during his workday, and the soldier during his campaign. According to Bakhtin’s model, these characters have retreated into a “utopian world in which anti-hierachism, relativity of values, questioning of authority, openness, joyous anarchy, and the ridiculing of dogmas hold sway.”211 And yet this anti-hierarchism does not result in chaos; the noblesse oblige of the career vagabond implies strict adherence to the adage “privilege entails responsibility”—responsibility to honor the codes of gypsy life, and to carry oneself with the outward dignity of an “artist of knavery.”212 Magnasco translated these comme il faut impulses into the details of his scene: the mannerly carving of the dinner fowl, the graceful exit of an attendant with a plate of food, the ramrod-straight posture of the gambler who sits at the table with a lady. One is reminded of the “poor man of Seville” from Chapter 35 of Guzmán de Alfarache, who, though clothed in rags, spends all of his meager earnings on foods from the finest gourmet shops on the mercado.213 Peter Dunn calls this the pícaro’s “idea of decorum, of bienséance,” underwritten by the

134 ostensibly antiheroic character’s objective valuation of social hierarchy as manifested in one’s relative ability to eat well and be lazy.214 On such matters of “valorous idleness,” Piero Camporesi quotes the stock peasant turned “captain of the gypsies,” Strillozzo da Scanzano.215 This folk character celebrated the gallantry of loafing in songs sung by “the operetta swaggerers and idle paupers” from plays by the pseudonymous “Zan Bagotto,” a self-described “Member of the Noble House of the Penniless” whose chant seems equally apropos for Magnasco’s fainéant vagabonds:

Hurray for the swaggerer in every alley May he who follows valorous deeds and is idle by nature be ever more valorous in idleness. Hurray for the swaggerer in every alley Hurray for idleness . . . 216

Though Magnasco’s vision of these “thieves’ lairs” does vary, a resigned recumbence is the standard posture of their inhabitants. In Halt of the Brigands, the rogues recline beneath a “theater of ruins,” a symbolic environment that manifests the material fatalism shared by the converso Alemán and the Jesuit historian and litterateur Daniello Bartoli (1608-1685).217 In the economic context of endemic poverty, Bartoli extolled an ambiguous doctrine of contented pauperism akin to Estebanillo’s favorite adage, “It is much happier to live in a state of humble independence than of splendid servitude.”218 In Bartoli’s words, “The ruins of the world console the poor, making them happy that they have nothing in the world.”219 While Bartoli’s message did little to improve the condition of the poor, it would have been welcomed by the ruling classes in the same way as the novela picaresca was embraced: as a permit to dispel any disquiet or remorse concerning their own consumptive roles in endemic poorness. Bartoli excelled at writing metaphors in which beggars enjoyed their freedom from responsibility while the “theater of ruins perennially and ineluctably crumbled into powder and decay . . . the flattened towers like giants’ bodies, the lopped and maimed trunks, twisted limbs of dismembered , the great fractured hulks of towering colossi . . . untidy mountains of statuary, heaps of scorched bones” beneath which only the “richest poor” could find the “treasure of poverty.”220

135 Magnasco participates in the illusory materialist aspects of the picaresque genre (and these concomitant writings) by “liberating” his rogues into ruin-littered environments that symbolize the pessimistic side of transience: the “cliffs and castles” that Pablos’s soldier friend values only as makeshift campsites and sites for positioning cannons.221 In Halt of the Brigands and Soldiers and a Charlatan among Ruins (among many other similar paintings), there is a manifest irony in the picturesque splendor of the bandit’s Roman architectural retreat, in which the three punters play the same hand of cards that they would in a lightless dungeon, oblivious to the grandeur of the setting.222 This irony was most elegantly described some years later by Washington Irving in his Tales of the Alhambra (1832):

I have often observed that the more proudly a mansion has been tenanted in the day of its prosperity, the humbler are its inhabitants in the day of its decline, and that the palace of a king commonly ends in being the nestling place of the beggar. . . . Whenever a tower falls to decay, it is seized upon by some tatterdemalion family, who become joint-tenants, with the bats and owls, of its gilded halls; and hang their rags, those standards of poverty, out of its windows and loopholes.223

Magnasco’s figures are as joyless in their freedom as they were in the shackles of the inquisitorial pound. As stock characters it is their lot to be static fixtures of the picaresque landscape. To repeat Chandler’s words, they are characters “with a careless and natural picturesqueness that succeeds in diverting attention from their lack of purpose or direction.”224 They are picaresque because they visually represent and facilitate a number of lessons contained in the picaresque text, addressing literal and metaphoric imprisonment, and the outwardly subversive yet ultimately ironical concept of liberation through beggary, an autarkic fallacy that most often drives the pícaro-protagonist to a dénouement of resigned pessimism.225

Magnasco’s Painterly Pícaros: “Society through the Rogue’s Eye”

Having surveyed Magnasco’s thematic and aesthetic approaches to corporeality and his usage of settings relating to the capture and liberation dichotomy of the picaresque topos, I will

136 employ these concepts in examining a number of examples from Magnasco’s oeuvre that engage Chandler’s conception of the picaresque as presenting a view of “society through the rogue’s eye.”226 In the face of other art historians’ unsupported claims that Magnasco’s paintings were inspired by the picaresque genre, I will provide informed descriptions of several of Magnasco’s most picaresque paintings, documenting the extent to which the artist employed the stock environments and personages utilized by novelists in crafting his painterly vision of the picaresque landscape. The rest of this chapter will be devoted to that exposition. To my knowledge, there is no primary evidence linking any of Magnasco’s “picaresque paintings” to specific novels; Magnasco was not an illustrator. We have seen, however, that the paintings did draw their iconography from the same cultural milieus frequented by picaresque protagonists—the European subcultures of beggardom, mercenary soldiering, organized crime, and prison—and the artist treated these subjects in a fanciful fashion that would have deterred reading the paintings as historical documents, or as having recorded the real lives of bandits and mendicants.227 In short, Magnasco’s vision has more in common with the picaresque idea of these milieus as fantastical pageants than with the far soberer facts of the period.228 The chronicler Giovanni Agostino de Cosmi (1726-1810) described the real lives of these pitiful people in despairing terms, as “forced to live in poverty and beg for a living, base and without work, and without any sense of morality,” those who were gradually and systematically removed by armed militias from the beggars’ camps to be shut up in specially designed hospices and work-houses.229 There is none of this reality in Magnasco’s pictures of delinquency. He is engaged in an imaginative translation of the same cultural manifested in literary picarism.230 Indeed, the picaresque novel is one of the most enduring genre mediums from which he could have developed such an understanding of the notional populace of gypsy soldiers, galley crews, and country brigands, who were by the turn of the seventeenth century already being subjected to the transformative forces of the economic reforms plied by civic leaders in the Piedmont, Lombardy, Naples, and Rome.231 Faced with representations of character types that now pervaded only the literary landscape, Magnasco’s audiences would have assumed that the artist shared an affinity with the picaresque author’s presumed motivation, which, according to Peter Dunn, was to serve

137 as “the mediating eyes and ears that scan the scenes of urban low life and itinerant vagrants in such a way as to fascinate respectable readers throughout Europe.”232 “Fascination” is the key, as most scholars are ready to concede that the vast majority of these readers did not seek to be educated about social problems, but to be entertained by the comedy, irony, and fanciful characters inherent to picaresque adventurism.233 In a scene like Soldiers and a Charlatan among Ruins, Magnasco’s respectable viewers encounter a party of derelicts typical of the pícaro’s aleatory encounters with stock types while traversing the highways of Spain and Italy. We know they are mercenaries because they are without uniforms, dressed in costumes cobbled together from fashionable bits—high neckbands, floppy hats, great capes. They have retired from some innominate battlefield, to seek refuge in a decaying mansion scattered with the matériel of warfare: drums, powder barrels, cannons, breastplates, cooking supplies, and muskets. A wandering huckster entices the two men from a raised pulpit in between the columns, while an assistant huddles at his feet. The scam would appear to center around the parrot that the seated soldier holds, as the charlatan demonstrates the proper form for prompting the bird to speak. A collared monkey watches attentively from the base of a column. Magnasco’s charlatan is dressed in a vaguely clerical fashion—the pitched hat of a puritan, the chorister’s quire bib—a ruse often used to gain the confidence of dubious marks like these soldiers, even as they are themselves likely to have plied the beggar’s racket.234 Magnasco’s mingling of soldiering and charlatanism combines two prevailing picaresque character types. In Romances of Roguery, Chandler linked the soldier with the charlatan under a common concept of deceitful chiseling: “appear[ing] with their rodomontades and their tricks, lawless in youth, poverty-stricken in age, and needy always.”235 In the picaresque universe, the charlatan plied a number of trades—indulgence peddling,236 rejuvenative cosmetics,237 fortune- telling by talking birds,238 and exotic mirabilia, or “secrets of deception” (making people appear without heads or with asses’ heads) designed to thrill and frighten audiences into paying.239 Often the charlatan assumes the mantle of a healer: Rutebeuf’s herbier or the Maestro Antonio “Faventino” from Ariosto’s Erbolato (literary models of the mountebank potion-mongerer) were transformed by Alemán into the médico regatón (doctor huckster) who prescribed for his patients whatever medicine he pulled from his bag, saying “¡Dios te la depare buena!”240 But the

138 confidence game need not always be so dazzling: Guzmán de Alfarache described conning in Florence as consisting of making such long and vacuous speeches that audiences would forfeit alms just to make the hawker quiet down. A kindred strategy of dulling the audience is relayed through Magnasco’s charlatan’s pontification and the somnolence shown by the reclining soldier, who plays the role of the picaresque skeptic, uninterested in having his fortune told by a talking bird.241 Beyond the parameters of Magnasco’s encampment setting, speaking birds figure in a number of picaresque scenarios: a thrush is trained as a criminal accomplice in Vicente Espinel’s La vida de Marcos de Obregón;242 in Jerónimo de Alcalá Yañez y Ribera’s El donado hablador a bird squawks the new beggar’s admonition, “I have wasted my work and money”;243 and in Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo’s El necio bien afortunado a parrot repeatedly calls for the “waterseller,” reminding his owner, a now arrogant statesman, of his humble beginnings.244 Though no doubt an amalgam of stock dodges, Magnasco’s vision of the charlatan’s animal act is closest in its iconography to an episode described by Quevedo. In El Buscón, Pablos encounters a wandering “poet” who invites him to join up in a business venture, staging lyrical adaptations of Noah’s Ark as a traveling attraction. The show would be performed “after the manner of Æsop’s Fables,” with the Old Testament heroes “played by parrots, thrushes, and magpies, which can speak. And for the interlude, I shall have monkeys.”245 Even if we cannot call Magnasco’s scene an illustration, Soldiers and a Charlatan among Ruins clearly shares its character and narrative attributes with the picaresque topoi of charlatanism. As was noted earlier, the etymology of the term pícaro relates it to kitchen service: the earliest record of its use (1525) was to designate a rascally scullion who could not be trusted to keep up with the dish washing.246 Numerous picaresque heroes tenured as mozos de cocinas alongside fregonas, peeling vegetables and scrubbing greasy pots, and Magnasco too forayed into the picaresque kitchen with two canvases, Kitchen Scene with Maid and Pícaro (c. 1709-10, Lechi Collection, Brescia; Figure 71), and Kitchen Scene with Nobles and Servants ( c. 1709-10, Lechi Collection, Brescia; Figure 72). These two paintings represent different kitchens, but the staffage of both include a buxom kitchen maid, a young man, and an aged figure who looks onto the scene from a distance. In Maid and Pícaro, the fregona is seated with an infant in her lap,

139 echoing the painting of the Virgin and Child that hangs on a pillar in the center of the room; the pícaro is off to the side, rifling through a chest full of clothes and housewares; and an elderly woman peers into the room from behind the right-side doorway. Through a back doorway a dining room can be seen, with well-dressed people being served by another young man. In Nobles and Servants, the fregona is working at a table covered in baskets and platters of fruit; the pícaro is busy with small preparations (perhaps peeling or shredding); and an old man takes the place of the old woman, resting on a cane and watching the goings-on. The party is joined by a serving boy who takes a platter through the rear archway, and a man and a woman dressed in aristocratic finery, who inspect the table where the banquet service is laid out. Estebanillo, Simplicissimus, and several characters from Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares each worked in palace kitchens reminiscent of Magnasco’s cavernous cookery. Estebanillo slaved in the back kitchen of Octavio Piccolomini’s palace (and even sailed as a kitchen boy in an expedition against pirates) before discovering his calling as a soldier-buffoon.247 In the house of the Governor of Gelnhausen it was young Simplicissimus’s duty, “like any other table server, [to] help to bring up the dishes, pour out wine, and wait at table with a plate in my hand.”248 The lieutenant from Cervantes’s Dialogue of the Dogs, “only recently left the pages’ table in the kitchen.”249 In short, the young man lazing and toiling in both of Magnasco’s canvases was prefaced by several picaresque prototypes. The figure’s role as a kitchen “pícaro” in the original, etymological sense, is further connected to themes of literary picarism by the details of the setting— the leering old authority figure, the contrast between penurious laboring in rags and the lavish costumes of the patrician classes, and the presence of a voluptuous love interest from beneath the stairs, a character type who often frustrates the schemes of the social-climbing pícaro. In an interesting coincidence, Magnasco’s fregona shares a rather distinct hairstyle with the kitchen maid Costanza from Cervantes’s La ilustre fregona: “Her hair was plaited with strands of white gimp, serving her as coif and headdress.”250 By far the most expansive references to the picaresque kitchen come from Guzmán de Alfarache.251 Depicting himself as a scullery boy, Guzmán describes the hierarchy of deceptions in a palace kitchen, under the alternating control of the head cook, the major-domo, a small legion of dodgy kitchen hands, and the nobleman whose house they all served.252 A principle

140 picaresque motif thus develops in this culinary environment (in scenes that take place rather early in the novel): the contrasting societies of esportilleros (workers), fulleros (sharpers), and cortesanos (courtiers) crucial to Guzmán’s proclaimed enterprise of finding the proper audience for his “honradas partes,” the society in which he sought to “create for himself a lasting appearance of honor.”253 By comparing Magnasco’s scenes to Alemán’s descriptions, a number of attributes inherent to the pícaro’s approach to food and cooking become apparent. Magnasco’s scullion was rendered in such a way as to suggest several integral dignities common to picaresque protagonists like Guzmán. His body is well formed and strong looking. His face is pensive, suggesting a keen mind undertaxed by his menial station. He shows a good work ethic when the nobles are in the room—stooped dutifully over his rote task; but he is rather more idle, displaying an interest in the clothes and accoutrements in the chest, when there is no upper-class supervision. Magnasco’s kitchen also shares a number of its trappings with Guzmán’s work place. Alemán described the governor’s kitchen as a space full of foodstuffs and containers—sacks with loins of veal, hams, tongues, and all kinds of fowl, pots with sauces, and piles of garnishes.254 Guzmán spends inordinate amounts of time shredding parsley, “which was always considered like the alphabet to those who aspire to higher degrees in the kitchen.”255 Magnasco’s paintings are littered with platters and basins, freshly killed poultry, fruit baskets, and loose bunches of vegetables, herbs, and grasses. As a curious (but probably coincidental) aside, Guzmán even proposed that the hotel kitchen where he worked would be a “fine subject for a painter”:

The bustle and confusion in which our kitchen now was, in preparing to entertain the prince who was expected, would have formed a fine subject for a painter. Every one was in action, not only those employed in the kitchen, but also those who were passing to and fro. . . . We call these grand entertainments, jubilees, as though we thought to obtain indulgences by robbing the master whose bread we were eating.256

In the end, I would qualify Magnasco’s Kitchen Scene with Maid and Pícaro and Kitchen Scene with Nobles and Servants as rather cryptic, but seemingly narrative representations of

141 culinary environments that share fundamental descriptive and thematic attributes with picaresque representations of comparable spaces. While lacking the incidental details that would suggest the adaptation of any specific narrative, Magnasco presented his viewers with scenes in which the scullion’s and kitchen maid’s identities could be readily analogized with those of several widely- known picaresque protagonists.

The Galley Yards

Another setting that Magnasco shared with the picaresque author were the galley yards at Genoa, Toulon, and , where convicts were kept in chains while the ships were moored as hulks in the harbors. These shore prisons were popularly known—in both literary and historical documents—as bagnes (baths), a term first applied to such penal establishments by the Italians (bagno), and derived from a legendary galley prison at Constantinople attached to the great baths there.257 Magnasco represented the bagnes of the galley system in several canvases, the two largest of which are Arrival of the Galley Slaves to the Prison at Genoa (c. 1736-38, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux; Figure 73) and Embarkation of the Galley Slaves at the Port of Genoa (c. 1736-38, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux; Figure 74). Neither of these paintings has been subjected to a critical reading that considers the many typological similarities exhibited in picaresque representations of the galleys. Among recent scholars, Franchini Guelfi and Muti limited their writing to florid descriptions of Magnasco’s formal techniques (“l’orrore è accentuato dal colore livido e spento, dall’esasperata gestualità, dalle spasmodiche contorsioni delle figure”) and schematic comparisons between these paintings and prints by Callot—in particular, the related tortures from Les Supplices and Les Misères et Malheurs de la Guerre.258 In Le musée imaginaire (1949), André Malraux did propose that Magnasco’s tormented galley slaves reflect in their heightened, near expressionistic aestheticism a psychological impulse shared by early writers on criminal sociology, but the essential threads between this assumption and the concrete details of picaresque literary treatments of galley life were not elicited.259 By the years that these canvases were painted the use of the galleys for war purposes had practically ceased, and those galley yards that continued to operate were essentially state prisons

142 that provided contract labor to merchant vessels.260 As a resident of Genoa through the end of the seventeenth century and again after 1730, Magnasco would no doubt have seen firsthand the squalid and often fatal conditions of the shoreline bagnes to which Charles II had ordered en masse all gypsies who were arrested without peddlers’ licenses (1695),261 (and where the Sicilian sculptor Gaetano Giulio Zumbo [1656-1701] had pilgrimmed to collect broken bodies from which to model his wax anatomies), but once again, the potential for intertextual dialogism with picaresque literature reinforces the air of the imaginary in these paintings.262 The Magnasco connoisseur would first know that these scenes are imaginary and not documentary because so much of the compositions consists of character types, set pieces, and choreography borrowed from Callot and Magnasco’s own earlier works after Callot. Taking then as a given the “unreal” nature of the visual episodes, the viewer would look for textual sources from which to derive understandings of these phenomenal settings and contorted bodies. Picaresque novels abounded with ominous mentions of the galley economy echoed in Magnasco’s visions—the irons, the whips, the floating concentration camps where prisoners became slaves.263 In Cervantes’s Master Glass, the main character travels from Cartagena to Genoa, “in four Neapolitan galleys, and this gave Tomás an opportunity to familiarize himself with the curious life of these sea-going houses, where the better part of the time one is tormented by bedbugs, robbed by the galley slaves, irked by the sailors, assaulted by the mice, and sickened by the billows.”264 In Rinconete and Cortadillo, the title characters spot “six galleys anchored off shore, the sight of which made them sigh and even fear the day when their offenses might condemn them to spend the rest of their lives aboard them.”265 Of their friends, “some thirty have made the acquaintance of the lash and sixty two are on the high seas.”266 Espinel’s Marcos de Obregón schemes to escape a chain gang together with two other condemned men when they learn that their destination is a galley slave market.267 After a thieves round-up by the alguazil, Pablos is fettered in a holding pen for prisoners under transfer: “The stench was such that I was forced to bury my head into my clothes. . . In the dungeon was a tall, one-eyed, mournful-looking fellow with a moustache, and heavy shoulders. He carried more iron than could be found in Biscay—two pairs of fetters and a chain from his neck. . . Another had more whipping than a post-horse, for every executioner tried his hand on him. . . We were all shackled and condemned

143 to the galleys.”268 By far, Guzmán de Alfarache contains the most references to criminal judicatures, bagnes, and the tribulations of a galley slave, as the eponymous narrator writes his life story after being sentenced to the galleys.269 As noted earlier, Guzmán is filled with satirical depictions of the officiating of punishments, many of which lead offenders to the galleys. In one of his many courtroom appearances, Guzmán stands before a juez who sentences another prisoner first to be fined, then given ten years in the galleys, and finally to be hanged.270 When Guzmán is betrayed by a spurned lover to an alguazil, and prosecuted for all of the wrongs he had committed while living the rogue’s life in Seville, he too is condemned “to serve the King upon the seas,” the sentence that begins the last chapter of the pícaro’s autobiography.271 Magnasco’s paintings reflect many of the details of Alemán’s account of the management of the galley yards to which Guzmán is sent, and I would assert that a viewer who knew the narrative descriptions from Guzmán would find the artist’s otherwise dark, spasmodic paintings more iconographically and thematically legible. In the Arrival of the Galley Slaves to the Prison at Genoa, Magnasco’s canvas shows the very same band of alguazil represented in Transfer of the Prisoners (Figure 61), arriving at the bagno with their quarry fettered with the manillas (handcuffs)272 and virotes (iron rods fastened to the collars of slaves)273 that Guzmán describes in the account of his own transfer to Port St. Mary: “the chain, composed of twenty-six young galley slaves, all decorated with the collar peculiar to the order.”274 Though Guzmán connives to avoid being beaten and starved, many of his cohorts on the chain are brutally flogged by the comisario (officer in charge of galley slaves on their way to serve in the galleys),275 “such that they were unable to proceed on their own power,” a circumstance reflected in Magnasco’s depictions of broken-bodied prisoners being dragged behind horses and delivered into the prison yard aboard wagons.276 Once Guzmán arrives at the bagno, he is subjected to a course of humiliations comparable to Magnasco’s representations in Embarkation of the Galley Slaves at the Port of Genoa, where slaves are stripped naked, bound in neck chains and leg irons, and processed through the port-side barbers’ stalls. Guzmán’s words capture the sense of personal abasement that these tactics were intended to instill in condemned men: “A barber performed the operation of shaving our chins and heads.

144 I regretted the loss of my hair exceedingly, which was long and beautiful. But it was of little consequence; I was now a complete galley slave, which I should have been long before if I had had my desserts.”277 Magnasco’s Embarkation incorporates the bodies of dozens of galley slaves in poses that emphasize their limber musculature: hauling chains, rowing boats, pulling , shaving scalps, and marching on board the ships anchored in the harbor. Once again, Magnasco’s interest in the raw, contorted physicality of his figures finds a conceptual fit with a well-established picaresque topos. The galleys are where the stock characters of the picaresque landscape—the thieves and quack doctors and card cheats alongside whom Guzmán is incarcerated—are finally denuded of all of the imitative dignities that they assumed for themselves as rogues, where they are reduced to toiling carcases, and where the least fortunate prisoners are literally stretched to the breaking point in the torture known as the despedazar, as with Guzmán’s rival Soto, whose body was torn to pieces when his chains were bound at once to two moving galleys.278 La vida picaresca, the marrow of freedom lazily consumed in the open-air feasts of Halt of the Brigands, is substituted with the forced discipline of a gulag, incessant menial labor (that which revokes any pretension of gentility), and barrels of flavorless mazamorra—the broken biscuits fed to galley slaves.279 And as if the humiliation of life as a galley slave were not enough, Magnsco’s slave barbers reserve a steaming pot of salted vinegar with which to balm the nicks and cuts that their scissors inflict on the prisoners—the sal y vinagre that Guzmán told of having had rubbed into his wounds as added torture.280 While Magnasco’s Arrival and Embarkation exhibit themes and iconography common to the picaresque narrative, it is difficult to argue that the canvases reflect any narrowly or well- defined character type from the picaresque novel. In describing the official enterprises of law enforcement and corrections faced by the pícaro, novelists most often fill their stories with innominate prisoners, alguazils, galley slaves, slave drivers, and barbers: the stock characters whose roles combine to effect a textual atmosphere of arrests, transfers, prosecutions, and penal servitude, the process by which the pícaro’s misguided approach to life is undone. Magnasco’s galley canvases rely on those same vague character types to convey their stylized atmosphere of choreographed punishments, and yet there is no “picaresque protagonist” in the sense of one

145 figure who stands out as the leading character in the drama. Viewers cannot read these canvases as narrowly narrative, because that would require the presence of a hero whose plight they could follow in among the stock types who perform their stock functions. This would be problematic if my argument were that Magnasco intended to represent the bagno where Guzmán was enslaved, but I would argue once again that Magnasco’s canvases are functionally picaresque without being illustrations. Neither Transfer nor Arrival nor Embarkation is a discrete representation of Guzmán’s comparable experiences of these humiliating processes. The paintings more broadly and aesthetically scan the scenes of arrest and punishment common to the picaresque landscape so as to fascinate literate viewers. In keeping with the genre’s employment of stock themes and scenarios, Magnasco integrated authoritarian social hierarchies (the alguazil, the comisario), acts of corporeal degradation (physical bondage, submission through head shaving), and el aguar de la vida picaresca (the manillas and virotes) into his paintings. The presence of these generic conventions charged the paintings with a coherent ethos of picarism that would have been more than adequate to facilitate audiences’ intertextual dialogical engagement with the analogous content found in works of picaresque literature.

Satire of a Nobleman in Misery

I will close the chapter with a look at Satire of a Nobleman in Misery (c. 1719-25, Detroit Institute of Arts; Figure 75), one of very few of Magnasco’s paintings that center around a single figure, and a painting that depicts one of the quintessential stock characters of the picaresque genre—the impoverished hidalgo.281 This painting was the focus of a short section in Franchini Guelfi’s 1977 monograph, in which she correctly identified the subject of the work, which had until that point been alternately titled Don Quixote and An Armorer.282 But rather than trace the origin of the stock type back to its roots in the Spanish picaresque novel, the author linked the painting to popular theatrical satires of the late seventeenth century, such as the Milanese playwright Carlo Maria Maggi’s Manco Male (1695), Il barone di Birbanza (1696), and I consigli di Meneghino (1697), in which patricians were derided for their reluctance to engage more actively in commerce and industry.283 Franchini Guelfi has also cited the Bolognese

146 printmaker, Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (1634-1718) as a primary influence on Magnasco’s visual conception of the poverty-stricken nobleman, while ignoring the copious descriptions of the appearances of poor hidalgos given by picaresque writers.284 There can be little doubt that Magnasco drew from Mitelli’s Umori diversi, in which a man afflicted with the “umor di nobilitá” holds up a family tree (1696, Cassa di Risparmio, Bologna; Figure 76), or that Magnasco knew an earlier print of Mitelli’s titled In casa sua ciascuno è re, which shows a man in the same pose used by the painter in his Satire, sitting before a fireplace with an insubstantial meal and decrepit wooden furniture (1694, Cassa di Risparmio, Bologna; Figure 77), yet without antecedent texts these images are mere figure studies. While these coeval prints that Franchini Guelfi discovered would have provided Magnasco the visual material from which to conceive the form of his own beggared don, this should not be taken as evidence that Magnasco or his audiences would have ignored the far richer textual premises underlying the character type as described in virtually every picaresque novel. Having already seen the painter’s proclivity for depicting picaresque themes and iconography, his Satire of a Nobleman in Misery should rightly be read as component to the painter’s larger dialogical involvement with the miens and attributes of stock characters from the literary genre. To date, no art historian has made this assertion, that Magnasco’s nobleman shares a conceptual lineage with numerous picaresque escuderos. According to Guzmán, “In Italy, every beggared Spaniard calls himself ‘don.’”285 Among the picaresque cast, the ruined hidalgo represents the deteriorating of both the Spanish and Italian peninsulas—always tall and skinny and dressed in the tatters of once fashionable costumes, hungry for a meal and scrounging the courts for a sinecure with which to reimburse the depleted family coffers.286 In a sense, the disenfranchised escudero represents to the pícaro the penultimate office of la vida picaresca: sportive, scheming, yet graceful and ennobled, and never made to work for his meal.287 Chandler classes the hidalgo or petty nobleman amid the most exemplary characters of the genre: “proud and miserable enough, sometimes aped by the rogue gentry, who descending to the depths of infamy retained recollections of better days.”288 These penniless aristocrats are found wandering the highways, sitting idle in their

147 disintegrating hovels, and freeloading in the homes of wealthier peers. Lazarillo is at first eager to serve such an “extravagantly proud” escudero, “as lean and elegant as a greyhound,” but he ends up feeding him from his own reserves of bread crusts and boiled calves’ hoofs.289 Gerónimo de Alcalá depicts Alonso similarly engaged to an improvident poet married to a shrew. When bread and money give out, her love soon follows, and the household pantry is left empty but for the verse and prose effusions of the gentleman, all read aloud to Alonso, the long- suffering page who would much prefer edibles.290 Don Tomé, whom the Bachiller Trapaza serves, is another poeticizing hidalgo who lives as a parasite, exchanging his words for meals in the great houses.291 But Don Ramirez’s introduction of the escudero Don Gaspard de Messagna to Estebanillo González perhaps best summarizes the type captured in Magnasco’s satire:

Prepare, Vanillo, to behold a nobleman in full-blown pride, a little Hidalgo from the borders of Alcala, whose whole estate consists of a thatched cottage, and at most three acres of land. Proud of possessing so fine a domain, he conceives himself as rich as a grandee; and if, in walking around this decayed hovel, which he arrogantly calls his Chateau, he happens to meet a sportsman, ‘I warn you sir,’ he cries, ‘from trespassing upon my estate.’ This coxcomb . . . can only talk of his nobility; he pretends a descent from the royal line of Pelagus; and boasts of being related, either by consanguinity or alliance, to the noblest families of the monarchy.”292

Magnasco’s escudero is similarly haughty, but he also exhibits a rather more existential desperation comparable to Quevedo’s caricature of the type in Pablos, el buscón. Pablos overtakes a despondent hidalgo on the way to Madrid. At first Pablos believes the man to have alighted for a moment from his coach, so imposing is his manner; but on closer inspection the gentleman proves to be threadbare, “only wearing a strip of a shirt which left him half exposed, and holding up his breeches.”293 Out of compassion, Pablos mounts the stranger upon his own mule, and as both are bound for the court, they journey on together, during which the hidalgo makes plain that his life’s investment in the currency of titles has depleted his stores of gold, bread, and meat: “You see here a gentleman in fact and by right, with a highland house and estate, and, if [the court] supported me as I support my nobility, I should have nothing to ask for.”294 Quevedo satirizes the labyrinthine order of heraldic nomenclature in Spain by having the

148 hidalgo announce himself to the world, as the son of Don Toribio Rodríguez Vallejo Gómez de Ampuero y Jordán: “I know full well what letters patent of nobility are worth since that day when, being hungry, I tried to get a couple of slices in a cookshop on mine. They weren’t letters of gold, forsooth!”295 It is Don Toribio’s hope that he will be able to sell the title of “Don” back to the court, though he doubts that he will get much for it, as he “could yet find no one who needs it.”296 The common message of Magnasco's escudero is clear: he clutches his sword in one hand and a scroll in the other, upon which we can discern the faded diagram of his noble and ancient family tree. The confusion over the subject of the painting likely derived from the presence of the knight’s helmet sitting on a table in the lower left corner of the canvas, an honorable attribute of any self-respecting squire, and not only Don Quixote. Guzmán de Alfarache would have called this anonymous aristocrat “Don Zutano,” a name he applied by to any unknown person assumed to be of a noble lineage.297 Guzmán most readily recognized these characters by their grand bigotes, an especially large moustache worn by gallants and considered to be a sign of elegance and valor.298 Magnasco’s outwardly gallant gentleman is seated in a room full of cheap furniture and broken pottery. These accessories unequivocally demonstrate the painter’s satirical intent. The torn portrait hanging from its stretcher on the rear wall beside the fireplace represents the tattered condition of the man’s once proud legacy, made doubly ironic by the painter’s conceptual capriciousness: we are, after all, looking at a larger “portrait” of the beggared nobleman that breaks with all conventions of representing genteel people in rarefied surroundings that emblemize their titles and land holdings.299 Yet Magnasco’s vision is no less rich with symbolism. A shadowy servant signs an Italian folk gesture of the horns (le corna) signifying impotence, deriding the master’s arrogance and haughtiness, and underscoring the pitiable condition to which his estate has fallen.300 The man’s meal, spread out on the bench before him, is turnips and onions. In Juan de Luna’s sequel to Lazarillo de Tormes, Lazarillo is engaged to a squire who admits that he prefers to eat cabbage and turnips without working rather than capons and chickens acquired through the sweat of his brow.301 Meals of root vegetables are often used in

149 picaresque scenarios to reflect poverty or profound miserliness, both attributes that Magnasco’s escudero reflects.302 But the turnip’s abundant seeds and obvious phallic shape are also the subject of numerous Golden-Age double-entendres. In describing the use of vegetable symbolism in Velázquez’s bodegones, Barry Wind cites a Valencian romance in which the phallic qualities of the turnip are noted, and he alludes to a poem attributed to Góngora, in which an obscene riddle revolves around its suggestive form.303 Quevedo, who Wind qualifies as “the master of the risque pun,” wrote in his Matraca de las flores y la hortaliza: “They prepare the turnips, aiming them at the bawd mothers and aunts.”304 In an anonymous Golden Age ballad, an amorous woman cajoles her lover to “Legumbre mia”—loosely translated as “radish me.”305 Magnasco's nobleman's turnip is small and withered, and so too any likelihood of his siring an heir to this fallen estate of torn portraits and straw-stuffed mattresses; hence, the servant’s hand signal of impotence. Lazarillo spent his mornings munching on cabbage stalks and watching as the starving escudero vainly flirted with the “veiled women” of Toledo alongside the river, only to be turned away when it became apparent that he had nothing to offer them for breakfast.306 Similarly, Magnasco’s nobleman could offer a prospective lover nothing but the fruitless mottos and fallow roots of his family tree. For both, the implicit appetite is the hunger for family and status (and to procreate more fortunate sons), absurd in this dismal setting, and with such an unsavory and misshapen spread. While it is entirely possible to view Satire of a Nobleman in Misery without knowledge of the many picaresque antecedents for the character type of the ruined hidalgo, the painting is rich in dialogical potential, both with the broad theme of honor enfeebled by penury and the narrower iconography of the ridiculing servant, the paper distinctions, and the turnips. From a formal perspective, the hidalgo is a hyperbolized representation of the gambler and soldier types repeated in dozens of Magnasco’s paintings. His body is lithe, with long crossed legs and pliant arms clothed in silky fabric—a desultory accentuation of personal style betrayed by the man’s face, which shows the same pessimistic resignation as the lazy brigands’. Magnasco’s nobleman is another “ironical antagonist” from the canon of picaresque character types: possessing of entertaining traits (the meager meal, the splintered furniture, the vast moustache) while at the same time demonstrative of the inherent fallacies that underlie the

150 pícaro’s ambition of arriving at a noble station through avenues other than hard work.

This chapter has examined the many ways in which Magnasco’s paintings intersect the picaresque literary genre, in figural representations that range across the themes and iconography common to the stock picaresque character types of soldiers, prisoners, gamblers, galley slaves, and hidalgos. The preponderance of specific texts that may be applied to the interpretation of these paintings—paintings that have been understood for centuries as mere bizzare invenzioni, uninformed by antecedent textual sources—argues for a more considered understanding of their inherent dialogical potential as works that analogize the characters and satirical mien of the picaresque landscape. It seems beyond coincidence that one painter would choose to paint disaffected soldiers, bandits’ retreats, charlatans, galley slaves, and beggared escuderos without knowing of the parallel lives these characters led in the pages of Guzmán, Estebanillo González, and Pablos, el buscón. While we cannot know for certain Magnasco’s intent in amalgamating such interpretive potentialities into his paintings, they are there, referencing a popular body of literature that would have been conceptually germane to any imaginative interpretation of life among itinerants and rogues.

______

1. Though hardly scientific, I find it interesting that Magnasco, a painter described by Mandel as “of the second rank,” is among the very first listed under a Grove Art Online search for “picaresque.” While Bramer and Elsheimer are noted ahead of Magnasco for the narrowly specific source materials they used in their art works after Lazarillo and Guzmán, Magnasco’s association with the picaresque is much more vaguely articulated by Fausta Franchini Guelfi, the author of the catalogue entry: “Two popular literary genres, the Spanish picaresque novel and the literature of the pitocchi (sea beggars), which related the adventures of vagabonds, beggars, gypsies and footpads in tones ranging from the dramatic to the grotesquely comical, provided a further source of inspiration.” See Mandel, 17; and Fausta Franchini Guelfi: “Magnasco, Alessandro” Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press, [March 15, 2005], http://www.groveart.com/.

2. See Franchini Guelfi 1977, 30-44; Franchini Guelfi 1991, 21-30; Camporesi 1996, passim; and Matthew Vester, “Social Hierarchies: The Upper Classes,” in A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance, Guido Ruggiero, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 227-242.

151 3. William Gaunt, Bandits in a Landscape (London: The Studio Limited, 1937), 53.

4. For an extensive discussion of Magnasco’s formal and iconographic relationship with Callot’s oeuvre, see Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 88-104.

5. For the most recent research on dialogism and the picaresque novel, see David R. Castillo, (A)wry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Picaresque (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2001).

6. For examples of his early, religious works, see St. Francis Consoled by an Angel (c. 1700, Genoa, Galleria di Palazzo Bianco) and The Martyrdom of St. Erasmus (c. 1700, Genoa, private collection).

7. Carlo Giuseppe Ratti’s term from the 1762 draft manuscript of Magnasco’s biography. Ratti, 1762. Cited in Mandel, 174.

8. Fausta Franchini Guelfi proposed 1701 for Magnasco’s arrival in Florence—the year in which the War of Spanish Succession broke out, driving the artist from Milan to more hospitable climes; Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 63. Antonio de Bortoli more recently published proof of Magnasco’s return to Milan in 1709. See Antonio de Bortoli, “Aggiunte al Magnasco milanese,” Arte cristiana 78 (1990): 272-279.

9. Like the Lazarillo de Tormes written nearly a century before, La vida y hechos de Estebanillo González was published with the rogue’s name on the title page as the “real” author; Sieber, 1977, 34.

10. The anonymous author of Estebanillo González dedicated his book to Ottavio Piccolomini, in whose service Estebanillo spent much of his life. Estebanillo is first employed as Piccolomini’s buffoon in chapter seven. See Sieber, 1977, 35.

11. Mandel, 41. See also Twilight of the Medici, 1974.

12. Both quoted in Klaus Lankheit, “Florence under the Late Medici,” in Twilight of the Medici, 1974, 20.

13. Cosimo III demonstrated the depth of his fanaticism by “allow[ing] no professor . . . to read or teach in public or in private, by writing or by voice, the philosophy of , or of atoms, or any save that of .” Hale, 186.

14. Harold Acton, “A Note on the Last Medici,” in Twilight of the Medici, 1974, 16; J.R. Hale records that this event marked the first time in Italy that a printed catalogue was prepared; Hale, 188.

15. Mina Gregori, “Una notiza sul Peruzzini fornita dal Magalotti,” Paragone 15, no. 169 (1964): 24-28; cited in Twilight of the Medici, 1974, 276.

152 16. Jay Tribby, “Club Medici: Natural Experiment and the Imagineering of ‘Tuscany,’” Configurations 2, no. 2 (1994): 215-235.

17. To quote from Carlo Giuseppi Ratti’s published account of 1768-9: “The above mentioned Sovereign, having developed a liking for Magnasco, took him hunting one day. It happened that while they were following some game, they came upon a court jester under a dense tree, who had gone there to relieve his bowels. The hunters, to delight the Grand Duke, pretended that the jester was the game they were following; quickly they rushed upon him with brandished weapons. The poor man, seeing himself thus assaulted, abandoned his britches and implored mercy. The Grand Duke laughed heartily at the scene, and turning to Magnasco, he commissioned him on the spot to capture it in a painting. With a few strokes Magnasco executed it so exactly that he managed to capture to the life all those who were there present.” Quoted after Mandel’s corrections to F.J. Fata’s translation of Ratti: Mandel, 185-186.

18. That the lady with the feathered headdress is Violante is confirmed by a profile portrait of her in an ivory medallion by Balthasar Permoser, discussed in Twilight of the Medici, 1974, 380.

19. Herman Voss suggested that the young man with a melancholy expression behind the prince could be Magnasco; it is also conceivable that the strongly characterized figure with dark hair and a pince-nez behind Violante is Sebastiano Ricci. Herman Voss, “A Re-discovered Picture by Alessandro Magnasco,” Burlington Magazine 71 (October 1937): 171-177. Cited by Marco Chiarini in Twilight of the Medici, 1974, 276.

20. Marco Chiarini likened the work to a photograph, painted to record a scene worth remembering; and noted that the presence of the grand-ducal arms was a token of homage to the ruling family; Twilight of the Medici, 1974, 276.

21. Franchini Guelfi, 1971, 368. Translated by Marco Chiarini in Twilight of the Medici, 1974, 276.

22. Quoted from Ratti, 1768-9; translated in Mandel, 186.

23. See Franchini Guelfi, 1971, 76-78.

24. See for instance Paul Julian Smith’s discussion of the intersection of scatology and wit in his “guide” to El buscón: Paul Julian Smith, Quevedo. El buscón (London: Grant and Cutler, 1991).

25. Grimmelshausen, 87.

26. Cited in Merriman, 42.

27. For more on the readership of picaresque novels, see Helen H. Reed, The Reader in the Picaresque Novel (London: Tamesis Books Limited, 1984.)

153 28. For examples of constructed self-representation by some of Magnasco’s contemporaries compare Magnasco’s fancy figure of Prince Ferdinando in The Hunting Party with Jacopo Amigoni’s Portrait of a Man in a Blue Jacket (c. 1715, Private Collection), Vittore Ghislandi’s Portrait of Count Giovanni Battista Vailetti, (c. 1710, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice), or Giuseppe Maria Crespi’s Cardinal Prospero Lambertini (1740, Palazzo d'Accursio, Bologna).

29. Filippo Baldinucci, Notizie de’ professori del desegno da in qua. v. 5, Paolo Barocchi, ed. (Florence, 1975), 522. Cited in Merriman, 42, n. 9.

30. For two interesting and corroborating accounts of Prince Ferdinando’s patronage of the Accademia del Cimento, particularly in reference to experiments relating to digestion and laxatives, see Tribby, 215-235; and Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527- 1800 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973) passim. According to the Dutch biographer Joan Bos, whose short studies of “Mad Monarchs” are interesting for their own rudely picaresque content, “Gian Gastone was a prematurely aged, fat drunkard, who looked at the world through a more or less permanent haze of intoxication . . . In 1730 Gian Gastone sprained his ankle and took to his bed and from then on he left it only on some very rare occasions. His bed became the center of his existence. He lunched in bed around 5 o'clock in the evening and had supper in it around 2 in the morning. The dogs slept with him in bed and it stank of tobacco, drink, vomit and excrement. From time to time his brother's widow organized the cleaning of his bed until she died in 1731. In his later years Gian Gastone became nearly blind and could hardly walk anymore. He let his fingernails, toenails and beard grow. Gradually he became senile. In June 1737 he became seriously ill, suffering from a large stone in the bladder. He died within a month.” Joan Bos, “Biography of Gian Gastone de’Medici of Tuscany (1671-1737),” published in conjunction with the author’s series on “Mad Monarchs,” http://www.xs4all.nl/~kvenjb/madmonarchs/giangastone/giangastone_bio.htm. Though he edited much of the salacious detail from his 1980 reissue of The Last Medici, Harold Acton remains the most complete source for anecdotes concerning the sexual behaviors of both of the Medici princes. See Acton, 1980, 287-294.

31. In the unpublished first manuscript of the Vite, Carlo Giuseppe Ratti noted, “Home again, [Magnasco] caught hold of a canvas, and rendered the scene so as to make the event even more ridiculous. . . . A very amusing scene, which furnished their Highnesses with laughing matter for a long time”; Ratti, 1768-9; translated in Mandel, 178.

32. For a most thorough listing of the degraded populations of the Italian countryside and parallels drawn with the social landscape of the picaresque novel, see Camporesi, 1996, 4-10.

33. Lankheit, 19.

34. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Sian Reynolds, trans., 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row,1972), 2: 740; quoted in Sieber, 1977, 8.

154 35. Acton, 1980, 169.

36. Camporesi, 1996, 4-5.

37. From another account cited by Acton: “The declining state of this city is very visible, a great deal of the ground within the walls being unbuilt, and many of the houses ill-inhabited, so that it is not very populous; nor are the inhabitants useful, the clergy making up the bulk of the people . . . . I counted above 4000 monks and friars in a procession, besides the secular clergy who are reckoned about half that number. The sick and infirm must also be very numerous where there are so many aged persons.” See Acton, 1980, 280.

38. See Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 70.

39. Rosa’s A Friar Tempted by Demons and Anchorites Tempted by Demons were originally acquired by the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica with attributions to Magnasco. See Introduction, n. 77.

40. See Luigi Salerno, "Four Witchcraft Scenes by Salvator Rosa," Cleveland Museum of Art Bulletin 65 (1978): 224-231.

41. Quoted in Giuliano Briganti, L. Trezzani and L. Laureati, The Bamboccianti: The Painters of Everyday Life in Seventeenth Century Rome, R. E. Wolf, trans. (Rome: Ugo Bozzi, 1983), 356- 357. See also Wendy Wassyng Roworth, “A Date for Salvator Rosa’s Satire on Painting and the Bamboccianti in Rome,” Art Bulletin 63, no. 4 (1981): 611-617.

42. Briganti, Trezzani, and Laureati, 202.

43. See Mira Pajes Merriman, “Comedy, Reality, and the Development of Genre Painting in Italy,” in John T. Spike, Giuseppe Maria Crespi and the Emergence of Genre Painting in Italy (Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 1986), 43.

44. George Syamken noted the popularity of the Spanish novel at the Medici court, a claim repeated by Franchini Guelfi. See Syamken, 95-98; and Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 100-107.

45. Quoted in Scott, 87. Franchini Guelfi referred to the Sweerts painting in her 1977 monograph. Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 34.

46. Gombrich, 1987. Cited in Mandel, 151.

47. Camporesi, 1996, 103.

48. The text is reproduced in Piero Camporesi, ed., Il libro dei vagabondi (Turin: Eunaudi, 1973), 343-346; translated and cited in Camporesi, 1996, 103.

49. The text is referenced in Piero Camporesi, La maschera di Bertoldo: C.G. Croce e la letteratura carnevalesca (Turin: Eunaudi, 1976), 338; translated and cited in Camporesi, 1996,

155 104.

50. Mina Gregori cites Lorenzo Magalotti’s observation in reference to Magnasco’s inventive collaboration with landscape painters in scenes of ostensible “realism.” The “Genoese paints extremely well; [his] figures are very fine and their realism brings out still more the absence of naturalness in the landscape and atmosphere”; Mina Gregori, “Una notica sul Peruzzini fornita dal Magalotti,” Paragone 15, no. 169 (1964): 24-28, (cited in Twilight of the Medici, 1974, 276).

51. We can assume that Magnasco had a good deal of personal exposure to gaming itself. In describing the sordid state of the late Medici court, Harold Acton wrote that “the entertainments of the aristocracy were limited to converzazioni, with card-playing—generally Ombre or Taroc, a game with seventy-two cards, in suits of suns, moons, devils, and monks—for modest stakes, tempered with ‘iced fruits and other pleasant rinfrescatives.’” Acton, 1980, 282.

52. For a discussion of Callot’s continued presence in Italian collectors’ circles see Choné, 220- 223.

53. Mandel, 41.

54. Muti, 206, cat. 40.

55. To quote Klingender, “With the Commedia dell’Arte Callot’s work shares two essential ingredients: a love of grotesque and objective detachment. Both viewed the world as a stage on which they displayed saints and devils, beggars and princes every rank and condition of life with the same mocking artistry . . . Callot’s war prints are among the most brilliant of his designs, a veritable ballet of horror and death”; Klingender, 206.

56. Klingender, 206.

57. See J.M. Ritchie, “Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus and The Runagate Courage,” in Knaves and Swindlers: Essays on the Picaresque Novel in Europe, Christine J. Whitbourn, ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1974).

58. Chandler, 80.

59. Grimmelshausen, 34.

60. For more on picaresque themes centered around warfare, see Sieber, 1977, 43; and Chandler, 1899, 80.

61. For more on the relationship between Estebanillo and Simplicissimus, see Alexander Parker, Literature and the Delinquent (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967), 75-79.

62. Parker is particularly expressive in his descriptions of the lasting (and in his opinion, degrading) influence of Estebanillo’s amoral character type on the trajectory of fictional

156 representations of the soldiering life; Parker, 76-77.

63. Muti, 256, cat. 325; Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 89-91.

64. Ratti, 1768-69. Reprinted in Mandel, 177.

65. Though it was a widely held social convention, it is mentioned in the second book of Guzmán de Alfarache that beggars in Rome were expected to keep mongrels. Magnasco and countless other artists paired their bohemian itinerants with scruffy dogs; cited in Gray, 56.

66. Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 97-99.

67. To quote Franchini Guelfi in her discussion of the romanzo picaresca as “l’unica fonte di queste tipiche iconografi del Callot e del Magnasco”; “Il romanzo picaresco perciò, ben lungi dal riflettere la realtà, si inserrisce in un ‘genere’ che appare eterodosso e ‘diverso’ solo se, paragonandolo alle opere concotte secondo lo stile ‘ sommo o tragico,’ non si considerano queste sue radici culturali che affondano profondamente nelle convenzioni della retorica letteraria.” See Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 98.

68. Klingender, 205-206.

69. Edward J. Sullivan, “Jacques Callot’s Les Bohemiens,” Art Bulletin 59, no. 2 (June 1977): 217-221.

70. Francois de Vaux de Foletier, Mille ans d’histoire des Tsiganes (Paris: Fayard, 1970), 28-41; cited in Sullivan, 1977, 221.

71. From the Oxford English Dictionary definition of “tableau”: A representation of the action at some stage in a play, created by the actors suddenly holding their positions or ‘freezing’, esp. at a moment critical to the plot, or at the end of a scene or act; also, as a stage direction. Hence used transf. to express the sudden creation of a striking or dramatic situation, a ‘scene’, which it is left to the reader to imagine”; Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “Tableau.”

72. Referencing Mateo Alemán’s chosen subtitle for Guzmán. See Bjornson, 66.

73. Quoted from Franchini Guelfi, 1991, 22. For a summary of the present state of the argument for Magnasco’s relationship with picaresque literature, see Franchini Guelfi, 1991, 22-23.

74. See Planiscig, 247-248; Syamken, 112, 114-116, 119; and for a most concise statement, Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 98.

75. See Chapter 5 of Anne J. Cruz’s Discourses on Poverty, entitled “From Pícaro to Soldier”; Cruz, 160-206. Cruz justifies the inclusion of soldiers’ tales in the picaresque canon, reflecting the basic thrust of her book—the intersection of literary with non-literary texts and their location within specific socio-historical contexts. (She also reminds us that a term often given as the

157 etymological root of pícaro has to do with “piker,” a soldier carrying a pike/pica).

76. These provide pecific text-based examples that Franchini Guelfi never included in her discussion of Magnasco’s artistic affinity for picaresque subject matter: Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 96-105.

77. For a thorough analysis of Estebanillo González as the “autobiography of a cynical, debauched soldier during the Thirty-Years War,” see Nicholas Spadaccini and Anthony N. Zahareas, eds., La vida y hechos de Estebanillo González: Hombre de buen humor (Madrid: Clasicos Castalia, 1978), 15-29; cited in Francis L. Trice, “La vida y hechos de Estebanillo González: Hombre de buen humor,” [book review], Hispania 63, no. 4 (1980): 775.

78. For more on Estebanillo as the “typical picaresque soldier,” see Chandler, 80-81. Guzmán also described the trick of accepting a soldier’s socorro (part of allowance paid to soldiers in advance) only to desert; Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., v. 2, 154; cited in Gray, 84.

79. Vanillo Gonzales, J.C. Nimmo and Bain, trans., 205-206.

80. Chandler, 56.

81. Refering to the term of art first used in the fronticepiece to La pícara Justina (1605; Figure 4).

82. Blackburn, 8, 64.

83. Note use of the term “dialogistic,” (i.e. Having the nature or form of dialogue; taking part in dialogue; argumentative), in contrast to Bakhtinian “dialogism,” which is active in the relationship between the picaresque text and Magnasco’s painted images of picaresque derivation: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “Dialogistic.”

84. For two seminal articles on narrative grammar and the use of first person in the picaresque see Claudio Guillén, “La disposición temporal del Lazarillo de Tormes,” Hispanic Review 25, no. 4 (1957): 264-279; and Douglas M. Carey, “Lazarillo de Tormes and the Quest for Authority,” PMLA 94, no. 1 (1979): 36-46.

85. The knowledge that would provide visual inspiration for the “vivid and continuous fictional dream” experienced during reading. I here borrow John Gardner’s now much utilized concept, the “vivid and continuous fictional dream,” in describing the process of imagining the visual elements of prose discription during reading. See John Garner, The Art of Fiction (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1984).

86. Of course the author, limited by time and pages and a personal desire not to be condemned by punitive authorities for overreaching with his irony or parody, must constantly exclude words and thus leave it to the reader to fill in missing information so as to complete fully the cycle of communication.

158 87. For more on the role of the audience in fulfilling the dialogical potential of the picaresque novel see Maria Shetsova, “Dialogism in the Novel and Bakhtin's Theory of Culture,” New Literary History 23, no. 3 (1992): 747-763.

88. The term “dialogism” may be defined as “the discussion of a subject under the form of a dialogue, to the personages of which the author imputes ideas and sentiments,” while alternately referencing Mikhail Bakhtin’s intertextual theory of the dialogical: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “Dialogism.”

89. Ratti, 1768-69; reprinted in Mandel, 176, 179, 184.

90. Ratti, 1768-69; reprinted in Mandel, 176.

91. Camporesi, 1996, 99.

92. Camporesi, 1996, 103.

93. Camporesi, 1996, 95-108.

94. Ratti’s choice of words seems peculiar to me, and yet emphasizes the underlying importance of Magnasco’s aestheticizing approach to these decrepit subjects. Ratti, 1768-69; reprinted in Mandel, 183

95. For a recent arguement for the expansion of “text” to incorporate objects of visual culture, see Best, 291-300.

96. This continued from Magnasco’s early “copies” through to the painter’s mature works on related subjects. As late as 1730, Magnasco was still drawing some of his compositions directly from Callot’s prints. Assault of the Brigands, a collaboration with Giuseppe Antonio Pianca, (c. 1730, The Collection of Alberto Robbiati, Lodi; Figure 57), recreated the scene of highway robbery depicted in La Caverne des brigands, the fifth plate from Callot’s Les Caprices (Figure 31).

97. Maurice Vaussard, Daily Life in Eighteenth Century Italy, Michael Heron, trans. (New York: McMillan, 1963), 126-129.

98. Franchini Guelfi goes so far as to credit Magnasco and Callot both as documenting “storie contemporanee . . . un’iconografia estremamente ‘realistica..’” See Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 95.

99. See Bert S. Hall, “Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, , and Tactics,” Johns Hopkins Studies in the 22 (1997): 192-199.

100. For a fascinating character study of the martial life in Baroque Europe, see Geoffry Parker, “The Soldier,” in Baroque Personae, Rosario Villari, ed. Lydia G. Cochrane, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 32-56.

159 101. Sullivan, 1977, 217, 220-221.

102. For a discussion that ranges across literary forms but includes the picaresque, discussing the philosphical and aesthetic adjustments made by early modern writers as to the “clamorous inclusion of fire weaponry into contemporary strife,” see Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); quoted from Eileen Reeves, “History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic, [book review]” Speculum, 72, no. 2 (1997): 537-539.

103. H.J.C. von Grimmelshausen, The Adventurous Simplicissimus, A.T.S. Goodrick, trans. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), 8-9.

104. Grimmelshausen, 8.

105. For a more expansive discussion of the conceptual relationship shared by Callot and Grimmelshausen, I know of only one unpublished resource, referenced by the institutional web page of the Germanistisches Institut der RWTH , a seminar paper produced by a graduate student of philology: Sabine Lay, “Callot und Grimmelshausen” (seminar paper, Germanistisches Institut der RWTH Aachen, 2002).

106. Grimmelshausen, 71.

107. Though post-dating this discussion by several centuries, it is noteworthy that the most recent and authoritative English-language translation of Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus was published with a reproduction of Callot’s La Pendaison as its cover illustration. See Grimmelshausen, cover.

108. Grimmelshausen, 9.

109. There appears to be a second scene of abuse occuring through the side door, out in the farm yard. In Simplicissimus’s words, “One heard some of them scream most piteously in diverse corners of the house.” See Grimmelshausen, 9-10.

110. Most picaresque heroes, at one time or another, are taken into custody on criminal charges, sometimes legitimate and sometimes fabricated. Guzmán, Justina, Estebanillo, Pablos el buscón, and Gil Blas each serve time.

111. Franchini Guelfi and Muti both suggest that Magnasco worked with an anonymous collaborator on this painting, while Geiger, usually a reliable connoisseur, withholds judgment, suggesting that Magnasco may have been the sole author of this canvas. See Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 91; Muti, 265, cat. 378; and Geiger, 1949, 22-23.

112. Claudio Guillén spends considerable energy on the discussion of the “prison tract” aspects of the picaresque narrative—the description of prison life, mores, and tortures, “oscillating between the symbolical and the descriptive, the general and the particular, the sociological and the psychological.” See Guillén, 1987, 294-308.

160 113. Franchini Guelfi, for instance, defaults to a vague suggestion that Magnasco found Callot to be interesting enough to copy, but does not reference any contemporaneous parallels in regards to subject matter, real or imaginary: “Questa tematica, del tutto ignorata nella cultura pittorica italiana e ben viva, invece, nella pittura nordica, svolge un discorso che ai primi del Settecento - cioè quasi un secolo dopo - viene evidentemente recepito con estremo interesse in funzione di nuovi indirizzi culturali; poichè è certamente nell'ambito di nuovi orientamenti di pensiero che le storie amarissime del Callot vengono recuperate dal Magnasco.” See Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 91.

114. See Chapter 9, “Trial and Punishment,” in Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 193-213.

115. Most readily illustrated by an anecdote from Acton: “In 1672, for instance, a certain Alessandro Cornesi killed his wife and wounded his young nephew. Cosimo, ever an ‘epicure of souls,’ ordered him to be ‘executed at the gallows and quartered,’ and wished to have him tortured with red-hot pincers, but he was advised against this by the examining magistrate because of the disgust that it would give the city to see him thus tormented, whence he was absolved from this form of punishment at the said examining magistrate’s request”; Acton, 1980, 191.

116. For a survey of crime and punishment in early-modern Florence, see John K. Brackett, Criminal Justice and Crime in Late Renaissance Florence, 1537-1609 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

117. Acton, 1980, 194.

118. C.V. Young, The Medici (New York: The Modern Library Inc., 1930), 712.

119. Lankheit, 19-20.

120. Lacy Collison-Morley recorded the use of the strappado in the torture of Guglielmo Piazza, a Commissioner of Health in Milan who was mistakenly arrested while carrying out his duties to identify plague houses: “He denied the accusations, so they put him to the torture, beginning with the cord, the strappado. This was long the commonest form of torture in Italy and also a favorite punishment. The cord was to be seen in all public places and could be used even by inferior police officers, as well as by nobles in their castles. The prisoner’s hands were tied behind his back and fastened to the cord, which was raised and jerked, so as to dislocate the shoulder blades. Piazza held out for a time, but finally promised to tell everything, if he were released.”: Lacy Collison-Morley, Italy after the Renaissance: Decadence and Display in the Seventeenth Century (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1931), 116.

121. Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 90.

122. Lazarillo did serve a brief stint working as a lackey for an inquisitor’s bailiff, but he gave the job up as too dangerous after watching his master endure beatings with clubs and rocks rather than stand down from his duty to bring in a heretic. See Lazarillo, Rudder, trans., 95.

161 123. For a fascinating discussion of the tenuous psychological differences between the picaresque author and the picaresque protagonist in matters of Inquisitorial predation, see Matthew Warshawsky, “A Spanish Converso’s Quest for Justice: The Life and Dream Fiction of Antonio Enríquez Gómez,” Shofar 23, no. 3 (2005): 1-24.

124. Bjornson writes of the picaresque novel’s function as a rhetorical device to plead for the justice and tolerance denied to the converso, citing a parable from Juan de Luna’s Segunda parte de Lazarillo de Tormes about a farmer whose pears become so famous that the Inquisitor desires to sample them. “If the pear tree stands for fruitful human endeavor, the invidious consequences of the Inquisition become evident: it inspires an irrational fear capable of destroying not only the products of human labor, but also the very capacity to produce.” See Bjornson, 97.

125. For more on García, see Bjornson, 97, 99-100.

126. Sherman Eoff marked this episode as the point at which Guzmán, “turns the deceptiveness of society to his account by using it to justify his own fraudulence”; Sherman Eoff, “The Picaresque Psychology of Guzmán de Alfarache,” Hispanic Review 21, no. 2 (April, 1953): 107- 119; see Alemán, Brady trans., 2: 170-176.

127. Alonso de Castillo y Solórzano, Aventuras del Bachiller Trapaza, in La novela picaresca española, Angel Valbuena Prat, ed. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1946), 1476; cited in Childers, 190, 210.

128. Lazarillo, Rudder, trans., 100; cited in Chandler, 90.

129. Alemán, Brady, trans., 1: 141-142.

130. Sarcastically called cuadrilleros (ringleaders) and lumbreras (luminaries), “Patrolmen of the Inquisition described as vicious, inhuman, false testifiers who take advantage of their office to rob freely and work mischief”; Gray, 19.

131. After Guzmán was pummeled, carefully searched, and then bound with cords for the return trip to Seville, one of the constables says with surprise to his companion, “‘God forgive me, brother, but I think we may have been too precipitate and are deceived; the fellow that we are in pursuit of has no thumb on his left hand, and this chap has all his fingers perfect,’ The constable hearing this, drew forth his instructions and read them aloud. The thief was there described in a manner very different from my appearance; for besides that he wanted a thumb, it was there stated that he was nineteen or twenty years of age, and had long black hair falling over his back like a horse’s tail; instead of which no one could mistake me to be more than fourteen, and my hair was very short, of a reddish color, and much curled.” See Alemán, Brady trans., 1: 143.

132. Alemán, Brady, trans., 1: 144.

133. Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 5: 145; cited in Gray, 27.

134. Vanillo Gonzales, J.C. Nimmo and Bain, trans., 403.

162 135. For more on the tactics employed by inquisitorial marshals, see John Tedeschi, The Prosecution of Heresy: Collected Studies on the Inquisition in Early Modern Italy (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1991).

136. The officer laughs off Estebanillo’s efforts to seize and grapple with him, saying, “Young gentleman you are taking dangerous measures; you may, perhaps, be ignorant of the respect which is due to this high tribunal. All persons, of whatever quality or condition, who are arrested by its officers, surrender themselves without resistance; and if any one, which is very rare, either from ignorance or obstinancy, shows the slightest disposition to resist, all persons are bound to aid in executing the order of the Grand Inquisition. Come, therefore, quietly with me, unless you rather choose to be dragged ignominiously along by force and violence.” Quoted from The History of Vanillo Gonzales, surnamed The Merry Bachelor (London: J.C. Nimmo and Bain, 1881), 317-318.

137. Vanillo Gonzales, J.C. Nimmo and Bain, trans., 319-321.

138. Vanillo Gonzales, J.C. Nimmo and Bain, trans., 320, 325, 328.

139. Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 157.

140. According to Chandler, addressing picaresque satire on the church: “In the main it was not seriously meant; and although it never hesitated to signalize inconsistencies, it does not often venture to suggest reform.” Very often, readers were advised through publishing devices that “all the book contains is subject to the correction of the Roman Church and the Holy Inquisition, and that wherever a bad example occurs in the text, reference is to be made forthwith to the aprovechamiento at the end of the section.” See Chandler, 91-92.

141. See Fausta Franchini Guelfi, “La pittura di Alessandro Magnasco dalle fonti figurative e culturali alle tenebre della realtà,” in Marco Bona Castellotti, ed., Alessandro Magnasco, 1667- 1749 (Milan: Electa, 1996), 33-37.

142. Though my descriptions here focus on the artists’ links to portrayals of inquisitorial interrogations in the picaresque novel, for an interesting discussion on the wider practices of the inquisitorial courtroom, see John Tedeschi, “The Roman Inquisition and Witchcraft: An Early Seventeenth-Century ‘Instruction’ on Correct Trial Procedure,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 2 (1983): 163-188.

143. Vanillo Gonzales, J.C. Nimmo and Bain, trans., 321.

144. The statistics compiled by Jaime Contreras and Gustav Henningsen reveal that the Spanish Inquisition put to death only 1.8 percent of those brought to trial. See Gustav Henningsen and John Tedeschi, eds. The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods (Dekalb, IL; Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 112-113.

163 145. One exception, not couched in the inquisitorial environment, is Pablos’s description of his father’s execution, as relayed to him in a letter from his uncle, where the details of the man’s hanging and dismemberment are told: Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 157.

146. Cited in Chandler, 85. See also Julie Greer Johnson, “Picaresque Elements in Carlos Sigüenza y Gongora's Los Infortunios de Alonso Ramirez,” Hispania 64, no. 1 (1981): 61-67.

147. Cited in Chandler, 86.

148. Cervantes, de Onis, trans., 258-259

149. Grimmelshausen, 44.

150. According to Frank Wadleigh Chandler, “Under no possible circumstances are the guilty detected or apprehended; the innocent, with the abuse and supreme contempt of their captors, are marched off, but the rogues, when they lodge in prison, most often go thither by error.” See Chandler, 84.

151. Anonymous, Lazarillo de Tormes, A Dual-Language Book, Stanley Applebaum, ed. and trans. (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications Inc., 2001), 4.

152. See for example, David Gilitz, “Inquisition Confessions and Lazarillo de Tormes,” Hispanic Review 68, no. 1 (Winter, 2000): 53-74; and Maximilian E. Novak’s discussion of the intersection of the “grotesque” elements of the picaresque tradition with the implements of torture utilized by the Catholic inquisition: Maximilian E. Novak, “Gothic Fiction and the Grotesque,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 13, no. 1 (1979): 50-67.

153. Chone, 410.

154. Most famous among these is Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s verse-drama “Life is a Dream,” (1637) set in the towers and dungeons of a fortress in a mythical Polish kingdom on the verge of civil war; see Edwin Honig, trans., Pedro Calderón de la Barca: Life is a Dream (New York: Hill and Wang Inc., 1970.) For further discussion, see Edward Peters’s cultural history of the Inquisition, particularly Chapter 5, “The Invention of the Inquisition,” and Chapter 7, “The Inquisition in Literature and Art”; Edward Peters, Inquisition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 122-154, 189-230.

155. For a record of Magnasco’s limited involvement in the production of the opera see Castellotti, 168.

156. See John Tedeschi, “Literary Piracy in Seventeenth-century Florence: Giovanni Battista Neri’s De iudice S. inquisitionis opusculum,” Huntingdon Library Quarterly 50 (1987): 107-118.

157. Maurice Bloomfield, “Joseph and Potiphar in Hindu Fiction,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 54 (1923): 141-167.

164 158. Alemán, Brady, trans., 2: 35-61.

159. Castellotti, 168-169.

160. Eoff, 119.

161. Enrique Moreno Baez, Lección y sentido del “Guzmán de Alfarache” (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1948); cited in Eoff, 108.

162. Eoff, 113-114.

163. For a thorough discussion of Quevedo’s El buscón and his employment of dualities relating to fashionable self presentation—body/soul, interior/exterior, social consummation—see Malcolm K. Read, “Language and the Body in Francisco de Quevedo,” MLN 99, no. 2 (1984): 235-255.

164. Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 158-159.

165. For example, “a cloth doublet reaching halfway down his walloon breeches, a cloak to match, and a ruff so arranged as to hide the tears in the materials. His breeches were made of camelot, but only as far as they could be seen, the rest being of colored felt.” Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 130.

166. To continue with another description of the recycling of clothes as a social subterfuge: “For example: you see this doublet, sir—it was first a pair of gregs, and it is the grandchild of a cape and great grandchild of a hooded cloak, which was the original garment.” Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 122-123

167. Guzmán also describes the process of culebra, “the hazing that old prisoners give to the novices.” See Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 2: 69; cited in Gray, 27.

168. Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 156.

169. Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 157

170. Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 157.

171. Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., v. 5, 130-131; cited in Gray, 27.

172. , “Entremés famoso de la Cárcel de Sevilla,” in Las Comedias de Lope de Vega, Vol. 7 (Madrid, 1617), 103; cited in Guillén, 1987, 305.

173. Consider George Boas’s interesting thesis in which he discusses how paintings like Magnasco’s or Salvator Rosa’s bandit images take on the reflexive function of realistic literature, how they “may start from an historical incident, may seem to illustrate a fact, but they are not about that incident or fact, they are about themselves.” See George Boas, “The Social

165 Responsibility of the Artist,” College Art Journal 6, no. 4 (1948): 270-276.

174. Picaresque authors paid relatively little attention to pursuits, (i.e. the books were not written with painted, graphic, or cinematic adaptation in mind.) Which is not to say that picaresque authors ignored the art professions entirely. Lazarillo worked for a time as a tambourine painter’s assistant, and Guzmán de Alfarache routinely employed metaphors from painting and sculpture in reflecting on his escapades, begging the reader’s pardon, for example, because his tongue was “such a rude brush.” See Vivian Folkenflick, “Vision and Truth: Baroque Art Metaphors in Guzmán de Alfarache,” MLN 88, no. 2 (1973): 347-355.

175. Gerald Gillespie concisely summarized this point in his 1971 review of Alexander Parker’s Literature and the Delinquent as the resolution of “acts of a world drama pattered (inversely in terms of social success for the protagonist) on the Christian historical scheme of salvation”: Gerald Gillespie, “Literature and the Delinquent: The Picaresque Novel in Spain and Europe, 1599-1753,” [book review] Comparative Literature 23, no. 3 (1971): 280-282.

176. Ulrich Wicks includes “freedom” among his “picaresque modes”: “Another picaresque theme is ‘Freedom,’ which is partly an exploration of the of entrapment in freedom. The pícaro is freed, usually by necessity, from the confines of ordinary social life, and he roams the landscape; this is paralleled on the narrative plane by his desire to ‘free’ himself from his life by turning it into art.” See Wicks, 1974, 246.

177. Contrast this with the dialogism between works of picaresque naturalism and the moralizing postures of the novels.

178. Franchini Guelfi describes Magnasco’s Ritrovo di pícaros e di soldati as “Il tema di derivazione letterarie è ascrivibile alle conoscenze che il Magnasco aveva del romanzo picaresco” and “Il pícaros tutti coloro che, privi di un’attività precisa nell’ambito della legalità, vivono vagabondando e ricorrendo ad espedienti più o meno truffaldini; per lo più truffatori, bari, accattoni, spesso anche ladri e briganti di strada.” See Franchini Guelfi, 1991, 22; quoted in Castellotti, 170.

179. Angelo J. DiSalvo used this rather modish expression in categorizing the picaresque genre in contrast to more ascetic, meditative literary forms in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain; Angelo J. DiSalvo, “The Ascetical Meditative Literature of Renaissance Spain: An Alternative to Amadís, Elisa and Diana,” Hispania 69, no. 3 (1986): 470.

180. See n. 70.

181. Cervantes, de Onis, trans., 177-178.

182. “Society Through the Rogue’s Eye” is the title of the third chapter of Chandler’s history of the picaresque; Chandler, 78-183.

183. Chandler, 78.

166 184. Though the question of reader response is seldom addressed in literary histories of the picaresque, in his survey of Spanish Baroque literary phenomena, John Beverly couches the diversionary, travelogue aspects of the picaresque alongside the “escapism of the Baroque pastoral.” See John Beverly, “Going Baroque?” Boundary 2 (1988): 27-39.

185. While Chapter 3 will explore issues of readership in greater depth, for a thorough discussion of the various kinds of picaresque readership, see Helen H. Reed, The Reader in the Picaresque Novel (London: Tamesis Books Limited, 1984).

186. For more on the pícaro’s end-all libertas, see Maximilian E. Novak, “Liberty, Libertinism and Randomness: Form and Content in Picaresque Fiction,” Studies in the Novel 4 (1972): 75-85.

187. See Wicks, 1974, 242. Taking Wicks’s concept a step further, in Magnasco’s painterly mode the gallery of picaresque types becomes the landscape: more than any shadowy garret, jail cell, or colonnade, the figures are what the paintings are about. These impossibly tall chicken carvers, the smokers with their vast moustaches, the shirtless men in the center-foreground grooming themselves in Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros and Halt of the Brigands course and flow into each other in a manner akin to the grotesque ornamental style—where the human contents of the scene literally blend into the settings—though they fall well short of the period’s most consummate picaresque-cum-grotesque adaptation, the gypsy-filled landscapes of the toile de Jouy, in which the gallery of human types is woven from the very same thread that forms the trees, the paths, and the ruined watchtowers (Figure 69). Giovanni Perini referenced Magnasco’s grotesque affinities in his 1991 review of the exhibition “Settecento Lombardo” at the in Milan. See Giovanni Perini, “Settecento Lombardo. Milan, Palazzo Reale,” Burlington Magazine 133, no. 1038 (1991): 339-340.

188. Quoted from Monique Riccardi-Cubitt: “Grotesque” Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press, [January 22, 2006], http://www.groveart.com/.

189. Bakhtin reminds us that the term “grotesque” has been expanded from its classical roots into the culture of folk humor: “The initial meaning of the term was in the beginning extremely narrow, describing the rediscovered form of Roman ornament. But in reality this form was but a fragment of the immense world of grotesque imagery which existed throughout all the stages of antiquity and continued to exist in the and the Renaissance. The fragment reflected the characteristic feature of this immense world, and thus a further productive life was ensured for the new term, with gradual extension to the almost immeasurable of grotesque imagery.” See Bakhtin, 1984, 32-33.

190. Wicks, 1974, 242.

191. Quoted from Wicks, 1974, 242. For more on the range of humor in the picaresque novel see James R. Stamm, “Uses and Types of Humor in the Picaresque Novel,” Hispania 42, no. 4 (1959): 482-487.

167 192. Anthony Close, “Psychology and Function in the Comic Characters of Spanish Golden-Age Literature,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 81, no. 4-5 (2004): 1-14.

193. Bakhtin, 1984, 11.

194. Quoted from Renate Lachmann, Raoul Eshelman, and Marc Davis, “Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture,” Cultural Critique 11 (Winter 1988-1989): 115-152.

195. For discussion on the role of an “ambivalent and contradictory” grotesquerie in shaping the carnivalesque landscape see Bakhtin, 1984, 18-30.

196. Bakhtin, 1984, 55.

197. For a thorough discussion of the pícaro’s engagement with legitimate and illegitimate character-defining agents, see David R. Castillo, (A)wry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes and the Early Picaresque (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2001), 15-28.

198. Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 150.

199. Alemán, Brady, trans., v. 2, 7-12.

200. Cervantes, de Onis, trans., 163-201.

201. Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 220.

202. “Cortadillo the Good (for by this title and sobriquet he is to be known henceforth.)” See Cervantes, de Onis, trans., 183.

203. One exception from Guzmán de Alfarache should be noted, the poor mendinga of Rome who became very wealthy, but continued to beg through force of habit: Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 3: 241-242; cited in Gray, 23.

204. Vanillo Gonzales, J.C. Nimmo and Bain, trans., 240-242.

205. See Dunn, 1993, 223; and Laura J. Gorfkle, Discovering the Comic in “Don Quixote (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 23-24.

206. Fundamental to Bakhtin’s socio-linguistic theory is this “ambivalence” of the carnivalesque, where degredation and renewal, death and rebirth always result in the reestablishment of societal norms and the reinforcement of the hegemony of the secular and spiritual rulers of a community. For an interesting critical reading of Bakhtin, particularly on his seemingly tautological theories of “cycles of ambivalence,”see Richard M. Berrong, Rabelais and Bakhtin: Popular Culture in Gargantua and Pantagruel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 30-44.

207. These quotes are spoken by a prisoner that Estebanillo encounters at the moment of his release from a thirty-six-year sentence. Vanillo Gonzales, J.C. Nimmo and Bain, trans., 290-291.

168 208. Here I am not referencing any specific cultural construct of Cockaigne, rather the general term as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, “Name of an imaginary country, the abode of luxury and idleness”; Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “Cockaigne.”

209. The English term “poltroon,” (“a spiritless coward, a worthless wretch”) is likely derived from the same root. See Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 2: 191; cited in Gray, 57.

210. Quoted in Piero Camporesi, La Maschera di Bertoldo: G. C. Croce e la letteratura carnevalesca (Turin, 1976), 338; cited in Camporesi, 1996, 103.

211. Quoted from Lachman, Eschelman, and Davis, 118.

212. Camporesi, 1996, 106-114.

213. Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 5: 60-61; cited in Gray, 26.

214. Dunn, 1993, 16.

215. Camporesi, 1996, 110-111, n. 49.

216. Barzeletta in contrasto del cortese bravo e del zani poltron [The comic tale of the courteous swaggerer and the idle servant], in Opera nuova di stanzem capitoli, barzelette, e altri nuovi suggetti: composta per Zan Bagotto, poco in testa e manco indosso, e niente in borsa, alias della Casada del Nullatenentis . . ., [A new work of poems burlesques, comic tales and other new subjects: by Zan Bagotto, with little in his head, less on his back, and nothing at all in his pocket, otherwise known as a member of the Noble House of the Penniless], quoted in L. Stoppato, La commedia popolare in Italia (Padua, 1887), 113-114; cited in Camporesi, 1996, 207.

217. For a brief biography of Daniello Bartoli, see Edward P. Spillane, “Bartoli, Daniello,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 2 (New York: The Robert Appleton Company, 1907).

218. Vanillo Gonzales, J.C. Nimmo and Bain, trans., 453.

219. For more on the concept of the “theater of ruins” see Daniello Bartoli, La povertá contenta, descritta e dedicata a’ richhi non mai contenti (Venice: G. Zini, 1678), 31; cited in Camporesi, 1996, 190, n. 11.

220. Bartoli, 1678, 31-32; quoted in Camporesi, 1996, 7.

221. The soldier’s ultimate devaluing of both natural wonders and artifacts of antiquity may be summarized in the line, “How I should like to blow up a great part of this and make things easier for travelers”; Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 99.

222. See for example, Soldiers, Gypsies, and Gamers (c. 1720-25, Museum der Stadt, Heidelberg [Muti, cat. 135, p. 394]); Soldiers and Singers (c. 1720-25, Museum der Stadt, Heidelberg [Muti, cat. 134, p. 395]); Gamers in a Roman Ruin (c. 1725, Private Collection, Genoa [Muti, cat. 128,

169 p. 423]); Architectural Ruin with Soldiers and Picaros (c. 1725-30, Lechi Collection, Brescia [Muti, cat. 34, p. 426]); and Soldiers and Beggars in a Ruin ( c. 1725-30, Lechi Collection, Brescia [ Muti, cat. 35, p. 427]).

223.Washington Irving, Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, The Alhambra (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1991), 770.

224. Chandler, 78.

225. For more on the philosophical pessimism that underlies picaresque delinquency, see Parker, 85-106.

226. Chandler, 78-183.

227. For more on the breakdown between the documentary and imaginary impulses within picaresque works of literature see Ulrich Wicks, Picaresque Narrative, Picaresque Fictions: a Theory and Research Guide (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1989).

228. As Klingender summarizes, “Magnasco progressively stripped the fantastic element of its realistic content”; Klingender, 205.

229. Giovanni Agostino de Cosmi translated and quoted in Anna Maria Rao, “Enlightenment and Reform,” John A. Davis, trans, in Early Modern Italy, John A. Marino, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 249. For notes on the rise of social services in late-Baroque Italy, see Rao, 229-243; and Gregory Hanlon, Early Modern Italy, 1550-1800 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 205-239.

230. To borrow Blackburn’s concept, an adventuresome vision “steeped in baroque illusionism.” See Blackburn, 15.

231. For the stop-start nature of the early reform movement in Italy, see Stuart Woolf, A History of Italy, 1700-1860: The Social Constraits of Political Change (New York: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1986), 10-44.

232. This idea of “presumed motivation” (as understood by the readers who approached genre novels as entertainments) must be contrasted with what were obviously more complex impulses propelling the author’s often critical appraisal of the religious and socio-economic underpinnings of la vida picaresca. Adapted from Dunn, 1993, 85.

233. For ideas on the “idleness of the novel reader” (implying that little was at stake beyond entertainment) see for example Walter L. Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel: the Quixotic Versus the Picaresque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 25-29.

234. Cervantes’s “Master Glass” lamented just this sort of trickery, those “mere vagabonds who treated sacred things with indecency, for in their shows they hold devoutness up to laughter.”

170 Cervantes, de Onis, trans., 83.

235. Chandler, 78.

236. Lazarillo works for a phony indulgence peddler in the fifth tratado of his story:Lazarillo de Tormes, Rudder, trans., 81-92.

237. Vanillo Gonzales, J.C. Nimmo and Bain, trans., 296-317.

238. Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 87.

239. Camporesi, 1996, 111, cites the influence of Pietro Passi’s study of conjurer-like charlatanism over picaresque representations of the hustles of magicians in Italy; Pietro Passi, Della magic’arte overo della magia naturale (Venice: G. Violati, 1614).

240. “God will this does you some good!” Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 1: 107; cited in Gray, 19-20.

241. Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 2: 184; cited in Gray, 86.

242. Vicente Espinel, La vida de Marcos de Obregón, in La novela picaresca española, Angel Valueba y Prat, ed. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1946), 1025; cited in Childers, 57.

243. Jerónimo de Alcalá Yañez y Ribera’s El donado hablador, Alonso moso de muchos amos, in La novela picaresca española, Angel Valueba y Prat, ed. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1946), 1313; cited in Childers, 101.

244. Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo, El necio bien afortunado, in La novela picaresca española, Angel Valueba y Prat, ed. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1946), 271; cited in Childers, 10.

245. Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 86-89.

246. Parker, Literature and the Delinquent, 4.

247. Cited in Richard Bjornson, “‘Estebanillo González: The Clown’s Other Face,” Hispania 60, no. 3 (1977): 436-442.

248. Grimmelshausen, 64.

249. Cervantes, de Onis, trans., 33.

250. Cervantes, de Onis, trans., 254.

251. For discussion of the role of food and cookery in Guzmán de Alfarache, see Nina Cox Davis, “Indigestion and Edification in the Guzmán de Alfarache,” MLN 104, no. 2 (1989): 304- 314.

171 252. Henri Guerreiro traces the character of the entrepreneurial court cook in several literary sources of the period, arguing that the figure functions as an index of corruption in the dominant political hierarchy; Henri Guerreiro, “Guzmán y el cocinero o del estilo de servir a principes. Breve cala y cata en el parasitismo del mundo aristocrático,” Criticón 28 (1984): 137-139; cited in Cox Davis, 308.

253. Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 2; 154; cited in Cox Davis, 305, 308.

254. Alemán, Brady, trans., 1: 279-281.

255. Alemán, Brady, trans., 1: 274.

256. Alemán, Brady, trans., 1: 283.

257. For a thorough discussion of the role of galleys in maritime commerce and warfare in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Paul W. Bamford, Fighting Ships and Prisons: The Mediterranean Galleys of France in the Age of Louis X IV (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973); cited from Byron D. Cannon, “Fighting Ships and Prisons: The Mediterranean Galleys of France in the Age of Louis XIV,” [book review] The International Journal of African Historical Studies 10, no. 2 (1977): 352-354.

258. Franchini Guelfi, 1992, 102; also cited in Muti, 204.

259. I should concede that Malraux’s mention of Magnasco was essayistic and not in the context of any larger consideration of the artist’s oeuvre or conceptual relationship with picaresque literary representations of related subjects; André Malraux, Le museé imaginaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 50; cited in Muti, 204.

260. See Bamford, 40-41.

261. Cited in Chandler, 33.

262. The sculptor’s macabre utilization of the Genoese bagnes is noted in R.W. Lightbown, “Gaetano Giulio Zumbo: Genoa and France,” Burlington Magazine 106, no. 741 (1964): 563- 567.

263. Citing the summary of the enterprise as phrased by Lionel Casson in “Galley Slaves,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 97 (1966), 44.

264. Cervantes, de Onis, trans., 66.

265. Cervantes, de Onis, trans., 169.

266. Cervantes, de Onis, trans., 175.

267. Cited in Chandler, 87.

172 268. Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 152-155.

269. Already in the first part of Don Quixote (1605), Cervantes parodied the conventions of the new picaresque genre in the famous encounter between the protagonist and “Ginés de Pasamonte,” a galley slave who is writing his Life: “‘And is it finished?’ asked Don Quixote. ‘How can it be finished,’ answered he, ‘when my life is not yet finished? What is written is from my birth to the point when they sent me to the galleys this last time.’” Cited in Barbara Fuchs, “An English Pícaro in New Spain: Miles Philips and the Framing of National Identity,” New Centenial Review 2, no. 1 (2002): 55-68.

270. Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 3: 278; cited in Gray, 24.

271. Alemán, Brady, trans., 2: 348.

272. Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 5: 159; cited in Gray, 47.

273. Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 3: 218; cited in Gray, 89.

274. Alemán, Brady, trans., 2: 348.

275. Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 5: 132-133; cited in Gray, 16.

276. Alemán, Brady, trans., 2: 350.

277. Alemán, Brady, trans., 2: 351.

278. Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 5: 176; cited in Gray, 27.

279. Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 5: 141; cited in Gray, 48.

280. Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 5: 150; cited in Gray, 80.

281. Other works centered on a single figure would include Lo schiavo barbiere (The Slave Barber) ( c. 1725, Private Collection), Concertino (c. 1730, Private Collection), and Davanti al camino (By the Fireplace) (c. 1730, Private Collection). Noted in Franchini Guelfi, 1991, figs. 19, 21, and 27. See also the entry for Magnasco in R. Ward Bissell, Andria Derstine, and Dwight Miller, eds., Masters of Italian Baroque Painting, The Detroit Institute of Arts, (London: D Giles Limited, 2005), 125.

282. The painting was exhibited in the United States in 1967 and again in 1985 (after Franchini Guelfi’s correction) as Don Quixote: Alessandro Magnasco (1667-1749): an Exhibition held at the J.B. Speed Art Museum and the University of Michigan Museum of Art, 1967 (Louisville: J.B. Speed Art Museum, 1967), cat. 19; and Don Quixote through Four Centuries, University of Kentucky Art Museum, Louisville, 1985 (no catalogue). See Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 174-176; and Bissell, Derstine, and Miller, 124-125.

173 283. Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 175; see also the chapter on Maggi in Jackson I. Cope, Secret Sharers in Italian Comedy from Machiavelli to Goldoni (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 131-154.

284. Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 174, fig. 204.

285. Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., v. 4, 77; cited in Gray, 42.

286. I use the term sinecure in a period sense: “Any office or position which has no work or duties attached to it, esp. one which yields some stipend or emolument.”; Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “Sinecure.”

287. Marcos de Obregón, for instance, when asked by his Moorish captors what profession he followed, answered: “No tengo oficio, porque en España los hidalgos no aprenden; que más quieren padecer necesidades o servir que ser oficiales; que la nobleza de los montañas fué ganada por armas, y conservada con servicios hechos a los reyes, y no se han de manchar con hacer oficios bajos.” Cited in Wilson, 37.

288. Chandler, 151.

289. See Lazarillo, Rudder, trans., 51-75.

290. Chandler, 150.

291. “Elegant in his personal appointments, he lives in poverty, which he by playing the parasite, his seat being paid for at the comedy and his presence at the houses of the great because of his wit.” See Chandler, 150-151.

292. Vanillo Gonzales, J.C. Nimmo and Bain, trans., 239.

293. Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 116.

294. Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 117.

295. Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 117.

296. Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 118.

297. Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 5: 96; cited in Gray, 90.

298. Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 2: 19 and 3: 16; cited in Gray, 9.

299. For a thorough discussion of the use of symbolism in the portraits of noblemen, see John T. Spike’s essay in Portraiture in Italy: Works from North American Collections (Sarasota: The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 1985.)

174 300. Bissell, Derstine, and Miller, 124.

301. Lazarillo, Rudder, trans., 123; noted in William E. Wilson, “The Pícaro Discusses Work and Charity,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 16, no. 61 (1939): 37-38

302. For a picaresque example of miserliness symbolized by shriveled vegetables, consider the avaricious “ministro papelista” who when moving to a new residence brought with him four dry and withered radishes (rábanos) from his old house and forced his wife to eat them rather than waste them; Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 3: 78-79; cited in Gray, 22.

303. Poesia erótica, J. Díez Borque, ed. (Madrid, 1977), 171, 198; cited in Wind, 1987, 85-86.

304. Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, Obras completas, F. Buendia, ed. (Madrid, 1964), 2: 313; cited in Wind, 1987, 86.

305. Poesia erótica, J. Díez Borque, ed., 119; cited in Wind, 1987, 89.

306. Lazarillo, Rudder, trans., 60-62.

175 CHAPTER THREE

READING MAGNASCO’S PAINTINGS AS FICTION

If we accept the premise that Magnasco’s paintings incorporate themes and iconography shared by the picaresque novel, other questions quickly arise. What aesthetic and compositional devices did Magnasco use that effect the mien of the literary form? If Magnasco’s paintings do not illustrate narrative episodes from specific novels, might they constitute a visual opus analogous to the cumulate scenes and personae of the picaresque landscape? Is it possible to describe Magnasco’s manifestly “imaginary” images of soldiers, gypsies, galley slaves, and beggared noblemen as “fictional?” So as to fully expand the analysis of Magnasco’s affinities with the picaresque genre, I will explore the real, the unreal, and the allusive elements in a number of his paintings from the ideational perspective of contemporary literary criticism as it has been applied to picaresque texts. This chapter employs the genre and reception theories of Thomas J. Roberts, Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss, and Mikhail Bakhtin toward the discussion of these questions, in an effort to discover the applicative generic status of Magnasco’s art. In analyzing the potential fictitiousness of Magnasco’s picaresque paintings, I will borrow from Thomas J. Roberts’s critical theory in which imaginative texts may be examined for the formal and thematic properties that reveal the author’s purport to make them “realistically particular” while, at the same time, “factually untrue”—the combination that in Roberts’s nomenclature equals “fiction by intention.”1 In much the same way that Roberts analyzes fictional texts for this blending of realistic particularity and factual untruth, I will examine several of Magnasco’s paintings in which real-world details (an historic lighthouse, a three- legged stool) are incorporated into larger contexts of “propositional truths” (imaginary scenes of gambling and merry-making populated by mustachioed rascals)—the proposals for which hew

176 closely to the fictional environments of the picaresque. I will follow with an exploration of Wolfgang Iser’s thesis that operable “fictions” occur when artists “overstep” reality. By Iser’s model, Magnasco’s hyperbolized representations of social realities—prison, interrogations, gypsy encampments—are, from the audience’s perspective, the product of “unforseen refashioning,” by which they become fictionalized. Magnasco’s gamblers resemble what is known, but they are thematically and aesthetically denser than reality, and in a manner of the artist’s choosing. Key to this critical approach is Iser’s concept of Koncretisation—the mitigation provided by the audience’s informed imagination, balanced as it is between tangible realities and the literary unrealities typified by generic schemata. Once again, in studying Magnasco’s paintings it becomes evident that audiences’ perceptions of the underlying realities behind his images of indolent soldiers and shiftless hidalgos would likely intersect with readers’ perceptions of the related character types from the picaresque literary genre. The third section of the chapter incorporates the theories of Hans Robert Jauss, expanding upon the role that the “characteristic themes” of literary genres play in forming Magnasco’s audiences’ “horizons of expectations.” I will argue that Magnasco’s paintings are picaresque fictions: firstly, because their content is so integrally related to the content of the novels; and secondly, and more importantly, because audiences faced with typological images of soldiers, gamblers, and hidalgos, would seek to define the boundaries of interpretive possibility, and they would find the fictive characters and environments of the picaresque to be among the most valent and informative of the related contexts. I will then proceed to discuss the applicability of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the novelistic “chronotope” to Magnasco’s paintings. The painter’s scenes display a number of attributes that imply that the action is in a “time-space” schematically related to novelistic chronotopes: the reappearance of identical character types within and between canvases, the suggestion of preceding and subsequent activity. Another component of Bakhtin’s theory is that constituent works of a literary genre may aggregate into a new chronotope, and I would argue that Magnasco’s picaresque paintings are dialogically related to Bakhtin’s “chronotope of the road”—a time-space which functions to “facilitate encounters” between

177 protagonists and the stock characters who represent the vast majority of the population of the picaresque landscape. This chronotopic analysis leads directly to the question of whether Magnasco intended for his paintings to function as units of a larger narrative: a question that I answer with a limited yes. As evidenced by his incorporation of nearly all of these personae in a hypertrophic “self-portrait,” The Beggar Painter (Il pittor pitocco) (c. 1733, Genoa, Museo Giannettino Luxoro; Figure 101), Magnasco perceived the members of his oeuvre as interrelated fictions. At issue are the relative properties of literary and visual works of low-life genre—iconographic, thematic, and aesthetic—when works are conceived as sociological reportage and when they depart from reality to the point that audiences perceive them as forms of imaginative fiction. To introduce this point, consider the formal differences between an expository work of literary “non-fiction” related to the picaresque, like Giacinto Nobili’s Il Vagabondo, overo Sferza de Bianti e Vagabondi (Viterbo, 1621) (a classic “anatomy of roguery” that indexed and described more than thirty kinds of rogue in a compendium format), and a true novel like Castillo Solórzano’s Aventuras del Bachiller Trapaza (1637), which told a made-up story, emphasizing adventure, surprise, conning, and social aspiration, while peppering the landscape with stock rogue types adapted from Nobili.2 A comparable dichotomy in the visual realm may be seen by comparing Giuseppe Maria Mitelli’s veracious image of a severely wounded war veteran from his series of etchings Proverbi Figurati (1678; Figure 78), with Magnasco’s depictions of flamboyant soldier gallants from Soldiers and Pícaros (c. 1725, Stoccarda, Galeria Nazionale; Figure 79). While both are clearly derived from Jacques Callot’s formal precedents (see Figure 30), Mitelli’s image of a dismembered fighter is drawn from the known reality of seventeenth-century Italy.3 In literary parlance, the print may be analogized as a work of realism: it describes a true state of being, is detailed and anecdotic, and is captioned by a proverb—a didactic text not generally categorized as fiction.4 Magnasco’s soldiers, on the contrary, are divorced from any semblance of reality. Rendered in plastic flourishes of blue and red paint, they are two of a vast and oft-repeated kind—the artist’s staple posturing and reclining figural type—with their gangly limbs, emphatic elbows and knees, and long moustaches. The standing figure leans nobly against a cane and steps forward to show off his seven-league boots;

178 the seated figure nods off as a monkey picks through his hair and feasts on the lice. While recognizable as uniformed soldiers, these characters do not exhibit that same documental thrust as Mitelli’s comminatory veteran; there is no sense that Magnasco is presenting a true state of being. On a purely formal level, Magnasco's loose, visible brushwork and the mannered proportions of his figures would have made it difficult for audiences to see his paintings as realistically representing the bodies and activities of social outcasts. The aesthetic eccentricity of his pittoresco appliqué of decorative collars, feathers, bows, and sashes—at times rendering his subjects nearly illegible—would have discouraged reading such pictures as literal interpretations of the soldiering life, an enterprise that was far less magniloquent on the ground.5 The figures are hyperbolically peacockish, and the settings are vast and shadowy and mysterious (multi-tiered chambers scattered with blotches of paint that suggest rifles, cannons, pitchers, rags, and drums); in toto, it is impossible to know just what these scenes of gambling and courting are about. Magnasco’s visions are often so disordered that the imagination is the only locus in which they could reasonably exist.6 The painter’s habit of repeating virtually identical figural types within and between canvases contributes to this sense of fantasy, and the reasoning behind certain juxtapositions is difficult to discern. In the one corner of Soldiers and Pícaros (Figure 79), for instance, the two soldiers are observed by an anomalous female figure (a type comparable to the fregona from the artist’s Kitchen Scene [Figure 71]) who slings her bare leg over a standing bench while cradling a baby. Is this a gypsy wife? If so, why is she so humbly dressed in a brown drapery, all’antica?7 Might this be a metaphorical character symbolizing maternity? What business does she have in a room crowded with rascally soldiers? And why is she depicted is such an unflattering pose? In another corner of the canvas, a figure identical to the cane- wielding gallant is now seated at a drum cum dining table; he carves a chicken while a young maid rests at his feet, picking at the lace around her collar (Figure 80). The same fregona (her hair still done up in bows) walks into the scene while knitting a sock (perhaps alluding to the vigilance with which picaresque beggars rehabilitate their tattered costumes, à la the “nobleman’s” descriptions from Quevedo’s Pablos, el buscón).8 A child , similarly garnished with bows in her hair, hangs from the woman’s skirt.

179 Magnasco regularly transplanted his cursory characters from their logical contexts (maids in kitchens, soldiers on battlefields, musicians on stage) into such vast, amalgamated spaces in which beggars, magicians, mercenaries, scullery maids, and mendicant friars were made to interact at the behest of the viewer’s imagination. The scenes cannot be read as literal translations of the lives of the people depicted, because these people are vague figments of the painter’s imagination. The many lairs, prison yards, ruin-scapes, and encampments, in which Magnasco’s stock players amble and loiter, emerge as imaginary gathering spaces in which it falls to the viewer to further imagine pertinent plots, narratives, and relationships between characters, the inspiration for which could be most readily drawn from the comparably fictional environments of the picaresque novel.

Defining the Applicability of “Fiction” to Painting

The idea that genre paintings could be analyzed for attributes of fictitiousness has only received cursory mention in art historical literature.9 In a 1944 article from the College Art Journal, Donald J. Bear suggested that “reading pictures” involved the arbitration of factual and fictional content. He was convinced that “pictures are painted as one special means of greater communication, . . . intellectual and even literary communication.”10 The concept that paintings could embody literary attributes—characters, plots, themes—has long been central to the research of genre painting, but the parameters that would operably define fictitiousness in the visual arts have remained vague.11 Though focused primarily on the experience and interpretation of literary texts, Benjamin Hrushovski wrote of the “internal fields of reference” inherent to “all fictional modes, including films or figurative painting.”12 These fields of reference facilitate the “‘experience’ and ‘concretization’” of the audience’s response to a work of art, with imaginative properties recommending interpretations that rely on one’s understanding of what Hrushovski termed the “contours of fiction”—the limits to which descriptions of the known world may be stretched before a representation becomes an “unknown abstraction,” and thus operably fictional.13 In a 1989 article from New Literary History, Felix Thurlemann and Cheryl Spiese McKee examined pictorial mimesis as a phenomenon of “fictionality” in Andrea

180 Mantegna’s San Zeno Altarpiece, a consideration that is by far the most detailed treatment that I have found of the fictional potentialities of paintings.14 The authors used a semiotic methodology that considered the structural principles involved in creating an “illusion référentielle”—a complex, meaning-generative process that could be understood by audiences as correspondent to literary and pictorial genres where both mimesis and imagination are inherent to the codes of reception.15 Though not the object of their study, the picaresque is one such genre, and its relationship with mimetic realism (its overarching interest in representations of the material culture and corporeal status of the European itinerant underclass) is firmly ensconced in the critical literature; and yet the genre has also received a fair share of critical analysis emphasizing its fantastical properties—the hyperbolic scenarios, the linguistic deftness of ostensibly uneducated characters, the unlikely ironies heaped upon a single protagonist.16 This balance between realism and hyperbole is fundamental to the construal of picaresque fictionality, and I would argue that these properties transcend the novelistic form and also appear in Magnasco’s painterly manifestations of the genre. The contemporary critical tendency is to treat the picaresque as a proto-realistic mode, as one of several fictional types within the broad spectrum of the development of modern realism, but one that relies heavily on stock satires to render its picture of the world.17 This “modal approach” was elaborated by Claudio Guillén and Ulrich Wicks in their attempts to identify not only a picaresque “literary genre,” but those qualities that are “picaresque” in any work of art.18 One of the defining characteristics of the picaresque (agreed upon by both theorists) is its fictionality. However realistic the genre’s favored “autobiographical” form appears to be (the veracity of Guzmán’s confession, or the detailed descriptiveness of Simplicissimus’s retelling of his family’s murder), fantasy is inherent to the panoramic structure of the pícaro’s adventure story. He moves “horizontally through space and vertically through society” in a poeticized fashion that is far removed from the prosaic lifeways of actual beggars and thieves.19 No matter how often the protagonist references a real battle, describes meetings with historical personages, or details the interior of an extant tavern or prison, readers understood this world, in John Fizer’s words, “as a new, creative addendum to what already was.”20 In addressing his modal approach to the picaresque, Ulrich Wicks flirted with the notion

181 that picaresque fiction could be expanded to incorporate E. H. Gombrich’s sense of comparable “renderings within acquired mediums”—meaning that the connotation of fictionality inherent to the literary genre could, and would likely, be adapted by informed audiences into the interpretation of succeeding texts—performative, pictorial or otherwise.21 To quote Wicks, “The complexities of the perception process—what Gombrich calls image-making and image- reading—constitute the continuing ‘plot’ of fiction-making and fiction-reading, and the modal- generic theory that describes them.”22 In other words, if Magnasco’s genre paintings are sufficiently analogous (thematically and iconographically) to authors’ typical visions of picaresque settings, their ranks of character types, and their morals and brands of humor, then the defining generic attributes of fictionality should also enter into the viewer’s interpretation of the scene. What remains then is to determine those pictorial elements that impute fictionality. In his much-lauded essay When is Something Fiction? Thomas J. Roberts presents an expansive understanding of what can constitute fictional forms of art. Having thoroughly familiarized myself with Roberts’s theories, together with the concepts of other writers whom he cites, I too would conclude that the term “fiction,” however commonly linked to prose, has no discrete meaning that should limit its use to literary analysis.23 It might be more useful to say that certain meanings have this word—a tautology, yes, but also an idea of Roberts’s that is helpful to my efforts at translating some of the more definable properties of fictionality into the analysis of a non-literary art form.24 To Roberts, the word fiction is epiphenomenal to critical behavior and to audiences’ responses to the equivocality of imaginative presentations of a recognizable reality, irrespective of any delimiting medium.25 To quote, “Fiction deals in untrue specificities, untrue facts . . . It includes statements [that critics and readers may] recognize as factual; it makes reference to specific details of time and place”; it is true and untrue, factual and unfactual, and it is recognizable as such through the function of reason on the part of the audience.26 Let us take for example the “recognizable realities” presented in Magnasco’s Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (Figure 48) and Den of the Gypsies and Soldiers ( c. 1710-15, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi; Figure 81). These are two works that Franchini Guelfi identified both with Ferdinando de Medici’s patronage and his assumed interest in the picaresque novel, noting the “gusto picaresco” (picaresque taste) with which the Prince admired the painter’s “libertá

182 grassetto” (bold license), the latter descriptors borrowed from Carlo Giuseppe Ratti in his account of Magnasco’s time at the Florentine court.27 If, as we have seen, Magnasco’s paintings were capable of prompting gusto picaresco in the educated viewer, did the commensurate sentience of fictionality accompany that gusto? One must first assume that the viewer’s inspiration to relate the picture to the picaresque would be rooted in the content of the work, and not in any extra-textual knowledge of the artist’s person, his own picaresque proclivities, or his stated intentions. In the case of Magnasco, we have exceedingly little of this anecdotal information, and so the paintings are the only resources in which to look for these details.28 In Roberts’s model, an author (or artist) can make his work fictional by intentionally crafting descriptions that the audience recognizes as originating outside of reality, and yet this does not imply that such works would lack factual propositions. Typically, a work of fiction by intention (again, irrespective of medium) is a small or large body of propositions that the author thinks to be true—even in many cases factually true—framed by a small or large body or propositions that the author knows to be false.29 Roughly speaking, if an author wanted his text to be understood by his audience as intentionally untrue in many of its facts, then it is an instance of fiction by intention. To quote Roberts, “A text is fiction by intention if its writer has knowingly made it factually untrue but also warned his readers that he has done this.”30 By applying Roberts’s concepts of factual truth and propositional truth to Magnasco’s scenarios, I may expand the parameters of “fictional” to include pictorial texts. In Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (Figure 48) and Den of the Gypsies and Soldiers (Figure 81) the viewer encounters gatherings of stock characters in a shadowy arcade. Both paintings appear to present the same space at the same time—brownish-red in hue, with the open windows showing it is nighttime—but there are minor differences appropriate to the needs of the inhabitants. The rather more domesticated Gypsy den (with its copious baskets, chicken cages, benches, and buckets) is a bit more spacious than the Pícaro den, where trumpets, armored breast plates, and rifles are scattered on the floor and suspended from the pillars. Numerous episodes of gambling go on in both canvases, and male and female figures recline on benches, play with trained birds, and groom themselves and others. Looking at these two paintings—as good examples of the kinds of scenes that predominate Magnasco’s “picaresque” oeuvre—it is

183 difficult at first to assign any of the details as factually true or false. The child who feeds a bird through its cage bars, the monkey who perches on a stool, and the woman who strokes a man’s head as he rests in her lap, each of these vignettes might appear as realistic materializations of a factual, eighteenth-century gypsy environment; but that is mere verisimilitude and does not address the truth or falsity of the facts (Figure 82). We cannot know if there was just such a monkey on just such a stool, or just such a girl feeding her pet, from which Magnasco verisimilarly recorded their shapes and colors. This would appear to force “unknowability” into the equation, making it impossible to assert any one or another specific detail as fiction. But according to Roberts, fiction by intention can be defined with moderately satisfactory precision, even if we are not sure precisely where the line between facts and generalizations existed in the author’s perception.31 The key to defining a text as fictional is dependent on the author’s predilection for real- seeming imagery and his or her audiences’ relative expectations of receiving mimetic content. In other words, if the audience for a work of fiction is prepared by the author for encounters with images that mimic reality, then there is no limit to the quantity of such descriptions that could be fit into a work, at the same time that that work remains operably fictional. In a rigidly “generic” sense, the literary critical concept of mimesis references the tradition of creating works that audiences would perceive as only true; by this strict model, historical biographies (and their painted counterparts in portraiture) are truly mimetic forms, while the more imaginative expressions of genre fiction and genre painting are antithetic to the fealty to literal truth embodied in the concept.32 Roberts rejects this circumscriptive (and, frankly, absurd) delimiting of the term—which forces the sieving out of factual truths as “non-fictions,” even as they are indispensable elements inherent to all works of fiction. After all, in both literal histories and picaresque novels the sun rises in the east, cannons are heavy, and cool water quenches one’s thirst. Yet statements like these would be unarguably fictional when spoken by a character in a novel and non-fictional when phrased in a religious treatise; the difference is in authorial intent. In art, and especially in genre painting, an author’s fundamental adherence to mimesis is requisite to the fashioning of recognizable representations of any subject, no matter how apodictically baseless. This more generous concept of mimesis has been factored into many ontological

184 explanations of the experience of art. Hans-George Gadamer concisely argued for the “reflexivity of mimesis” in his discussion of the importance of “recognition” in the mind of the audience: “What one actually experiences in a work of art and what one looks for is, how true it is, that is, how much it makes one know and recognize the world and one’s own self.”33 To perceive how “true” something is does not, however, interfere with the perception process for determining if that same something exhibits properties of fictionality. And now we come to the questions of truth and mimesis in Magnasco’s paintings, which, contrary to the popular dichotomies, are not inverses of fiction, but rather are functional and indispensable constituents of the concept. Roberts assumes that authors will include countless descriptive propositions that they know to be factually true (the sun rises in the east, the nation is at war, the pope lives in Rome) but argues that so long as they appear within a fiction-by- intention context or frame, the presence of such “true facts” does nothing to compromise the status of a work as fiction by intention.34 Hence, when Magnasco includes a representation of the actual lighthouse standing at the Genoese harbor in his painting Embarkation of the Galley Slaves at the Port of Genoa (Figure 83), he may be incorporating this true fact into a tableau that he conceives of as wholly fictional. But far more important than “factual truth” is Roberts’s idea of “propositional truth,” which describes the myriad abstract qualities of the world contained within the work of art (the wool stockings sagged below his knees, the beggar hobbled on his cane, the soldier sported a dashing moustache). These descriptive details are made up by the author, but in the Baroque-era novels and genre paintings that influenced Magnasco’s art they very often mirrored those encountered in the audience’s own world. In art-historical parlance, similar ideas have been adapted into concepts like Eddy de Jongh’s “schijnrealisme,” or “apparent-realism,” concepts most often applied to Dutch Baroque genre painting in which emblems and proverbs served as the referential texts, but which seem to me no less applicable to this discussion of the relationship between Magnasco’s genre paintings and picaresque textual topoi. In defining his terms—differentiating between the real and the imaginary components of an artistic depiction—De Jongh said: “By realism I mean in this case the ‘reflection of reality.’ Pseudo- realism refers to the fact that a representation imitates reality in regard to form and at the same

185 time is a realized abstraction.”35 I would argue that the cognitive function of Magnasco’s art was in large part tied to recognizing the many propositional truths contained in his own pseudo- realistic painterly representations of settings and character types drawn from the comparably pseudo-realistic literary environments of the picaresque, the result of which is a “realized abstraction” of the characters and tenets of literary picarism. So as to facilitate audiences’ perception of such a relationship between a series of paintings and the topoi of a realistic but fictional genre, an artist could deliberately balance his representational style between mimesis and abstraction, setting the stage for viewers’ engagement with discrete pictorial details just as readers would engage with similar details verbalized in a literary narrative. This engagement would, over the course of a thorough “reading” of a painting, inform the viewer as to the relative fictionality of the work. Facing Magnasco’s florid approach both to decorative objects and human figures may be likened to an encounter with descriptive passages of prose like these, from Gil Blas de Santillane (1715), where the main character meets up with Fabricio, the leader of a band of brigand soldiers: “[He] had changed his face and platted his hair, a pair of false whiskers covered half his face. He wore an immense sword with a hilt of at least three-feet in circumference, and marched at the head of five men of as swaggering an air as himself, with bushy whiskers and long rapiers.”36 A few scenes later, after the characters succeed at a robbery, they return to their home tavern, “devoting to a regale”: “We ordered the women to get supper ready, and sat down at table with our physical and mental powers in full vigor. The relish was heightened by a thousand pleasant anecdotes. Fabricio, of all men in the world, having the happy knack of a chairman in the company of jovial spirits, kept the table in a roar.”37 They feast, play cards, fight, and are later arrested for their crimes, handcuffed, and sent to the public prison. By Roberts’s model, these passages are composed of a series of propositional truths: the reader accepts the imagery as accurate descriptions of unhistorical events, scenes that never actually occurred but which are made up of character types and anecdotal details that mirror reality, however hyperbolically. If the author, Alain-René Lesage, decides at a later moment to reintroduce Fabricio into a scene, the reader would assume and imagine that the character resembles these earlier descriptions. It becomes propositionally true that the man has platted hair and enormous whiskers, that he is

186 armed with an immense sword, that he swaggers, and that he asserts a contagious joviality. For comparison, let us look again at Magnasco’s two Dens. As I mentioned earlier, because we do not know the precise circumstances of the artist’s studio practice—that is, whether or not he used live models for his figures, or copied the appearance of specific garments or housewares—it is impossible to assign the status of “factual truth” to any of the details of the characters, their dress, the architecture, furnishings, or animal inhabitants of the scenes. Yet, if we look closely at the compositional tricks that Magnasco used in rendering his figures, it quickly becomes apparent that we are not looking at representations of real people. We are, instead, faced with something akin to the fiction writer’s proposal of the appearance of figmental characters like Fabricio or his minions. Consider two figures from Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (Figure 84). While one reclines against a stack of powder barrels, with his red breeches hiked up his leg and his leather boot top folded down, the other sits upon a barrel and plays with his pet bird, also with his red breeches hiked up his leg and his leather boot top folded down. A viewer who also has access to Den of the Gypsies and Soldiers will see much the same figure, with his knee bared above a floppy boot, resting against a cannon in the lower left of the composition (Figure 82), and reclining against a bench to the right (Figure 84). The repetition of this detail (one of many such repetitions throughout and between his canvases) immediately puts the critical viewer in a dubious frame of mind. Any expectation of encountering factual (or biographical) truths—implying verisimilar mimesis based upon a particular individual—would be diminished by this recurrent display of stock character attributes, and even more so when one registers how the painter rendered each knee and boot in playful, yet standardized, al tocco brush strokes, such that one knee might easily be exchanged for another. Such libertá grassetto may have been admired by Prince Ferdinando, but it tempers any reading of realness in these people. To follow Roberts’s reasoning, this compositional redundance, combined with the painter’s stylized “authorial” flourishes, might be interpreted as the ways in which the artist “warns” his audience that he is offering fiction for their consideration.38 As with any fictional expression, Magnasco’s scenes include numerous elements that reinforce the factual truths held in common between the actual and the imaginary world. The three-legged stool ubiquitous to his dungeons, halls, and encampments by all appearances

187 represents a fully functional stool that any viewer would recognize as a furnishment of daily life in the eighteenth century (Figure 86). In truth, its three legs would make for a very stable seat, and there were no doubt thousands of such stools serving their function throughout Europe, one of which Magnasco may have sketched as a prototype for his stool. I would assert, however, that Magnasco’s stool is fictional—an imaginary recreation of a real object contextualized by the artist in a similarly imaginary space, and surrounded, and sat upon, by imaginary people. It is perhaps a little easier to assume that one of Magnasco’s rifles is fictional; he rests them against walls, pillars, and benches in such a scattershot fashion that even the most credulous viewer would doubt that the artist’s intent is to convince his audience that the objects are real: they are mere conglomerates of narrow brown and white stripes, something that translates poorly in the viewer’s imagination into a functioning weapon (Figure 87). It is not, however, enough that the “rifle” be an unconvincing rendering of a real rifle for it to become fictional; the very same painting of a rifle in a group portrait or historical battle scene would be non-fictional. It is through the artist’s assertively delusive mein that the entire pictorial space does not represent a real space. The figures are stock types, the den is nebulous, and most importantly, there is no overarching moral or emblematic thesis that might propel the painting into the ranks of didactic genre, á la a Dutch Baroque gambling scene like Adriaen Brouwer’s The Card Players, where disguised symbolism (the skinny dog and metal nails to which the gambler’s backs are turned) and conspicuous moralizing would liken the scene to a nonfictional allegory or essay (c. 1635, Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten; Figure 88).39 Alongside Brouwer’s hearty gamers, Magnasco’s soldiers and maids come across as effervescent figments (Figure 89). In this way, I would argue that some of the works that I have included among the ranks of the “painterly picaresque” are similarly nonfictional: in particular, the “picaresque naturalism” of Velázquez, Ribera, and Murillo. While these paintings are made up of iconographic and thematic content that parallels that of the novel genre, the cognitive process of viewing and interpreting this content does not rely to the same degree upon the imagination as with Magnasco’s more elusive scenes. Instead, they lean rather more heavily on the interpretive conventions of portraiture and/or devotional imagery. Velázquez’s representation of picaresque types in The Waterseller of Seville (Figure 16) incorporates numerous factual truths: the main

188 figures quite obviously relay the likenesses of real people, and the water jug is a splendidly veristic rendering of a real earthenware vessel. The artist’s composition (artificially directed in the studio much like a theater performance) also declares a number of propositional truths that are not intended to report something that occurred in reality: the old man hands the boy a glass of water in order to quench his thirst. I believe it is safe to assume that this transaction was staged, and that the boy was not thirsty at the moment that Velázquez painted him. Similarly, the real boy depicted in Ribera’s Blind Beggar (Figure 21) did not really pen the message of mercy that is adhered to the old man’s alms cup, though the scenario does imply that the “Lazarillo” figure would have performed that assistance for his blind master—a fiction connoted by the staging, and the audience’s familiarity with these characters through intertextual dialogism with picaresque novels like Lazarillo de Tormes. These small “fictions” are contained, however, within larger texts (the finished paintings) that lack the authorial intent to warn viewers that what they are witnessing is made up. In much the same way that an essayist might use anecdotes or metaphors to convey a point, Velázquez and Ribera pictorially combine factual truths and propositional truths (some fictional) to the end of convincing their viewers to see the deeper, philosophical truths contained in the representations of these men. The paintings thus contain the many small fictions necessary to all artistic simulacra, but they are not fictional by intent. In contrast, Magnasco’s paintings are short on factual truths, rife with propositional truths, and they require that viewers use their imagination to concoct operative scenarios from which any deeper meanings might be drawn. Here it becomes apparent that Roberts’s system for diagraming the constituent “truths” inherent both to works of fiction and nonfiction only takes us so far in exploring the applicability of “fiction” to painting. When the viewer’s own creative agency is required in formulating the fiction, it is not enough to know whether the image of a rifle or a moustache is factually or propositionally true, and it is here that I would consult Wolfgang Iser’s theories on the role of the imagination in the reception of literature and art.

“The Fictive and the Imaginary”: Applying Iser to Magnasco

I am especially fond of Iser’s comfort with the concept of “make believe”—something he

189 argues a human need for—as a component of the broader practice of “fictionalizing” across literary and non-literary mediums.40 According to Iser, creative texts (novels, performances, pictorial representations) are composed of “a mixture of known reality and fictions,” and as such they bring about an interaction between the given and the imagined.41 Because this interaction produces far more than just a contrast between the two, Iser argues that we might do better “to discard the old opposition of fiction and reality altogether, and to replace this duality with a triad: the real, the fictive, and the imaginary.”42 As we have seen with Magnasco’s portrayals of prisoners and galley slaves—contorted expressions of human excruciation and resignation—the fictional work, assembled from aestheticized constructs and not factual matter, “oversteps” the real world that it simulates.43 The Baroque-era prison was no doubt a horrible environment in which captives—hardened criminals, brawlers, and vagrants alike—were subjected to regimens of physical and psychological abuse, as Pieter Spierenberg records, “to cure the habits of idleness” by alternating reflective solitude with remedial punishments.44 But Magnasco’s torture chambers and galley yards display none of the rehabilitative carceral practices undertaken by actual prison administrators. Instead they emphasize the wretched writhing of caricatural jail lags, the repugnance of gleeful torturers, and the grotesque grandeur of the dungeons, to the virtual exclusion of any documental reckoning with reality. As Iser summarized, “The text reveals its own fictionality.”45 Iser views such boundary-crossing as the hallmark of fictionalizing. The fictive recasts and conceals the truth, but so the truth is potentially present in the that disguises it. In literary fictions, as in Magnasco’s representations of imaginary spaces inhabited by real social types, existing worlds are overstepped—the moustaches are longer, the posturing grander, the chambers more shadowy and foreboding—and although the rogue soldiers, inquisitors, and gypsy maids are individually still recognizable , these personae are reset into contexts that, in their hyperbole, defamiliarize them. To adopt Iser’s phrasing, “Both literary and artistic fictions incorporate an identifiable reality that is subjected to an unforseen refashioning.”46 And when we describe fictionalizing as an act of overstepping, we must bear in mind that the reality overstepped is not left behind: it remains present, thereby imbuing the fictional medium with a duality that the author or artist may exploit for thematic, aesthetic, or divertive purposes.47

190 Magnasco’s paintings are permeated by a vast range of identifiable items selected from social, literary, stereotypical, and other extratextual realities. The strappado, the hourglass, and the ledger of criminal charges pored over by the prison functionary in The Tortures (Figure 63) are recognizable components of an interrogation, be it a real one previously witnessed by the viewer, a typological one known from demotic accounts, or one inventively described in a novel. The hall of ruins in Halt of the Brigands (Figure 66), beneath which a pecking order of soldiers, gypsy maids, and servants unwind over cards and chicken dinners, might well conjure a vivid sense of the social reality in which true vagabonds congregate beyond civic borders. But the mere importation of such realities into the pictorial text—even though they are not being represented in the text for their own sake—does not by that very fact make them fictive.48 The text is transformed into fiction when the audience partakes in an abstract process that Iser terms Konretisation, the mechanism for which is the readerly imagination.49 In attempting to understand the meaning behind an image like Halt of the Brigands, the viewer incorporates countless small fictions into the equation— perceiving the brigands as allusory representations illustrating libertine lifeways, or, more specifically, imagining a conjugal relationship between the seated soldier/dandy and the young woman breast-feeding her child across from him. Through this process the constituent parts of the scene that might have originated in extratextual realities (the powder barrels, chicken cages, breast plates, and begging monkeys) become fictive components of a new, imaginary entertainment. One clearly imaginary impulse shared between our subject mediums was the degree to which Magnasco and the picaresque novelist portrayed a conspiracy-driven world in which beggars and criminals banded together like a martial corps, with chiefs giving assignments to underlings, while the ostensive authorities were corrupted cabals—falsifying evidence, extorting bribes, and relishing the small moments in which they could release their sadistic impulses on long-suffering pícaros. One cannot discount the possibility that seventeenth-century Italy was crawling with bandit princes who had it in their power to orchestrate complex kidnaping schemes;50 or alguazils who rolled innocent travelers and plotted with gypsy godfathers on which crossroads to stake;51 or local chapters of “thieves colleges” that convened meetings to parse the rules of dress and demeanor that would be enforced when its members begged, mugged, or

191 shoplifted.52 But such euphuistic “realities,” according to Fernand Braudel, must also be seen as a product of the sociological imagination of a culture that feared its law enforcers and reveled in the rebellious, proto-democratic spirit of its deviants.53 The inquisitors and jailers of Magnasco, Alemán, Quevedo, and Cervantes are spidery caricatures of institutional functionaries—authoritarian but purposeless—while their rogues and wanderers are gently hierarchical and organized, as if members of an aristocracy of vagabonds. To quote Roger Chartier, “In spite of the fact that all of the information found in the picaresque novels was basically fiction (most of the things were invented by the authors), the readers began to take to the wanderers and the beggars because they believed that these people were organized and behaved like them: as if they were part of a monarchy.”54 Assuming that the stock types encountered in the novels and paintings were not mirrored in the actual citizenry of the reader’s world—that there was no inverted monarchy of bandits, with its attendant courtiers, counselors, and clerics consisting of rogues and gypsy maids—what could this “belief” be but an expression of the audience’s imagination, a Koncretisation of a notional reality that defied the spatial, moral, and behavioral limits of the audience’s own reality? Every novel or painting depicts a more delirious world—one in which the forces of fate and irony trifle with the ataxy of the burgeoning market economy of Baroque Europe, where those who wish to live free from hassle can dwell in or among the crumbling columns of fallen estates, but where brutal penalties for social or doctrinal transgressions may be suddenly and indiscriminately levied by wraithlike punishers. Each of the stock roles in this grander picaresque play (novelistic and pictorial) is performed by a fictive apparition who weaves his or her way in and out of scenes—the plume-hatted soldier, the nurturing maid, the abject prisoner in chains, the pious sadist. These characters might be based upon living models, but they are clearly motivated by the generic conventions of Koncretisation—as the otherwise inert verbal descriptions or painterly renderings may only be empowered by the receiver’s desire to imagine literary unrealities in the place of his or her own more mundane reality. To quote from Helmuth Plessner’s discussion of the impulsion that readers supply to fictional characters, as delimited representatives of the human types who are their real basis: “The role-player or bearer of the social figure is not the same as that figure, and yet cannot be thought of separately from it

192 without being deprived of its humanity. Only through the other of oneself does one have—oneself.”55 Though referencing literary representations of stock characters, Wolfgang Iser’s words appear to me to be equally well suited to our discussion of Magnasco’s involvement with fictionalized depictions of familiar social classes: “Literature fans out human plasticity into a panoply of shapes, each of which is an enactment of self-confrontation. . . . It even incorporates into itself the inauthenticity of all the human patterning it features, since this is the only way it can give presence to the protean character of what it is mediating.”56 But I would expand this point, and argue that Magnasco’s characters are calculated to be inauthentic beyond even the degree to which audiences might recognize themselves: physically, they are more sinuous and slouchy than any living man; their visages are masks of whiskers, sunken eyes, and plaited hair; and their behaviors are iterative to the point of parody. One must assume that even the most laggard rogue would occasionally dislodge himself from the card table, rise from his nap, or break from being groomed, but these are not authentic “human patterns,” rather they are the generic conventions of literary character types—the indolent soldier, the shiftless hidalgo—made manifest in a medium that is considerably more limiting than words (Figure 82).57 Perhaps it would be better to take Iser’s triad of real, fictive, and imaginary, and, when applying it to Magnasco, trim the emphasis on the real. If Magnasco is drawing his scenarios from the cultural milieus of the picaresque landscape, then engagement with the “real”—real criminology, real gypsy life, real policing, the real Inquisition—has already been mediated by the literary genre, and the painter picks up the content at a point when it has already become fictive. Thus the protean element of Magnasco’s art is not in its transformation of real vagabondage into painted forms, but in the further hyperbolizing of stock types into painted forms, the “plasticity” of which is limited by the generic conventions of the picaresque. According to Iser, fully developed, generic fictions contain a whole series of conventionalized signposts that indicate to the audience that they are perceiving “staged discourse.”58 While what is depicted may often be taken as if it were referring to something real, in actual fact all the references are bracketed by the parameters of expectation (delineated by the formal traditions of the genre) and serve only as guidelines for what is to be imagined. Though

193 Iser’s discussion does not range into picaresque literature, he does provide one example of a form of literary fictionality that expanded beyond verbal mediums into graphic depictions: pastoral poetry, which found its most elaborate expression in the pastoral romances of the Renaissance, and in the subsequent paintings of imaginary (yet textually grounded) arcadias by , Jacopo Bassano, , Rubens, and Boucher.59 If the pastoral genre has, by the will of artists and their audiences, transcended the limitations of its initial literary medium to become manifested in paintings, drawings, , and theatrical performances, might the picaresque be a less well understood sibling of this process? Another, admittedly smaller, instance in the history of art when the fullness of reception depended on audiences’ familiarity with established fictions? And beyond that point, do the subsequent works of art themselves constitute fiction? This introduces the parallel function of generic schemata into the consideration of fictitionality, i.e., whether a work that audiences perceive as adhering to the generic conventions of a fictional genus is not, by that perception, coopted into the fictional discourse and subjected to the audience’s impulses to infuse meanings into the scenarios that reinforce those conventions.60 Of course, one need not limit this question to fictional genres, though those genres do seem to me to be the most pliant and disposed to the vagaries of a painter’s reimagining. According to Gombrich, all art has a conceptual basis in schemata, which correct pre-existent schemata and are absolutely necessary for representation. By mimetic measures, a genre representation must be veristic enough to be recognizable as that which it represents, and by generic measures it must exhibit greater fealty to the topoi of the genre than that which it represents. In other words, the image must be of a subject, but it must exceed that subject in chosen qualities such that the viewer is coerced into imagining applicable meanings. In The Act of Reading, Iser stresses both the representative and the corrective function of the schema: “Herein lies the functional fecundity of the Gombrich model, for the schema embodies a reference which is then transcended by the correction. While the schema enables the world to be represented, the correction evokes the observer’s reaction to the represented world.”61 One result of this schematic process, as we have seen in Magnasco’s work, is that already hyperbolic characters from picaresque novels are subjected to further exaggerations of their humorous physiognomies, calculated comportment, and antipathy to hard work. Magnasco’s lazy soldier

194 who gambles his wages and dwells among gypsies is clearly recognizable as a such a soldier (his clothes, face, and manner are emulously appropriate to the schema), and the audience’s reaction is to classify him as a roguish type, to assume an appropriate back story to the represented circumstance, or to assign motives or a moral inclination to the man’s behavior, three of many possible acts of “make believe” spurred by the artist’s correction. Magnasco’s schematic presentation of the brigands’ feast—the celebratory yet slouchy atmosphere, the assorted implements of soldiering and wayfaring—is similarly schematic in its mood and details, and corrective in its invocation of similarly fictional portrayals of vagabondage promulgated in picaresque texts. Thus the formal and thematic parameters of an applicable genre are crucial to the process by which audiences may perceive subsequent pictorial texts as fictional.

Fictional Genres and Magnasco’s Audiences’ “Horizons of Expectations”

In addition to his consideration of the constituent “truths” of fiction, Thomas J. Roberts discusses the role that genres play in ensconcing a work’s fictionality. An author’s strict adherence to generic conventions by definition places limits on the range of interpretations open to an audience.62 Central to Roberts’s thesis is the concept of “characteristic themes”—the limited number of viable motifs that a reader could draw upon when imagining the meanings behind given characters’ circumstances or behaviors.63 Let us take for example Magnasco’s representation of a beggared escudero in Satire of a Nobleman in Misery (Figure 75). The characteristic themes of this “genre portrait” are limited by the roles that such a ruined hidalgo has played in other pictorial satires, and by the conventions of fictional depictions like those of the penurious master from Lazarillo de Tormes and the ridiculously proud Don Gaspard from Estebanillo González. It would make sense for a viewer both to assume that the man is desperately poor (with his broken crockery, straw-stuffed cushions, and very unappetizing lunch) and that the man is merely miserly (he can afford servants). Either interpretation fits with the “characteristic theme” of the absurd lengths to which filial pride will drive a man. It would not make sense for a viewer to assume that this titled nobleman is a kind and generous benefactor to his squire and handmaiden, because the rascally assistant seems awfully eager to wag the

195 humiliating “horns.” This insinuation of cuckoldage would not fit within a “characteristic theme” of noble benefaction, and so that possibility is eliminated from the index of viable interpretations of this image. Of course this process of receiving, weighing, and judging the interpretive potentialities contained within a text or work of art is seldom so pedantic as my example, but it is subtly restrained by an audience’s readiness (however conscious or subconscious) to apply generic criteria to analyses. Hans Robert Jauss has written extensively on the role of generic criteria on the reception process.64 Foremost among Jauss’s concerns is how to determine the historical function of fictional texts, while maintaining a critical openness to what he terms the “aestheticization of reality”—superimposed upon works of art by generic protocols, and materially shaped by individual authors’ and artists’ stylistic predilections.65 In Jauss’s view, the audience does not passively accept or receive a given text (be it a novel or a painting), but through the act of reading (or in the case of visual arts viewing and comprehending) participates along with the author in the creation of the fictional world evoked by the heretofore lifeless text.66 Accordingly, a work of art does not exist until it is activated by the intervention of the reader or viewer, at which point the work may be said to exist through or within the dialectical process called reception.67 Magnasco’s Nobleman has no motivations until the viewer associates him with the motivated types expatiated in antecedent texts, and the motivations that a lettered viewer would likely ascribe are bound within those texts. Jauss’s succeeding theory of “horizons of expectation” addresses this need for “lettered interpretation,” conceiving of textual reception not as an autonomous, free, and individual experience but as collectively framed by shared conventions, proper to a time or to a community, and most formatively shaped by the prevailing schemas of genres that audiences perceive to be applicable to a text or image.68 In Roger Chartier’s words, “Among these conventions, the ascription of texts to specific genres was a key element that defined the system of intelligibility or the common expectations allowing the appropriation and understanding of the texts, literary or not.”69 According to these perspectives, the notion of genre acquires a dynamic or dialogical dimension.70 By framing a set of assumptions proper to the reception, each schematic attribute imposes on the reader the intended identity of the text: the knight’s helmet, state-sanctioned rapier, and scrolled family tree identify

196 Magnasco’s nobleman as an escudero; the beggarly dwelling, haughty demeanor, and dubious servant further identify him as a schematic character adapted from picaresque scenarios.71 If we accept that Jauss’s “horizons of expectation” are operable in the process through which a “lettered” viewer of Magnasco’s paintings would determine the outside boundaries of interpretive possibility, then surely the fictive characters and environments of the picaresque landscape would be on the visible side of this horizon. Having surveyed the many literary resources that Magnasco and/or his audiences would have had available, there is only that one generic context where the topoi of the impoverished hidalgo, the absconding soldier, the gypsy maid, the charlatan bird trainer, the tormented galley slave, and the vile inquisitor all meet and interact. It thus follows that Magnasco’s pictorial oeuvre constitutes a complementary work that belongs within the horizontal boundaries of the picaresque genre. In The Power of Genre, Adena Rosmarin proposed a liberal standard by which a work may be considered to function as genre “by degree.”72 To apply this standard to Magnasco, through the inclusion of recognizable themes and iconography, the painter’s audience is made aware of the relationship between a work of art and other texts to which it bears a resemblance, “but from which it necessarily deviates.”73 This makes genre an inherently intertextual category since it is the modification of previous literary models and practices that is important.74 The subjects of Magnasco’s paintings clearly resemble descriptions of picaresque characters: a delinquent squire who Gil Blas serves “was a gigantic fellow, with a long face, a parrot’s beak, and a very rascally contour, without being absolutely ugly.”75 Yet they deviate radically from traditional genre insomuch as the “text” is transformed from a sequence of words on pages into the arrangement of on a canvas. Jauss also ascribes to the text the potential to function as a “provocation,” existing within the conventional boundaries of a genre, and yet creating new aesthetic expectations for future texts. In Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, Jauss quotes from the Italian genre theorist Benedetto Croce: “Every true work of art has violated an established genre, and in this way confounded the ideas of critics who thus found themselves compelled to broaden the genre.”76 With this in mind, it may be argued that Magnasco’s paintings redefined and expanded the picaresque genre (as reflected in pictorial mediums) away from sympathetic portrayals of picaresque penury rendered in a naturalistic manner (Velázquez, Ribera, Murillo) toward

197 divertive representations that drew upon the inherent ironies of the picaresque circumstance such that viewers might be similarly entertained by the exploits—celebratory and sufferable—of schematic types. In his emphasis on corporeality, and the contrasts between physical wretchedness (the ramshackle living space) and ephemeral stylishness (the crossed legs, slippered feet, and poised hands), the painter established new expectations for pictorial representations of the beggared nobleman, rooted in the inherent contradictions of integrity born by the committed rogue who at once loathes work, but who spares no effort at conniving to be elevated into sheltered social positions by his wits or legacy-mongering. Without ranging too far from this discussion of Magnasco’s painting, its history of reception by other artists demonstrates at least one genre-specific “horizon of expectations” invested in the work, relating it to the fictionalized portrayal of another imaginary literary character. I would argue that the artist’s operative involution with an intertextual generic type is proven by a 150-year legacy of derivative pictorial representations by other artists—images that are clearly affiliated with discrete literary source material. Magnasco’s reimagination of the escudero typology in his Satire of a Nobleman in Misery must have been perceived as an act of generic conventionalizing because it inspired a number of later depictions of a fictional character tangentially related to the picaresque hidalgo: Don Quixote (Figures 90, 91, and 92).77 As early as 1820 Magnasco's painting had been relocated to Paris, and by mid-century it was held in the Collection Cailleux, one of the premier commercial art houses of Europe.78 It is unclear whether it would have been on public display, but formal evidence suggests that it was known by a number of artist-illustrators working in the publishing industry. Tony Johannot’s Don Quixote Reading, the frontispiece for the first volume of the J.J. Doubochet edition of Louis Viardot's translation of Don Quixote (Paris, 1836), shows a representation of the Don that shares numerous compositional and iconographic qualities with Magnasco’s Nobleman, such that I would propose a direct relationship between the two images (Figure 90). Johannot, a wood engraver, reversed Magnasco’s image, adapting the hooked-nose and mustachioed physiognomy and crossed legs of the beggared nobleman, while transforming the pauperous environment of the hidalgo’s living room into a study, where the Quixote figure clutches a book in lieu of a scrolled pedigree.79 Both figures have helmets and swords, affirming their social status as esquired

198 descendants of the mounted nobility of Spanish lore. As I mentioned in Chapter 2, Magnasco’s painting was titled Don Quixote through the nineteenth century, and it is no stretch to assume that the embellishment of the figure’s identity coincided with its adaptation by other artists seeking inspiration for their own graphic depictions of Don Quixote, the ultimate literary representation of an insolvent nobleman. Johannot’s frontispiece was followed by William Lake Price’s (1818-1896) staged photograph, Don Quixote in His Study, in which the seated Don is returned to the orientation of Magnasco’s nobleman—with his head lowered slightly, his long hair swept back from his face, and his legs crossed (c. 1855, Austin, University of Texas Libraries; Figure 91).80 Sundry housewares and armor parts are scattered at his feet, and he again holds the text in which his identity is invested: the nobleman’s genealogy diagram was transformed into a chivalric novel in the addled mind of Don Quixote. Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) continued the trajectory of Magnasco’s nobleman’s transformation into a conventionalized representation of the Quixote in his painting of Don Quixote Reading: seated, crossed-legged, hook-nosed, sunken-eyed, holding his paper-born record of self-worth (c. 1867, Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria; Figure 92).81 Daumier also incorporates images of Quixote’s servant girl and monsignor neighbor in the background of the picture, two characters whose roles in the novel are those of concerned onlookers, but whose bearing toward Quixote’s senility is as dubious and disparaging as that of the waggish servant who insults Magnasco’s nobleman’s vitals. One has lost his potency in ironic contrast to the family tree he holds so dear; the other has lost his exemplarity by reading too many stories of meritous knights; and now neither are estimable in the minds of their actual companions. These analyses of Magnasco’s painting and the print, photograph, and painting that followed are limited by my horizon of expectations that the meanings intended to be communicated through the images are bound up with the meanings inherent to the source texts with which the art works share their thematic and iconographic substance: Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and, more generally, the units of prose that function to contrive the picaresque stereotype of the poor but haughty escudero. To further adapt Jauss’s theory, these artists have aestheticized a pseudo-reality that only existed within those fictionalized presentations, texts that

199 themselves may have been based in part upon historical actualities, but which, through the institution of generic constructs delineated the range of interpretations open to comparably generic expressions. Thus, while Magnasco’s Satire of a Nobleman in Misery might countless times have been subjected to formal analyses and/or connoisseurship that disregarded any intertextual investment in the generic attributes of picaresque literature, the most adventitious “lettered interpretation” of Magnasco’s Satire of a Nobleman in Misery is that it means what it does because of the antecedent generic profiles of the literary type, and that, in its deviation from these necessarily limited profiles, it contributes to the further imagination of that type by subsequent authors and receivers of the genre.

The “Chronotope” of Magnasco’s Fictions

If we are prepared now to accept that Magnasco’s paintings exhibit qualities of fictionality, and that their interpretation may depend upon the audiences’ imagination as informed by their familiarity with schemas from the picaresque genre, might we further metaphorize these works of art as “novelistic”? Rather than limiting the term “novel” to a narrow definition of a piece of fictional text, Mikhail Bakhtin used it to name the interplay of heteroglottal strata at work within any discursive system in order to reveal the artificial limits and constraints of that system.82 In a most basic sense, a work or sequence of works might be considered “novelistic” if there is a sense of narrative continuity, if the subject is presented with realism and/or moral complexity, and if identifiable characters reappear throughout the virtual time and space of the described action. In support of his theories on the “novelization” of mediums not traditionally associated with literary constructs, Bakhtin developed a media-neutral concept that he termed the “chronotope.” Chronotope literally translates as “time-space,” a term Bakhtin borrowed from research in physiology in the 1920s to summarize “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” in life, art, and literature.83 Bakhtin argued for the applicability of this concept “in all meaning-making situations.”84 As a formally constitutive category, the chronotope “determines the image of man in literature,” and, I would argue, in other artistic representations including painting, as Bakhtin himself posited that “out of

200 the actual chronotopes of our world (which serve as the source of representation) emerge the reflected and created chronotopes of the world represented in the work.”85 The main use that Bakhtin made of this theory in his own published works was in the study of literary history, where it served principally to demonstrate the “process of assimilating real historical time and space in literature . . . [and] the articulation of actual historical persons in such time and space.”86 But as Janice Best argued in her 1994 Criticism article, “The Chronotope and the Generation of Meaning in Novels and Paintings,” Bakhtin did not restrict the chronotope to the analysis of novels, but suggested that it might also be applied to “other areas of culture,” especially that of painting, where time is just as “intrinsically connected” to space as in the novel.87 According to Bakhtin, the chronotope constitutes the matrix where the principal temporal and spatial sequences of a work of art meet: “From a narrative and compositional point of view, this is the place where encounters occur . . . [where] the webs of intrigue are spun, denouements occur and finally—this is where dialogues happen, something that . . . reveals the character, ‘ideas,’ and ‘passions’ of the heroes.”88 As with Jauss’s horizon of expectation, Bakhtin’s chronotope depends upon the audience’s ability to apply extra-textual knowledge to the interpretation of the depicted scene, and the potential number of valid chronotopes is as vast as the number of viewers who will encounter a work of art. While this makes the chronotope more expansive than Jauss’s horizon, Bakhtin similarly assumes that interpretations will congregate around the cultural schema that the author or artist referenced in the initial creation of a fiction; and in art making Bakhtin privileges the morphological role that literary schemas play above the less structured topoi of “street life.”89 While a picture of lazy soldiers gambling might intersect with “actual” chronotopes of soldiers recessing from battle, by literary measures, the chronotope of a painting like Magnasco’s Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros is temporally and spatially most related to scenarios like the revelry in Monapodio’s lair described by Cervantes in Rinconete and Cortadillo, or the gambling deserters holed up in the “subterraneous mansion” from Gil Blas (Figure 48).90 Again, this is because of the relative unlikelihood of an audience being familiar with such events through real interactions with bandits, mercenaries, and gypsies in their private retreats. Unlike the chronologically directed novel, the medium of painting is at a disadvantage for

201 certain facets of chronotopic analysis. Any verbal exchanges between the painted characters, direction of the characters’ movements, or sense of preceding or subsequent action may only be implied through their physiognomy, comportment, or other compositional devices. While we cannot interpret the dialogical interaction between the characters in Magnasco’s Den, we can assume that the artist intended for viewers to assume speaking relationships between the figures (the man who rests his head in the woman’s lap; Figure 93); movement into and out of the scene (the young soldier in a helmet and short sleeves who walks in from the shadows on the left; Figure 94); preceding action (the dice resting on the tabletop); and subsequent action (the man who cradles another set of dice in his cupped hand in preparation for a throw; Figure 95). Thus, even without the sorts of chronologized verbal descriptions that the reader would encounter in Cervantes’s prose (“the lad entered a house that was frankly sinister in appearance. . . . To one side stood a three-legged bench, and to the other a water jar with a broken lip, on top of which was a little pitcher in the same sorry state”), the audience is able to perceive the artist’s intent to communicate related narratives “novelistically” in their temporal continuity and realism.91 And in a static, two-dimensional medium, without the horometrical latitude or physical space in which movement through a third dimension would be possible (tossing dice or playing cards), the painting’s audience can perceive such action, just as the static, dimensionless medium of writing may impel comparative perceptions of space-time: “Diego Cortado embraced Rincón, the latter in turn clasping him closely and affectionately, whereupon the two of them began a game of twenty-one with the aforementioned cards, free of dust and chaff, but not of grease and slipperiness.”92 The chronotope generates not only the encounters that advance the plot, but also the principal symbolic and metaphorical patterns of a work.93 Bakhtin illustrated several different locations for characters’ encounters that can determine the specific genres of novels: the adventure novel, the novel of chivalry, and the picaresque novel were all linked to “chronotopes of the road.”94 In addition to vistas of open roads, this chronotope incorporates taverns, encampments, and indistinct, structureless places where a picaresque character’s physical transience and psychological anomie (normative malaise, removed from the concretely defined social spaces of a city, church, or court) could be made manifest in settings “without boundaries.”

202 The combination of social and temporal ambiguity in these literary spaces (what Best describes as a “curious mix of public and private . . . places of passing, regulators of flow and ebb”) contributes to their function: “facilitating encounters” between the pícaro and the “disintegrating” and “reintegrating” stock characters who, in their own illusiveness, embody the road metaphor.95 As I discussed in Chapter 2, Magnasco’s paintings often convey sullen moods in indeterminate settings: soldiers loafing indifferently before a charlatan’s animal act, alguazils shambling their prisoners through shadowy landscapes. Even a celebratory feast is reimagined as a spectacle of grim transients gatherered beneath a tarpaulin, as, for example, in The Wedding Banquet (1731, Paris, Musée du Louvre; Figure 96). Images like these are clearly in dialogue with Bakhtin’s “chronotopes of the road.” Especially apposite to the parallel between this construct and Magnasco’s vision of the picaresque is Bakhtin’s sense that this chronotope relies upon readers’ perceptions that the characters who inhabit these spaces are physically inconstant. They are wayfarers who disintegrate and reintegrate as needed for the fulfillment of stock entertainments (the musician, card sharp, or charlatan); as means by which characters transition from episode to episode (the muleteer or alguazil); and as admonitory models (the prisoner or galley slave). The reader or viewer need not believe that these people even exist beyond the schematic roles that they play in staffing the in-between places. Their roles are the most fictional among all of the picaresque cast (compare with a morally complex protagonist like Guzmán or an historical personage like Ottavio Piccolomini), insomuch as the characters are flat, with scant relationship to any “factual truth” known by the audience. Each time the novelist reintegrates a stock character from the picaresque cast for a temporary service to the larger narrative, the inherent fictionality of that character is reinforced. So too with each encounter that the viewer has with a familiar character in multiple paintings by Magnasco. In discussing Magnasco’s chronic reuse of characters, Peter M. Lukehart asked this rather obvious question for the first time: “Could Magnasco have intended for these types to be recognized from painting to painting?”96 As I pointed out earlier, the reuse of character types does not only occur between canvases, but within them as well. The mustachioed coxcomb appears twice, on opposite ends of the scene, in Soldiers and Pícaros (Figures 79 and 80). He departs that scene to go gambling with his cronies in The Players (Figure 46); he is on horseback

203 playing the role of an alguazil in Transfer of the Prisoners (Figure 61); and he carves a diminutive fowl for two ladies’ supper in Soldiers Feasting (Figure 67). I have found this man’s caricatural likeness in dozens of scenes, ranging from merry encampments to dismal jails, and always with the same stolid surliness staring out from beneath his tricorn hat and heavy brows (Figure 97). In effect, Magnasco implies that this character is peripatetic within the fictional chronotope: he is at once in multiple places, playing whatever dour role is assigned, be it a fatalistic gambler, a rogue courtier, or a bounty hunter dragging his quarry into the prison yard at Genoa (Figure 98). Should then a select combination of canvases in which Magnasco’s typologized characters appear be understood as constituting a larger narrative? Even if we cannot know the exact order in which the scenes should be read, there are some rational trajectories: from Transfer of the Prisoners to The Interrogation to The Arrival of the Galley Slaves at the Prison at Genoa to Embarkation of the Galley Slaves at the Port of Genoa. There are other sequences that make sense because they loosely mirror narrative events repeated in two or more picaresque novels. Both The Bachiller Trapaza and Gil Blas describe a gypsy wedding procession—“a crowd of both sexes coming into the plain. . . . Who should it be but the newly-married couple, attended by their family and friends, with ten or twelve musicians in the van, producing a most obstreperous din of harmony”—a scene that resembles Magnasco’s The Nuptial Parade (1731, Berlin, Staatlische Museen; Figure 99). The merriment is soon interrupted, however, by an attack of bandits staged by the cruel Fabricio, in which “a well-looking gentleman,” “the musicians,” and “four horsemen were stretched lifeless on the field of battle”—carnage echoed in Magnasco’s Assault of the Highwaymen, where a similar procession is ransacked (c. 1730, Cleveland, Collection of Charles E. Roseman; Figure 100). Though first painted separately, Magnasco must have sensed an affinity between these two scenes, as duplicates of the original paintings were later commissioned as pendants.97 Individually, the paintings exhibit self- contained narratives—with implied dialogue, movement, and preceding and subsequent action. Yet when viewed along side one another, it is no stretch to imagine a relationship between the pictures. Even if the attack was not intended to represent the victimization of the very wedding party in the neighboring canvas, the similarity of the wind-swept landscape, and the appearances

204 of the bodies splayed around the scene of the melee clearly communicate a connectedness to a mutual chronotope of the road, (i.e. the wedding party and the bandits dwell within a contiguous fictive space where their narratives could potentially intersect.) Those paintings that Wendy Steiner considers “strongly narrative,” that overtly represent plot and story, exhibit three factors: (1) depiction of more than one temporal moment; (2) repetition of the subject; and (3) some approximation of realist representation.98 By looking at multiple works from Magnasco’s picaresque oeuvre, we see that each of these criteria is met, leading viewers to assume that the artist’s invented environments of roads, ruins, dens, and dungeons are representations of the same larger place and time, a chronotope of picaresque derivation. But to assume novelistic affinities introduces a rather more complex question: Where are the picaresque protagonists in these scenes? Whose eyes are we looking through as we survey these landscapes and interiors? Though certainly open to interpretation, I perceive many of Magnasco’s scenes as analogous in their panoramic composition to the novel reader's first- person experience of moving through the picaresque universe and meeting its denizens.99 Magnasco’s soldiers, gamblers, and prisoners are the novels’ unredeemed stock players shown in existential moments of the comedy, while the social-climbing pícaro’s coeval role, interpreting the underlying hierarchical relationships that underscore la vida picaresca, is left for the viewer to perform.100 But there is one other possible answer to the question of who is mediating the viewer’s perception of the scenes. Magnasco may have intended for the scenes to be understood as showing the picaresque world through the artist’s eyes.

Il pittor pitocco: Self-Portraiture as Fiction

The question of Magnasco’s first-hand perception of stock, fictional staffage is nowhere more interestingly posed than in his scenes showing a bearded figure seated at a large canvas, surrounded by dozens of characters imported from other paintings—seated gamblers, nursing mothers, musicians playing, young maids eating chicken, soldiers being groomed by monkeys, and fregonas darning socks (Figures 102, 103, 104, and 105). The painter evidently harbored some great affection for this conceit—combining a hypertrophic “self-portrait”with a cavalcade

205 of stock characters—as there are several versions of the composition.101 By far the grandest of these expressions is The Beggar Painter (Il pittor pitocco) (c. 1733, Genoa, Museo Giannettino Luxoro; Figure 101).102 In his study of Romantic tendencies in Baroque painting, William Gaunt described the singularity of Magnasco’s corporeal investment of himself into the imaginary space of his genre paintings:

He surrounded himself (or his imagined self) with these symbolic figures that peopled his mind. A tall man (he liked to think of himself as tall) bearded and in a skull cap, he sits at an easel in the gloom of an attic lighted from above, while around him is his collection of automatons, a bony broken-nosed musician, a sluttish woman with a baby, and a darker figure whose mysterious visage may have represented to him the very spirit of the time.103

It is clearly debatable whether Magnasco intended for this beggar painter to be a physical likeness of himself: in life he was a short man, who, according to Ratti, “always walked about sumptuously dressed,” to the point that his daughter’s legacy was in time reduced to nothing.104 Yet this has not stopped some scholars from assuming that Magnasco meant for viewers to read this painting as a literal self-portrait, ignoring the clear relationship between the other figures in the composition and the artist’s myriad genre paintings, in a misguided attempt to read some autobiographical detail into the representation of a painter at an easel. Benno Geiger opined that this painting, which he titled The Painter in His Studio, actually represents a self-portrait of Magnasco together with his wife feeding their child.105 Giuseppe Delogu repeated this claim in his chronicle of Ligurian painting (1931), a claim that I find patently absurd in its inverted leap from the clear fantasy that underlies the buxom (“sluttish”) gypsy into facts about Magnasco’s unknown wife.106 In over thirty years of painting, the same nursing mother with her hair in ribbons frequents kitchens, gypsy encampments, and gambling dens—settings with no autobiographical mien. But more than that, Geiger’s and Delogu’s assumption runs counter to the prevailing dates for even the earliest of Magnasco’s “self-portraits.” Documents suggest that the artist married in Genoa while on leave from Ferdinando’s court, around 1708.107 There is no record of his daughter’s birth. We know from Ratti’s biography that a widowed Magnasco returned to Genoa from Milan in 1735 at the rather advanced age of sixty-seven. At that time his

206 daughter was already married to a certain Signore Micone, and she desired her father’s presence nearby.108 If Magnasco’s daughter’s birth year is supposed at 1710, after the artist’s return from Florence to Milan, the prototype image of her feeding at her mother’s breast would need to have been painted very soon after.109 Neither Franchini Guelfi nor Muti and De Sarno Prignano accept such an early date for any of these compositions, dating the first pittor pitocco to the late . In a rebuke to Geiger and Delogu, both authors rule out the possibility that this painting shows Magnasco’s wife and daughter.110 Even if Magnasco did not intend for these paintings to represent a naturalistic, documentary image of himself and his young family, he was clearly using a hybridized genre/ self-portrait to explore his artistic character and imagination. The artist is identifying his own profession within the established confines of symbolic self-portraiture, but with an additional degree of poetic licence that differentiates it from the established formulae of the Seicento and Settecento.111 Magnasco deviated from the mimetic and ennobling traditions of the Baroque self- portrait by casting himself as yet another derelict, at work at his easel among the shadowy ruins that served as the hangout for so many of his gypsy gangs, soldiers, and peripatetic friars.112 The message that the artist intended to convey with Il pittor pitocco is ambiguous, but given the visual art environment into which such a representation would have emerged in the early eighteenth century—alongside works like Giuseppe Maria Crespi’s (1665-1747) The Artist in his Studio (c. 1735, Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum; Figure 106), or Luis Egidio Meléndez’s (1716- 1780) Self Portrait (1746, Paris, Musée du Louvre; Figure 107)—viewers would have assumed that Magnasco saw aspects of himself and his practice in the phantasmagorical space of the gloomy “attic.” He surrounds himself with the objects of his creative life, but in a strange and amplified way. Whereas Crespi showed himself in an uncluttered home studio with books, a copy of Guercino’s The Ecstasy of Saint Francis, and assorted anatomical casts, and Meléndez holds up a life drawing for his audience’s consideration, Magnasco projected himself bodily into the environs of his “bizzare invenzioni” where he is surrounded by the inhabitants of his imagination.113 In these paintings, perhaps more than any other, Magnasco challenges his audience to see these figures as existing in an unreal, “anti-Arcadian” space where all of the low- lifes and outcasts can convene and be seen by the pittor pitocco, and through his eyes, by the

207 wider audience.114 The conceptual leap from capriccio to fiction is bridged by the viewer’s realization that he has seen each of these same figures many times before in the camps and halls and jails and galley yards of the artist’s picaresque oeuvre—a recycling of people, props, and motifs that is itself a caprice of episodic plotting.115 While removed from any discrete narrative trajectory or novelistic chronotope, Magnasco’s Il pittor pitocco reinforces the overarching schemas of fictionality that permeate his representations of stock character types.

This chapter has defined several of Magnasco’s paintings by the measures employed by literary theorists in relation to the critical constructs of genre and fictitiousness. I have demonstrated the viability of approaching these paintings as dialogical relatives of the picaresque, wherein the propositional truths (anecdotic details from the material world of the pícaro), character schemas (repeated use of stock typologies), and even temporal narrative attributes (implications of continuity within and between scenes) are reflected in pictorial language. In conclusion, the internal and external fields of reference, the “horizons of expectation” by which audiences would interpret the content of each painting, are shared by the fictional genre, thus making the real, the unreal, and the allusive elements of Magnasco’s “picaresque” oeuvre applicably fictional.

______

1. See Roberts, 9-14.

2. For more on the interrelationship between Nobili and Solórzano, see Guillén, 1987, 265-273. See also Robert Chartier, “La Construcción Estética de la Realidad Vagabundos y Pícaros en la Edad Moderna,” Tiempos Modernos 7 (2002-2003): 1-15.

3. See Geoffrey Parker, “The Soldier,” in Baroque Personae, Rosario Villari, ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1995), 32-56.

4. The text in the etching translates roughly as: “He doesn't know peace, nor does he esteem it, who hasn’t first tried war.” Though admittedly not exhaustive, proverbs are not included in Thomas J. Roberts’s index of forms considered to be “fictional”; Roberts, 131-144. See also Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “Proverb.”

208 5. Philip Sohm discusses such incoherent “results of excessive imagination” in his unit on spegazzoni (understood alternately as “master strokes” and “just big blots”). Such brushwork was the genius “product of working ‘disorderly and haphazardly’ (disordinamente e a caso).” Marco Boschini (1605-1681), a principle critic and theorist of Baroque painting techniques, believed “that the spegazzoni were controlled by the artist, even though they did not seem to be, and needed [only] to be reformed or brought to perfection by a knowledgeable viewer.” Boschini found in the conventionally pejorative spegazzone “a tension between apparent and real confusion,” a tension similar to that exhibited by Magnasco’s idiosyncratic renderings. See Sohm, 1991, 140-149.

6. In William Gaunt’s words, Magnasco’s figures are “mannequins thrown into unreasonable contortions, whose effects cannot be exactly predicted or their meanings defined.” See Gaunt, 57.

7. Compare her dress to the representations of gypsy women in their great skirts and hats from Callot’s The Feast of the Bohemians, from Les Bohémiens, one formal source for Magnasco’s representation of the gypsy solider type (Figure 56).

8. Quevedo, Villmiquel y Hardin, trans., 121-122.

9. The most prominent art theorist to consider the implications of reading fictitiousness into the receptive potential of paintings is Mieke Bal, though her approach dwells heavily on ideologies of reading and looking based on a contemporary understanding of “realism.” See Mieke Bal, “De-Disciplining the Eye,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 3 (1990): 506-531.

10. Donald J. Bear, “How to Read a Picture,” College Art Journal 3, no. 3 (March 1944): 105- 108.

11. By far the most thorough consideration of the intersection of painting and literature is Wendy Steiner, Pictures of Romance: Form Against Context in Painting and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

12. Benjamin Hrushovski, “Fictionality and Fields of Reference: Remarks on a Theoretical Framework,” Poetics Today 5, no. 2, The Construction of Reality in Fiction (1984): 227-251.

13. Hrushovski, 231-232.

14. Felix Thurlemann and Cheryl Spiese McKee, “Fictionality in Mantegna’s San Zeno Altarpiece, Structures of Mimesis and the History of Painting,” New Literary History 20, no. 3, Greimassian Semiotics (Spring 1989): 747-761.

15. Thurlemann and McKee, 747-748.

16. For more on irony and the use of comic hyperbole in the picaresque, see Edward Freedman, The Antiheroine’s Voice: Narrative Discourse and Transformations of the Picaresque (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 12-45; and Julián Olivares, “Levity and Gravity:

209 The Interpretation of the Ludic Element in Quevedo’s ‘Comunicación de amor invisible por los ojos’ and Donne’s ‘The Extasie,’” Neophilologus 68, no. 4 (October 1984): 534-545.

17. Julio Rodríguez-Luis, “Pícaras: The Modal Approach to the Picaresque,” Comparative Literature 31, no. 1 (Winter 1979): 32.

18. See Ulrich Wicks, “Pícaro, Picaresque: The Picaresque in Literary Scholarship,” Genre 5 (1972): 153-216; and Claudio Guillén, “Toward a Definition of the Picaresque,” in Literature as System: Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 71.

19. Guillén, 1971, 84; cited in Rodríguez-Luis, 33.

20. This quote is from an exchange of letters between John Fizer and Ulrich Wicks: John Fizer and Ulrich Wicks, “Theory of Fictional Modes,” PMLA 90, no. 1 (January 1975): 125.

21. Fizer and Wicks, 126.

22. E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (New York: Pantheon, 1961), 370; cited in Wicks, 1975, 126.

23. This runs counter to the prevailing sense of the term, as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as follows: “4. a. The species of literature which is concerned with the narration of imaginary events and the portraiture of imaginary characters; fictitious composition. Now usually, prose novels and stories collectively; the composition of works of this class”: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “Fiction.”

24. See Roberts, 80.

25. One arena in which Roberts suggests applicability of fictionality is theatrical performance, a visual culture that, in his verbal description, shares many synchronic attributes with genre painting: “It does seem to me that a performance could not be anything except fiction by intention. For even if I were to make a script by copying an exact transcript of what some people had said on some historic occasion, when actors spoke those lines they would give them their own inflections and pace and they would accompany them with gestures and movements that they had invented themselves, and it seems to me that these inflections and gestures, etc., would meet the criteria I found characteristic of fiction by intention (the actors would feel they were literally untrue and would expect their audience to know this). Thus I would argue that while the transcript may or may not be fiction by intention, the performance is always fiction by intention.” Roberts, 51-52.

26. Roberts, 11.

27. See Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 96; cited in Castellotti, 150; and for the translation of Ratti see Mandel, 183.

210 28. In many instances critics have blurred the relationship between text and context by viewing it in mimetic terms. I am not so interested in context, in part because so little of it is knowable, while the content of the text—Magnasco’s paintings—presents enough information to explore potentialities relating to eighteenth-century audiences’ understandings of real versus fictional depictions of picaresque subject matter

29. Roberts, 16.

30. Roberts, 9.

31. Roberts, 35.

32. “b. Imitation; spec. the representation or imitation of the real world in (a work of) art, literature, etc.” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “Mimesis.” See discussion of the term in Hans Robert Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” [Elizabeth Benzinger, trans.] New Literary History 2, no. 1, A on Literary History (Autumn 1970): 21; see also the discussion of “mimiture” in Roberts’s When Is Something Fiction?: Roberts, 95.

33. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Warheit und Methode (Tübingen, 1960), 109; cited in Jauss, 1970, 21.

34. See Roberts, 19.

35. Eddy de Jongh, “Realisme en Schijnrealisme in de Hollandse Schilderkunst van de Zeventiende Eeuw,” in Rembrandt en Zijn Tijd, exh. cat. (Brussels: Paleis voor Schone Kunsten, 1971), 143; translated in David R. Smith, “Irony and Civility: Notes on the Convergence of Genre and Portraiture in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting,” Art Bulletin 69, no. 3 (September 1987): 407.

36. Lesage, 151.

37. Lesage, 156.

38. Roberts, 9.

39. Adriaen Brouwer’s sordid life story attests to this allegorical, essayistic interpretation. See Mari Adelman’s master’s thesis on Adriaen Brouwer: Mari Adelman, “Getting High: The Seventeenth Century Tavern Scenes of Adriaen Brouwer” (Masters thesis, Temple University, 2000); see also Bryson Buroughs, “Adriaen Brouwer,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 21, no. 2. (February 1926): 51-54.

40. Discussed at length in “The Significance of Fictionalizing,” a lecture for the Learned Societies Luncheon, given at The University of California at Irvine on February 24, 1997, and later published in Anthropoetics—The Electronic Journal of Generative Anthropology; Wolfgang Iser, “The Significance of Fictionalizing, Anthropoetics 3, no. 2 (Fall 1997-Winter 1998): URL: http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/anthropoetics/.

211 41. Iser, 1993, 1.

42. To complete Iser’s thought, “It is out of this triad that the text arises: Just as the text cannot be confined to those of its elements which are taken from referential reality, so it cannot be pinned down to its fictional features. For these fictional features do not constitute an end or an entity unto themselves. Rather, they provide the medium through which a third element emerges. This is the element I have called the imaginary.” See Iser, 1993, 1-2.

43. Wolfgang Iser, “Fictionalizing: The Anthropological Dimension in Literary Fictions,” New Literary History 21, no. 4, Papers from the Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change (Autumn 1990): 939-955.

44. Pieter Spierenberg, The Prison Experience: Disciplinary Institutions and their Inmates in Early Modern Europe (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 44-45.

45. To expand this concept with Iser’s words: “When a fiction signals its own fictionality—for which of course genres are the most obvious and durable sign—it necessitates an attitude different from that adopted toward fictions hiding their fictionality. The incorporated ‘real’ world is, so to speak, put in brackets, simultaneously indicating that it is to be viewed as if it were a world . . . that has no empirical existence, and this is only to be taken as if it were a given world”; quoted from Iser, 1997/1998.

46. Iser, 1990, 939-940.

47. Though Iser addresses matters pertaining to literary fictionalizing, these ideas underlay the thesis of his 1997 lecture; Iser, 1997/1998.

48. According to Iser, “The text’s apparent reproduction of items from the world outside serves to highlight purposes, intentions, and aims that are not part of the realities reproduced.” In other words, the fictions inherent to Magnasco’s depictions are not contained in the representations of powder barrels, drums, horns, and fancy costumes; See Iser, 1997/1998.

49. Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” New Literary History 3, no. 2 (Winter 1972): 279-281.

50. Lesage, Smollett trans., 60-61.

51. Cervantes, de Onis, trans., 55.

52. Alemán, Brady, trans., v. 2, 21-26.

53. Hans Kellner, “Disorderly Conduct: Braudel's Mediterranean Satire,” History and Theory 18, no. 2 (May 1979): 197-222.

54. See the abstract from Chartier, 2002-03, 1.

212 55. Helmuth Plessner, “Soziale Role und menschliche Natur,” in Schriften zur Soziologie und Sozialphilosophie, vol. 10 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Günter Dux et al. (Frankfurt, 1985), 235; cited in Iser, 1992, 879; also cited in Iser, 1990, 946.

56. See Wolfgang Iser, “Staging as an Athropological Category,” New Literary History 23, no. 4, Papers from the Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change, (Autumn 1992): 877- 888.

57. While a picture may be worth a thousand words, writers have at their disposal a virtually endless supply of descriptors with which to elaborate upon the attitudes, motivations, and behaviors of fictional characters. Perhaps the real problem is not knowing which thousand words to apply to the understanding of one of Magnasco’s representations of a card player seated at a drum.

58. Iser, 1990, 941-942.

59. The second chapter of Iser’s The Fictive and the Imaginary (1993) addresses the intertextual fictionality of Renaissance pastoral representations: Iser, 1993, 46-68; see also Iser, 1990, 941. For art historical treatments of the pastoral, see Robert C. Cafritz, Lawrence Gowing, and David Rosand, Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape (New York: C.N. Potter, 1989); and Luba Freedman, The Classical Pastoral in the Visual Arts (New York: P. Lang, 1989).

60. According to Thomas J. Roberts, “The fictional genre consists of an extended convention or set of conventions working together to establish the formal nature of a whole work and to distinguish it as a particular kind of literary work.” See Roberts, 76.

61. Iser, 1978, 91; see also Steven Gillies influential review of Adena Rosmarin’s The Power of Genre: “The Power of Genre,” [book review], The Journal of Aesthetics and 45, no. 3 (Spring 1987): 308.

62. Genre is a useful , particularly when dealing with the art and literature of a temporally remote period like the Baroque, because we often lack sufficient knowledge about a culture, or more specifically, about the way that people read and looked at art. The closer an art object or a work of literature is to our time, the more means we have at our disposal for reconstructing its ground and discovering its cultural function. As long as we are interested in the cultural function of a text, and not just in explaining its component parts, the critic (and literary and art-historical critical methodologies) will be involved, whether explicitly or implicitly, in reconstructing its past function. See Gillies, 308-309.

63. Roberts, 76.

64. Though he spends an inordinate amount of time tracing the minutia of the historical moment in which a work of art is experienced, for Jauss, the historical context of genre is not an end in itself, but a means of uncovering the function of a text at any particular point in time. Jauss aims for “a theory of genres grounded in an aesthetics of reception [that] will add to the study of the

213 structural relations between literature and society, work and audience. . . a genre system that pre- constituted the intention of the works as well as the understanding of the audience.” See particularly Jauss, 1982, 108.

65. In Jauss’s words, “Aestheticization, or, using a term here that is less open to misunderstanding, fictionalization, is always at work in historical experience.” See Hans Robert Jauss, Question and Answer: Forms of Dialogic Understanding, Michael Hays, ed. and trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 25-29.

66. In Jauss’s words: “Every work belongs to a genre—whereby I mean neither more nor less than that for each work a preconstituted horizon of expectations must be ready at hand (this can also be understood as a relationship of “rules of the game” [Zusammenhang von Spielregeln]) to orient the reader’s (public’s) understanding and to enable a qualifying reception.” See Jauss, 1982, 79.

67. For further thoughts relating to audience “interactivity” and fictional texts, see Anthony J. Niesz and Norman N. Holland, “Interactive Fiction,” Critical Inquiry 11, no. 1 (September 1984): 110-129.

68. Jauss’s central notion of “horizons of expectations,” or Erwartungshorizont, is a term that derives from a number of German philosophical and historical traditions, indicating, in general, the set of expectations against which readers perceive the text: Geert Lernout, “Reception Theory,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, Michael Groden and Martin Kreisworth, eds. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). See also Hans Robert Jauss, Literaturgeschichte als Provocation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970); cited in Roger Chartier, “Genre between Literature and History,” Modern Language Quarterly 67, no. 1 (March 2006): 130.

69. Chartier, 2006, 130-131.

70. As a result, genre “cannot be deduced or defined, but only historically determined, delimited, and described.” I have set as my task the delimiting and description of Magnasco’s iconographic and thematic interaction with a fictional sub-genre that critics and historians have determined to be intertextually related to a number of non-fictional forms: beggar books, soldier’s biographies, and confessions of Catholic faith; Jauss, 1982, 108-109; cited in Adena Rosmarin, The Power of Genre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 36.

71. For numerous references to picaresque authors’ use of the hidalgo type, see Childers’s entries on royalty and nobility in Childers, 199-200.

72. Rosmarin, 29.

73. Gillies: 307-309; see also Rosmarin, 30.

74. Gillies: 307-309; see also Rosmarin, 30.

214 75. Lesage, Smollett, trans., 1: 230.

76. Benedetto Croce, Estetica, 2nd edition (Bari: Laterza, 1902), 40; quoted in Jauss, 1982, 78.

77. I first presented this argument in the form of a research paper, titled “Daumier's Tomes and Magnasco's Turnips: Two Portraits of the Beggared Don,” at the interdisciplinary conference “Quixotic Repercussions and Impacts: The Publication of Don Quixote I” at the University of Chicago in April 2005.

78. Muti, 210.

79. For more on Johannot’s Quixote, see Rachel Schmidt, “The Romancing of Don Quixote: Spatial Innovation and Visual Interpretation in the Imagery of Johannot, Doré and Daumier,” Word & Image 14, no. 4 (October-December 1998): 354-370.

80. William Lake Price was a English topography painter, watercolorist, and photographic pioneer. His first pictures were dramaturgic genre scenes arranged in the studio, and this one appeared in the London Photographic Exchange Club's album for the year 1855. The Exchange Club worked on the basis of mutual exchange of prints so that each member could have a selection of work by their colleagues without money changing hands. See Steve Edwards, “William Lake Price and James Mudd,” History of 20, no. 4 (1996): 342-344.

81. Though he is not known to have practiced the art, Daumier was an avid collector of photographs. The albums of the London Photographic Society were held in libraries and available in bookshops throughout Europe, and Price's Don Quixote was reproduced in at least two editions after the original club pressing. As a professional printmaker and caricaturist, Daumier would also have had knowledge of the many illustrated editions of Don Quixote from which to devise his version of the beggared Don. By 1867, Magnasco's own “Don Quixote” had been in the Cailleux collection in Paris for nearly ten years and would likely have been known by Daumier. See Schmidt, 364-368.

82. “‘Novelization’ as Bakhtin sees it is fundamentally opposed to the ordering into genres and canons that is characteristic of most literary systems”; see Mikita Hoy’s discussion of heteroglottal novelization; Hoy, 765.

83. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84; cited in Anthony Wall and Clive Thomson, “Cleaning up Bakhtin’s Carnival Act,” Diacritics 23, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 48.

84. Wall and Thomson, 48.

85. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 253 (his emphasis); cited in Wall and Thomson, 48.

86. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 237; cited in Best, 291, n. 3.

215 87. Best, 291-292.

88. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 246; cited in Best, 292.

89. In Bahktin’s holistic and intertextual view of novelization, this concept of time-space replaces conventional definitions of low-life genre—the delimited “generic whole” incorporating food, drunkenness, clothing, sex, and death—in favor of a view of the genre as a “series of human body performances” that allow the participants (the authors, the characters, and the audiences) “to investigate themselves freely, to study the disparity between their potential and their reality, both in the text and on the street.” See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 169-171; cited in Hoy, 773-774.

90. Cervantes, de Onis, trans., 177-179; Lesage, Smollett, trans., 1: 61.

91. Cervantes, de Onis, trans., 176-177.

92. Cervantes, de Onis, trans., 168.

93. Best, 292-293.

94. To Bakhtin, “adventure time” is not associated with a foreign, abstract world, but with a marvelous one: Bakhtin, “Forms of Time,” 248-249; cited in Best, 313, n. 7.

95. See Best 293-294, in particular her incorporation of T.J. Clark’s comparable theorizing from his book The Painting of Modern Life: T.J. Clark, The Painters of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York: Knopf, 1985), 49; cited in Best, 294, n. 11.

96. See Peter M. Lukehart, “The Choristers,” in Diane de Grazia and Eric Garberson, eds. Italian Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 187-188, n. 17.

97. See Muti, 207-208.

98. Steiner, 144.

99. Ulrich Wicks incorporates the concept of “panoramic structure”—“comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups, and exhibited in different attitudes”—into his description of the “picaresque mode.” See Wicks, 1974, 243.

100. Henry Ettinghausen emphasizes the idea of pícaro as interpreter in his discussion of Quevedo’s El buscón: Henry Ettinghausen, “Quevedo’s Converso Pícaro,” MLN 102, no. 2 (1987): 241-254.

101. Four canvases are of particular note: The Painter among Beggars (with Clemente Spera) (c. 1710, Collection of A.S. Drey, Monaco); The Painter’s Studio (c. 1730, Musée du Louvre); The Painter’s Studio (c. 1733-35, Narodny Galeria, Prague); and The Beggar Painter among Gypsies,

216 Musicians, and Vagabonds (c. 1738-39, Museo Luxoro, Genoa).

102. Formerly Vienna, Private Collection; Paris, Musée du Louvre; Los Angeles County Museum; Prague, Národni Galerie; and formerly Munich, private collection (Muti and Prigano, figs. 277, 331, 341-342 and 453). The group also features in the more elaborate composition in the Museo Giannettino Luxoro, Genoa (Muti, color plate 39, dated to the late 1730s). This work was exhibited at the exhibition in Milan at the Palazzo Reale; Castellotti, 1996, fig. 78; described as “appare riconducibile alla fase più tarda del Magnasco.”

103. Gaunt, 53.

104. Ratti, 1768-69; Reprinted in Mandel, 179.

105. Geiger, 1949, 56.

106. Giuseppe Delogu, Pittori minori liguri, lombardi, piemontesi del seicento e del settecento (Venice: Zanetti, 1931), 128.

107. Ratti recorded the events as follows: “The wish to take a wife, namely a certain widow whom a Genoese friend proposed to him in Florence, caused him to leave that city, and thus he came to see his birthplace again, where the wedding took place.” See Ratti, 1768-69; reprinted in Mandel, 178. See also the chronicle entry for “1708 ca.” in Marco Bona Castellotti and Christina Geddo’s “Regesto”; Castellotti, 1996, 357.

108. In Ratti’s words: “Magnasco’s only daughter had married a certain Signore Micone, namely in the year 1735; and unhappy at being separated from her father, she exerted herself so much, what with pretty arguments and the intercession of friends and relatives, that after a few months he moved to Genoa”; Ratti, 1768-69; reprinted in Mandel, 179.

109. In late March of 1709 the name of Alessandro Magnasco was annotated to the register of the Milanese Accademia di San Luca; Angelo De Bortoli, “Aggiuente al Magnasco milanese,” Arte Cristiana 739 (1990): 272; cited in Muti and Prigano, 137.

110. See Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 159-162; and Muti and Prigano, 258-259.

111. A point raised in the entry for Magnasco’s The Beggar Painter in the online catalogue for the Stair Sainty Gallery, New York and London: http://www.europeanpaintings.com.

112. Foremost among the practitioners of this art would be the great masters of Baroque painting, Diego Velázquez, Artemesia Gentileschi, Rembrandt van Rijn, Nicolas Poussin, Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, each of whose many self portraits represent the culmination of the post-Renaissance process of artistic self-examination and conceptual deconstruction. The best of each of their self portraits delivers to viewers a clearly descriptive representation of the sitter’s/artist’s likeness while exploring questions of identity, creativity, and the artist’s role in society.

217 113. Spike, 1986, 168.

114. Bona Castellotti, 252.

115. See related discussion of the phenomenon of episodic plotting in the development of the picaresque novel genre in Andres Ferrada, “La textura picaresca y meta-picaresca en Moll Flanders de Daniel Defoe,” Revisita Signos 36, no. 54 (2003): 177-182; and Dunn, 1993, 8-14.

218 CHAPTER FOUR

MAGNASCO AND MONASTICISM: PICARESQUE PREMISES OF PIETY

Using methodologies similar to those I employed in the examination of Magnasco’s picaresque paintings, this fourth and final chapter will explore the artist’s multivalent approach to the portrayal of monastic life and religious fervor, to the end of relating these portrayals to the skeptical attitudes intimated in references to religion in the picaresque novel. Magnasco simultaneously pursued two approaches to piety and spirituality: one highly expressive and theatricized (his representations of Camaldolite monks and ascetics in prayer, processionals, and witness to personal ecstasy) and the other much darker, moodier, and ostensibly more satirical (his scenes of Capuchin friars eating, drinking, and lazing about the misericords and refectories of shadowy abbeys). I believe that these ostensibly disparate scenes function most meaningfully when interpreted together.1 In conjunction with the theses of the previous chapters, I will argue that Magnasco at times treated monasticism as a subject of broadly picaresque derivation, using caricatural figures of monks and nuns to fashion scenes of spiritual emotion, lethargy, and comedy in a manner akin to the picaresque author’s utilization of these character types. Magnasco’s ecstatic monks flagellating themselves in grottos, when viewed alongside representations of similar friars dozing beside a warm hearth, function dialogically with picaresque accounts of most religious orders as being publically invested in showy displays of piety and self-deprecation, while privately their members enjoyed rich meals and long sleeps. Magnasco’s thematic ambivalence towards the cloistered life thus constitutes a comparably picaresque critique of the schema of religious hypocrisy.2 Magnasco painted many scenes of “religiosi,”3 and nearly every scholar of his paintings has interpreted them as they appear to be on the surface, as recording (however expressionistically) real moments from the devotional lives of hermits, ascetics, evangelists, and

219 monks.4 To be sure, mendicant religiosi were found everywhere in Magnasco’s Italy. Beside some 40,000 members of the Frati minori osservanti (the Observants) and some 25,000 Frati minori conventuali (the Conventuals), about 32,000 Capuchins were begging and preaching on the roads of Italy by the middle of the eighteenth century.5 Yet even as past writers have assumed that Magnasco’s paintings were anchored in the social realities of religion, critics have displayed surprisingly little interest in the broader perception of ordered life as recorded in the popular literature of the era, and none has considered the potential of the picaresque genre as a context rich in the caricatural treatment of monks and religiosi.6 Oscar Mandel’s recent study of Magnasco’s Calefactorium with Friars did mitigate somewhat the paucity of documentary details regarding daily life in actual orders, with a pointed discussion of the historical differences between the Capuchins and Camaldolites that Magnasco favored; yet there remains, even in Mandel’s richly considered essay, a tendency to look only to the paintings themselves as a means of understanding the artist’s and audiences’ attitudes toward the subject matter (c. 1725, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena; Figure 108).7 There can be little argument that Magnasco appropriated the emotional and expressive value of piety as a subject to be celebrated in stylized images that may be enjoyed for their formal brilliance and inherent narratives. 8 He painted nearly 100 representations of friars praying, confessing, parading along shorelines, and burying their dead—scenes rendered in dramatic strokes of light and dark, populated with famished-looking, robe-draped eremites cast against extraordinary backgrounds—paintings like Landscape with Processing Capuchins (c. 1720-30, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan; Figure 109) and Graveyard of the Trappists (c. 1715, Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa; Figure 110).9 Antonio Morassi described the predominately dark and unsettled mood of these canvases: “His ascetic friars know no peace, they flay themselves to the quick, pray in the solemn vastness of the forests or in the humid obscurity of fearful grottoes; the are present, powerless, at frightful shipwrecks; at death, they are like spectres, burying their comrades in the silence of cemeteries covered with humble, tottering crosses and bare trees.”10 The theological tenets and the spiritual and lifestyle practices of hermetic monasticism became for Magnasco “themes” after which to devise virtuoso, and consequently incredulous expressions of modern style (in Carlo Giuseppe Ratti’s words, “suo modo del tutto nuovo”)11 —a body of

220 paintings that Oscar Mandel has termed the painter’s “Camaldolite fantasies.”12 In sum, I agree with Mandel’s conclusion that Magnasco's lazy friars in scenes like Calefactorium with Friars represent an early Enlightenment-era depiction of Catholic spirituality—an aesthetic vision conceived by a secular imagination.13 Yet where Mandel spends the majority of his study seeking the prevailing “meanings” of Magnasco’s monasticism by critically amalgamating the opinions of art historians who recorded their thoughts some two hundred years after Magnasco’s death, I find that a great percentage of the imagery in these pictures is related, in style and mood, to the picaresque literary schemas that broadly defined Magnasco’s oeuvre in its own time—an influence that has been completely ignored in all prior studies of the painter’s monks and nuns.14 The chapter begins with a short discussion of the critical history of picaresque satire against the church, comparing literary with painterly representations of parochial and monastic life, informed by a satirical viewpoint.15 There is a long visual history of anti-Church- establishment satire beginning with the Reformation, but as one would expect, there is very little record in the more monumental and costly mediums of painting and sculpture. Most caricature and derisive imagery was shown in the relatively inexpensive etchings and engravings widely distributed and collected throughout Europe. I would argue that the audience and cultural climate receptive to Magnasco’s work was fond of such facetious representations, and that the painter’s work would have been viewed as heir to the limited tradition of the vagabond friars represented by artists like Egbert van Heemskerk, Cornelius Dusart, and Jacques Callot. The chapter will continue by looking at the ways in which Magnasco’s approach to the “picaresque body” was translated into representations of the physical bodies of devotees. Magnasco’s scenes are tightly packed choreographs of tonsured heads, robe-draped arms and legs, hoods and sandals. These figures’ formal expressiveness—exaggerated postures, contorted limbs, mannered proportions—convey the idea that holy austerity may be manifested both in the spiritual and the corporeal. I will argue that, however stylishly, Magnasco succeeded in presenting supremely physical portrayals of devotion, and in doing so communicated the idea of the human material basis underlying the asceticism common to the Capuchin and Camaldolite orders that he most often represented.16 Yet I will not argue that Magnasco’s paintings were intended to function as affirmations of their audiences’ faith, as emblems of fondness for

221 monastic life, or as devotional instruments through which viewers could achieve the transcendental states shown by the ecstatic friars. I believe that the social and literary contexts of Magnasco’s oeuvre suggest a different, and more complex reading. Such scenes were more likely viewed as painted fictions, showing highly expressive friars/characters performing imaginary scenes of heavenly power, spiritual catharsis, and ascetic self-denial. These scenes were painted by Magnasco in direct contrast to his other, quite contradictory visions of monasticism, those of feasting, festivity, and resultant lethargy. I will support my arguments throughout the chapter by presenting specific textual sources from the picaresque novel that relate—thematically and iconographically—to the indolent and depraved behaviors shown in some of Magnasco’s cloisters and convents. Such behaviors were richly parodied in the picaresque literary tradition, wherein overt and public displays of religiosity (comparable to Magnasco’s scenes of contorted and ecstatic friars) often belied more worldly pursuits of physical gratification (see Magnasco’s similar group reclined and picnicking in a grotto). Compare for instance Magnasco’s Spiritual Exercises of Monks in a Grotto (c. 1730-40, Berl Collection, Vienna; Figure 111), with Monks Eating in a Grotto (c. 1740, Szépmüvészeti Mùzeum, Budapest; Figure 112). Given knowledge of the contrast between the public and private lives of cenobites (typified by the incredulous descriptions of monastic life found in picaresque narratives) the first scene would be incomplete without the second. It would show only half of the pretentious monks’ repertory—the showy, lamentational praying without the feasting that follows as a reward for vigorous piety. In much the same way that Magnasco reused character types in his paintings of soldiers and gamblers, the representations of Capuchins in superhuman displays of piety depict the very same characters who later appear playing with cats and picking at their calloused feet and warming their backs at the monastery fireplace.17 I will demonstrate that this dichotomous approach to spiritual life reveals Magnasco’s artistic approach to be irresolute and skeptical, the critical attributes most often ascribed to the picaresque narrator.18 I will conclude the chapter by examining one example of Magnasco’s treatment of conventual life, The Convent Parlor, a painting that relates in its themes and iconography to several stock scenarios from the picaresque novels Pablos, el buscón, and Gil Blas ( c. 1730,

222 Private Collection, Milan; Figure 131). I will use this painting to bring full circle my argument that Magnasco’s oeuvre—encompassing both his “picaresque” and friar-paintings—depicts interrelated episodes in pictorial spaces of imaginary geniture, the characters and motifs which reflect types and tropes common to the picaresque literary genre.

Satirizing Monasticism

Numerous scholars of Magnasco have striven to describe the cultural contexts in which the painter would have developed his satirical approach to monastic life. Borrowing from period accounts of the ubiquity of religiosi in all spheres of society, critics describe Magnasco’s Italy as rampant with congeries of scheming friars, false penitents, and nuns behaving like débutantes. If only to reflect the prevailing sense among art historians with regards to these influences, I will begin this section by quoting at length from Antonio Morassi’s essay, “The Art of Magnasco”:

Above all it is the life of the monks and nuns that for many years retained the attention of Magnasco. . . . And the clergy at that time constituted a bizarre society. Beside them, all others, unless they were brigands or soldiers, were pallid and colorless. Acts of mortification would alternate with acts of vanity, and it was not rare to see priests bewigged or with Mephistophelian moustache and beard. They, too, dressed “for the court,” in gaudily printed material, girdled with showy weapons (even nuns were permitted to wear them, during carnival time), intently listening to charlatans and comedians. The chronicles of the time, perhaps exaggerating somewhat, inform us that the sacred temples themselves had become public squares and markets, even worse, scenes of vanity and lasciviousness, retreats of the scandalous, atrii de bagordi, theaters of indecencies. Convents were transformed into elegant salons, where recitals in costume were given and where noblemen and ladies were received with sumptuous feasts. All this must have strongly excited Magnasco, who profoundly felt the dualism and contradictions of these attitudes.19

In contrast to Morassi’s descriptions of the vitiated milieus in which Magnasco would have encountered religiosi, Rudolf Wittkower reserves as to the degree of Magnasco’s motive to show members of the faith so unflatteringly: “The question remains how much religious fanaticism, how much quietism or criticism or farce went into the making of his

223 pictures.”20 Fausta Franchini Guelfi proposed that these paintings embody part of a larger commentary on the monastic orders. She argues that, on the one hand, Magnasco painted numerous fraterie in which the “piety, poverty, prayer, and penance,” as well as the manual labors of religious orders, especially the Capuchin monks and the Franciscan sisters, are celebrated.21 But on the other hand, he portrayed the excesses of the convents and monasteries in which the members lived extravagantly and immodestly, such that they are “evidente nella loro intenzione derisione” (“plain in their derisive intent”).22 Franchini Guelfi goes so far as to assert that, given knowledge of their contrarian counterparts, Magnasco’s many paintings on traditional religious themes—processions, penitential contrition, prayer sessions, even crucifixions—are devoid of authentic religious feeling. She wrote of the “total and definitive loss of content and motivation in [Magnasco’s] sacred paintings” (“la totale e definitiva perdita di contenuti e di motivazioni della pittura sacra”).23 Ten years later, in an entry for Magnasco in La pittura a Genova e in Liguria dal Seicento al Promo Novecento, her interpretation is even more emphatic: “Magnasco constructs sacred scenes in which any intention of religious persuasion or edification is missing;” he is interested only in “dramatic representation.”24 Lionello Venturi had previously followed this line of thinking to its nihilistic conclusion, seeing Magnasco as representing a new age “of carefree frivolity, joie de vivre, religious skepticism and freedom of thought” in which whimsical paintings of monks and nuns are merely “sportive diableries” that “in a word, carry no meaning.”25 Despite this wide discrepancy between historians’ willingness to presume certain details about Magnasco’s representations of religious subject matter, there are numerous concrete period resources through which we can perceive popular attitudes regarding the spiritual state of affairs behind the cloister walls—namely, books, paintings, and prints. From these I will focus briefly on materials relating directly or obliquely to the picaresque literary genre, as one means by which period audiences could have developed “horizons of expectations” that would have prepared them for Magnasco’s satirical representations of the Church as a divaricated body—split between the dutiful exercise of spirituality and more worldly enjoyments. Even as commerce, science, and exploration expanded humankind’s understanding of the planet, the citizenries of Baroque Europe continued to be taught that true reality lay in the

224 supernatural other-world of God. According to Carl Friedrich, the pícaro, when reflecting on his experience (usually in a penitential mood), often accents the ineluctably illusory nature of lives filled with suffering and want, and assumes that they are guided by God’s will.26 As a confessional form, the picaresque “autobiography” often conveys “a deeply felt religiosity and more specifically a renewed belief in the transcendence of God as the true reality,” even as the pícaro’s daily activities center around the acquisition of material wealth and societal prestige.27 That existential struggle between the material and the spiritual is the bifurcation that underlies the world-view of every picaresque protagonist. It is the division between the bodily gratifications of food and fashion, and the discorporate rewards of moral living. The pícaro does, of course, believe in the forces of Providence—they are often too cruel to be ignored—but the beliefs he holds through his wandering years mostly center around the material trappings of religion (the power of a cross, the bulwark against arrest provided by a monk’s habit or a string of rosary beads).28 The Spanish historian José Ortega y Gasset neatly described this picaresque dilemma in his essay, Man and Crisis: “Souls looked simultaneously toward one world and the other as though walleyed, belonging to neither.”29 Before looking for evidence of these tendencies in novels and concomitant art works, we should concede that the “spiritual” environs of the picaresque borrowed heavily from the earthly realities of politics and economics that undergirded the growth of cloistered living as an alternative to soldiering, peddling, or begging.30 Across the Spanish and Italian peninsulas, nearly ten thousand religious houses swung each day their bells to matins and to vespers, and thousands and thousands of men and women passed their lives in devotion there, dependent on private fortunes or, more often, on pious bounties for support.31 Like the roguish vagabond, these anchorites and cenobites were non-producers, and a bond of sympathy linked them with the beggar, a bond that had earlier been strengthened by the institution of orders of mendicant friars, and that was supported through the centuries by the prospect of heavenly rewards promised in the Bible to those who assisted the needy.32 On the subject of penurious friars, a seventeenth-century French bishop, Jean-Pierre Camus, wrote that whereas Jesus had fed three thousand people with five loaves and three fish, St. Francis, “with a few ells of course cloth, feeds daily, by a perpetual miracle, forty thousand loafers!” (avec quelques aunes de bure, nourrit tous le jours, par un

225 miracle perpétuel, quarante mille fainéants!)33 Insomuch as mendicants relied upon the generosity of working people for their sustenance, the pious espousal of hermit monks to “holy non-productivity” led to their being railed at for hypocrisy.34 If some of these men and women went into seclusion honestly, as the result of a true disenchantment with the world, many were not so disenchanted that they ever lost sight of the chance to profit by their vestments. In the picaresque novel most monks choose the profession only as a cloak to roguery, and these shrewd friars often abandon their cloisters for the more gainful climes of the highway.35 In the Bachelor of Salamanca, Don Cherubin encounters a band of friars who “proposed to play at Primero, and this proposal was generally agreed to. Cards were brought; and the first who took them up to deal acquitted himself with a good grace, and in a manner which showed that he was well accustomed to handling them.”36 The fleecing that follows confirms Don Cherubin’s earlier proclamation, that “pícaros are the better part of those who wear the habit.”37 Quevedo’s Pablos himself dons “a friar’s habit . . . false beard, and a humble gait” in order to cheat a unsuspecting table of gamblers.38 When the young and naïve Lazarillo asks a gypsy maid if all of her companions were indeed born in , the prompt reply is, “not one; they are friars, clerks, nuns, or thieves escaped from solitude, convents, or prisons, and the worst among them are the friars, who have exchanged a contemplative for an active life.”39 Later a hermit’s mistress confesses to Lazarillo that her daughters can actually claim three holy fathers, who, according to the best conjectures, are a monk, an abbot, and a curate: “She said she had always been enamored of the Church.”40 The fact that many Franciscans led deplorable lives was officially acknowledged in the period chronicles of many Italian cities, like this passage, documented in Ettore Verga’s Storia della vita milanese (1859): “There is no lack of edicts against priests and friars who, armed or disguised, make the rounds of inns and taverns at night” (Non mancano editti contro preti e frati che, armati o travestiti, vanno in giro la notte per le bettole e le osterie).41 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Church strove to mitigate this popular sense of the peccancy of life under religious orders by publishing short treatises explaining the pious nature of conventual living, often in the form of scantly revised reprints of the biographies of legendary anchorites.42 One such example, Abbot Ailred’s biography of the

226 Cistercian monks of Rievaulx, idealizes the pure motives of every brother: “They venerate poverty . . . counting riches and honors as dung . . . spurning fleshly desires and vain glory in food, drink, act and affectation. . . . They observe at all times a discreet uniformity, using only so much and such means of sustaining life as will just maintain the needs of the body and their fervor in the worship of God.”43 But with texts like this at hand, the acerbic satire displayed in a painting like Egbert van Heemskerk the Younger’s Drinking Monk appears all the more damning (c. 1680, Museum Bredius, Aja; Figure 113). Likewise with the satirical works of Cornelis Dusart (1660-1704), Jacques Callot, and Philips de Koninck (1619-1688), artists whose images have been cited as influencing Magnasco’s vision of related subject matter.44 The diabolical physiognomy shown in Dusart’s satirical etching of a Capuchin Monk reveals a character that is clearly alien to Ailred’s fervent worshipper, and much more in keeping with the disguise that Estebanillo González’s master, the Viceroy Ottavio Piccolomini, wears—the habit of a Capuchin friar—in order to conceal his true identity when prowling the streets of Naples in search of sexual conquest (c. 1690; Figure 114).45 Jacques Callot’s Mendicant with a Rosary, while far more sympathetic than Dusart’s Capuchin, is still fashioned from satirical elements common to the picaresque (Figure 29). The grandiose rosary contrasts with a costume and haircut contrived to solicit a maximum of charity. The hyperbole of the figure’s pauperdom suggests that he too is no real disciple, but a tramp in the mode of Pablos’s friend Don Cosmo who cloaks himself in the trappings of the order: “He had the complete outfit of hypocrisy: there was a rosary of enormous beads; under his rags you might see the stain of blood intended to represent a holy penance—but it came from his nose; he would move and shrug his shoulders to make you believe he wore a hair shirt—whereas it was merely a lousy activity.”46 Even then Don Cosmo disguises the itching and scratching as a complex prayer gesture.47 Magnasco’s friars never appear so mean-spirited or duplicitous as Dusart’s scoundrel or Callot’s wretch, but the painter did routinely adapt their sharp features, heavy brows, unkempt hair, and grimacing expressions into his visions of inscrutable clerics (Figure 115). Magnasco did not, however, see his Capuchins or Camaldolites as embodying that most routine stereotype of the ordered life: fatness.48 In visual culture spanning from the Middle Ages into the eighteenth century, this overfed quality is one of the most common characteristics used

227 to satirize the coddled and gluttonous life of a friar. Philips de Koninck’s caricatural drawing The Friar About Town shows just such a Franciscan laden with two very full saddle bags, returning to the abbey after a day of shopping (c. 1660, Private Collection; Figure 116). In the second tratado of Lazarillo de Tormes, our protagonist is kept near starvation, while he is made to watch his clerical master bring whole heads of mutton home for Saturday dinner: “He cooked it and ate the eyes, the tongue, the neck, the brains, and the meat in the jaws. Then he gave me the chewed over bones; he put them on a plate and said, ‘Here, eat this and be happy. It’s a meal fit for a king. In fact, you’re living better than the Pope.”49 Guzmán twice considers becoming a Franciscan friar so that he will always have enough to eat.50 The one time he does enter the monastery he dutifully studies his grammar and Greek in exchange for plentiful hot meals, but once his hunger is sated he tires of the routine and abandons the order.51 Though often shown gathered around an ample spread of food and drink, as in Monks Eating in a Grotto, Magnasco’s friars remain the antithesis of plump (Figure 112). The satire that Magnasco incorporates into his monastic scenes is located in the contrast between the penitential and recreational bearings of his hyper-austere forms, which the painter Emile Bernard described as novel in their inversion of the rotund into the gaunt.52 Magnasco replaces the familiar topos of the fat friar with equally steep expressions of “self-abnegation, effaced under the tatters of their worn and mended monastic vestments”53 Franchini Guelfi also reads Magnasco as a satirist of monastic excess, and imagines him frowning in rebuke whenever he paints his frati osservanti “per essere in realtà” (as they “tended to be in reality”): too fond of food and wine and music and other such diversions.54 She correctly asserts his conceptual distance from Koninck’s gross satire of corpulence, but leaves out discussing the formal means by which the painter sought to correct the indulgent friars’ misbehavior. I would argue that where other artists exaggerated portliness, Magnasco’s rebuke is in the perpetual (spiritual) emaciation suffered by monks and friars who (based on the prevalence of eating scenes) are apparently well-enough fed. In an attempt to set the stage for Magnasco’s foray into monastic imagery, Franchini Guelfi drew parallels between Magnasco and other artists’ representations of fat friars and wandering ascetics.55 Franchini Guelfi did not employ Jauss’s concept of “horizons of

228 expectation,” but her intent was the same as my own: to propose a visual starting point from which audiences could understand the relationship between Magnasco’s visions and the traditions of anti-clerical satire in paintings and printed media. Though Franchini Guelfi does distinguish between Northern artists’ “accostarle alle spietate invettive antimonastiche” (“pitiless approach to their anti-monastic invectives”) and Magnasco’s more ambivalent posture—where ridicule in one painting is balanced with humbler moments in another, “senza ridicolizzarne nepure i momenti più umili”—both systems participate in a dialogue with viewers’ informed sensibilities regarding satirical stereotyping of the stock topoi of the monk, be they informed through real-life or literary encounters.56 It is difficult to argue for formal or conceptual continuity between a painting of a vilely lecherous Franciscan like Cornelis Dusart’s Monk Embracing a Laughing Woman (c. 1695; Figure 117) and Magnasco’s somber Capuchins in The Friar Barbers (c. 1720; Museum of Western and Eastern Art, Odessa: Figure 118). Yet period viewers would surely have had knowledge of the rich visual history showing ostensible ascetics in unflattering scenarios, and Magnasco’s paintings would appear the more novel for their contrast with these preceding texts, as viewers would be challenged to discover the more subtle satires contained in his seemingly quotidian depictions of Capuchin life. It would be incorrect to assert that all of Magnasco’s friar-paintings were meant as criticism, just as it would be incorrect to assert that the picaresque novel presented only damning descriptions of monastic lethargy and duplicity. In both mediums, the satire emerges when audiences are exposed to contradictory representations of similar (or identical) character types. Here and there in the picaresque novel a beneficent anchorite does appear. Marcos de Obregón relates the story of his life to a patient confessor in an oratory on the Segovia Bridge during a storm that confines them there. The only fault this hermit exhibits is a tendency to fall asleep, a tendency with which, considering the length and discursiveness of Marcos’s narrative, the reader may sympathize.57 Guzmán de Alfarache, Micer Morcón, and a party of rogues listen respectfully to a sermon delivered by an honest eremite, but part ways without profiting by his advice.58 Estebanillo González finds refuge in a hermitage on his journey between the Castle at Rodenas and Saragossa, where he meets a holy recluse. At first Estebanillo is wary, as he knows the villainous reputation of clerics, but the kind hermit divines the meaning of the traveler’s

229 hesitation, saying, “Young gentleman, do not permit my external appearance to alarm you; this habit is sometimes worn by honest men.”59 Standing alone, it is difficult to read Magnasco’s The Friar Barbers as a positive or negative portrayal of Capuchins. The central figure is dutifully tonsuring a novice while another towel dries a razor next to a large stone basin, but these characters are not altogether holy: a fourth anchorite grooms himself before a mirror, there is an empty bird cage suspended above their heads, and a cat is licking its paws, all suggesting a certain distrait frivolity. Overall, I would categorize the scene as ambivalent in regards to the friars’ devotional state of mind: it contains a few elements that evoke piousness—the cross over the doorway, the coarse brown robes, and the memento mori skull resting on the shelf beneath the window; but the chamber is otherwise crowded with allusory objects that have no grounding in ordered discipline—the cat (an instinctual preener), the ornate wash stand (pridefully polished to a high shine), and the numerous mirrors, which can only imply that these Capuchins care a great deal about the neatness of their tonsures and shaves. These are, after all, men struggling with the same character flaws they knew before they adapted the habit, and thus Magnasco’s satire is much softer and forgiving than many of the grotesque caricatures of his predecessors. Encounters with friars in the picaresque novel can paint a similarly gentle picture of the innate struggles that follow a novice’s abandonment of secular life. In a moment of despair following the death of his master, Estebanillo González seeks the advice of a hermit who lives in solitude outside of Pamplona: “As for myself, the loss of my dear master affected my mind to such a degree, that in the excess of my grief I was tempted to immure myself in the great convent of Franciscan Friars for the rest of my life.”60 He is sincerely desirous of a life change, and hopes to escape his master’s creditors by donning the habit and training under the hermit in his holy refuge.61 “‘You are too young,’ said he, ‘to embrace a mode of life which requires that its votaries should be satiated with the pleasures of the world, and be thoroughly satisfied of its vanities and vexations, in order to quit it with propriety. It is the want of this knowledge that fills the cloister with so many unworthy inmates.’”62 A like sentiment is expressed in Grimmelshausen’s original introduction to Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus, where a passage is adapted word for word from a work of the Spanish ascetic Antonius de Guevara: “The story is

230 to tell the life and adventures of an individual who has seen, learned and done many strange things and has eventually decided voluntarily to quit the world of action and experience for the tranquility of a hermit’s cell.”63 While the character of Simplicissimus does make a much better eremite than Estebanillo ever would, their flirtation with enlistment in religious orders are only two instances of the frequent social communion that went on between pícaros in search of easy living and inmates of the friary. Many pícaros took advantage of the sanctuary offered by the social convention known as “pórticos de las iglesias,” whereby fugitive beggars and thieves were not to be molested by creditors or legal authorities when sheltered in a church.64 It appears to me that, if Magnasco is to be viewed as a satirist, his approach is quite close to the viewpoint of the picaresque narrator: deferential to the true faith and discipline exhibited by those few exemplary practitioners of monastic life, but skeptical of the abilities of most brothers to abide by the strictures of their orders and seeking of subtle (formally witty) means of betraying such novices’ ineptitude. A painting like The Friar Barbers, when viewed alongside a devotional scene like Capuchins in Contrition before their Superior conveys just this sort of duplicity—the moral and fortitudinous shortcomings of the young, unworthy monks in the face of a mature religioso (c. 1730-40, Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid; Figure 119). Capuchins in Contrition is typical of Magnasco’s late paintings—dense groupings of nearly identical, monochromatic figures in various contortive postures. I will save my discussion of the monastic body for the next section of this chapter, but I do wish to emphasize here the distinct, physical effort that each figure appears to display in bending, kneeling, prostrating, crossing himself, and standing pensively, in formal contrast to the solemn and becalmed dignity of the abbot (Figure 120). To my eye, this effortfulness translates by degrees into disingenuity. In other words, the more stilted and flamboyant the figure’s disposition, the more likely it is that the figure is performing, and is not engaged in a genuine act of contrition. The unflinching abbot is the center of the composition, geometrically anchored in the shape of a triangle, while the sixteen other friars are crowded in the wings—an unbalanced six on the left, eight on the right. While some of the novices writhe and flail at the abbot’s feet, others peek distractedly into books, scribble on loose sheets of paper, or simply stare off into space. The figure on the far left seems to be having an especially difficult time concentrating on

231 the task at hand, as he looks down and away from his confessor, perhaps at one of the cats that we know to be prowling the abbey (Figure 121). It is as if Magnasco is saying, “Here is one of the ‘unworthy inmates.’” I would conclude this section by suggesting that, while painted by a man who was by all accounts a believer,65 representations of such extreme figural plasticity approach what Francis K. Barasch has termed “anti-Catholic burlesque”: “a [superficially] religious painting executed in a licentious manner, without rule, proportion, verisimilitude, or true coloring.”66 Magnasco’s figures certainly match these criteria, and if, as I believe, his friar-pictures were calculated to exaggerate the gestures of piety and lethargy in an entertaining way, the underlying sentiment toward the subject matter must be viewed as skeptical, or at least withholding of any endorsement. Chandler described picaresque satire on the church as “less harsh than lovingly witty. In the main it was not seriously meant; and although it never hesitated to signalize inconsistencies, it does not often venture to suggest reform.”67 I concur with Chandler’s general thesis, and find it an equally valid précis of Magnasco’s pictorial satire upon the material- spiritual bifurcation with which all unworthy acolytes struggle. I likewise find that there is a great deal of interpretive potential relating to this duality invested in the Magnasco’s approach to the physical bodies of the devotees—concepts of corporeality and inconsistency that resemble his attitude toward the pícaresque type.

The Monastic Body

Though never phrased as such, Magnasco’s treatment of the monastic body has been at the center of many art historians’ thinking about the artist’s attitude toward religious subject matter. There is no critical consensus as to whether Magnasco intended for his exaggerated human forms to ridicule the affectedness of the friars’ prayers, to represent the depth of their piety, or to show the fleshly inadequacy of mankind’s efforts to emulate Christ. Yet nearly all writers are ready to assume that the painter intended that his friars’ crooked, emaciated frames would complement and reinforce the underlying themes of these paintings—whether satirical or celebratory.68 Any objective examination of Magnasco’s friar-paintings must concede that the

232 artist presented his audiences with supremely physical portrayals of devotion, and in doing so communicated the idea of the human material basis underlying the asceticism common to the Capuchin and Camaldolite orders that he most often represented. Benno Geiger quoted excerpts from a lecture delivered by Roberto Papini in 1938: “Magnasco creates the tragic poem of faith to the point of martyrdom, discipline ending in maceration, segregation in solitude, and mortification in a skeleton. . . . [He] lengthens the bodies, stretches the arms, exaggerates the gestures and dishevels the beards and cassocks . . . [gestures] equivalent to confusing the tragic with the comic, the sob with the laugh.”69 Emile Bernard wrote that Magnasco’s dirty, flea- bitten, ostracized Capuchins appear as “Diogenean saints . . . who have been able to rise victoriously over the vanities and weaknesses of the flesh.”70 To Bernard’s thinking, they are “the last examples of Christ walking on earth.”71 Both of these readings seem inflated to me, and, more importantly, they deliberately ignore the many scenes in which these physicalized “ascetics”—supposedly victorious over their vanities—are clearly engaged in leisure acts like lounging, sleeping, daydreaming, and petting cats: scenes in which the viewer is faced with a strange vision of communal life among those who are supposed to have withdrawn themselves from communities. But, to concede Geiger’s and Bernard’s points about the extreme haggardness of the figures, Magnasco does stay true to his formal approach—pallid, elongated, and bony—in both his prayer scenes and calefactories, so as to make certain that viewers recognize that these same “Diogenean saints” do at times vacation from their abnegation to gather around fireplaces, talk, and scratch each others’ backs. Magnasco’s approach to the monastic body is not without precedent. It is assumed by most scholars that he knew and incorporated Francisco del Cairo’s (1607-1665) technique of using stark whites and tenebristic earth tones to effect expressive visions of piety.72 Cairo’s Ecstasy of Saint Francis clearly shows Magnasco’s debt to the earlier master. Though the painting is of a single, three-quarter length figure, St. Francis is composed of the same rapid, al tocco dabs and streaks that would lend Magnasco’s friars their disheveled energy (c. 1630-33, Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan; Figure 122). Some of Magnasco’s earliest known religious works, including Saint Francis Consoled by Angels (c. 1690-95, Galleria di Palazzo Bianco, Genoa; Figure 123), and Christ Bearing the Cross (c. 1690-95, Vitali Collection, Pistoia;

233 Figure 124), draw upon Cairo’s example: the sharp nose, sunken cheeks, and skeletal eyes and brows, all rendered in long, narrow brush strokes that accentuate leanness. We can see here, several years before Magnasco’s first friar-paintings, the beginnings of his approach to representing the physical bodies of ostensible ascetics. When images such as these are compared to other late-Baroque representations of monastic piety like Geritt Dou’s (1614-1675) The Hermit, it becomes apparent that Magnasco assigns his figural technique a special role in expressing the idea that holy austerity may be manifested both in the spiritual and the corporeal (c. 1670, National Gallery of Art, Washington; Figure 125).73 Dou’s hermit is fleshy, in keeping more with satirical images of the fat friar than Cairo’s and Magnasco’s wasted ecstatics. The hermit’s body is substantial beneath the coarse brown robe, and his face is round and jolly, even as he raises his eyes in prayer. While the scene does incorporate the requisite elements of a memento mori, the human skull and hourglass, the crucifix upon which he meditates is propped up by a picnic basket, and an empty pitcher is tipped over into the grass below the makeshift altar. I am not ready to insinuate that Dou intended for his painting to be interpreted as a satire against hermetic excesses, but it does include elements that must be read either as merely decorative—the empty pitcher, the open basket—or as disguised symbolism alluding to the man’s character, which would, in the tradition of the perpetually striving anchorite, be suggestive of moral or behavioral shortcomings.74 Magnasco produced several compositions that are quite similar to Dou’s The Hermit, most often substituting the recluse with small groups of Camaldolite friars. The wan figures in his Friars in a Grotto, for example, contrast strikingly with Dou’s robust anchorite (c. 1730, Private Collection; Figure 126). The central figure is the most ready surrogate: he is framed by a natural stone arch that echoes the brick ruins into which Dou’s figure has retreated; he kneels in front of a improvised altar; and he directs his gaze upward, to a book, a skull, and an elongated crucifix. On the surface, these figures’ situations and behaviors are nearly identical. But Magnasco departs from Dou’s rather conventional representation of the saintly hermit in two key ways. Firstly, Magnasco has reduced the monk’s physical mien from a naturalistic rendering of a real-looking man to a frenetic caricature of exaltation formed out of dashes of white and brown paint—copious robes draped over a near skeletal body. Secondly, he removes the penitent from

234 his solitary refuge into a crowd of similar figures, though their individual pursuits do vary widely. Some of the friars read prayer books, while others meditate over skulls, but there is one novice who is quite obviously asleep behind the back of the central figure, and another who may or may not be dozing with his arms crossed and his chin tucked into his chest. In William Gaunt’s words, “These pictures of monkish tribulation do not concern themselves with the sublimity of religion, but much more with the physical weakness of man.”75 It is this contradiction between the ecstatic body of the revering monk and the sleeping delinquent behind him that similarly led Hans Dürst to credit Friars in a Grotto as “[breaking] down one’s last doubts concerning the authenticity of Magnasco’s religious sensitivity,” for such paintings can be created only “out of the truth of one’s own experiences.”76 These “experiences” need not have been literal truths (i.e., it is unlikely that Magnasco encountered such a bevy of Camaldolites in a ), but to borrow from the terminology used in the discussion of fictitiousness, it does suggest the painter’s desire to record propositional truths as he saw them: the disjunction between the promises and practices of monasticism. Franchini Guelfi contends that Magnasco invented the iconographic particulars of his subject matter, “which falls between a chronicle of modern life and the more established conventions of satirical genre,” for a learned and sympathetic clientele whose pre-formed attitudes toward the lifestyle practices of monastic orders were already skeptical before they ever saw Magnasco’s paintings.77 Franchini Guelfi has identified the patrons for many of Magnasco’s friar-paintings as members of a learned circle in Milan, cultured, though anti-academic, in their tastes. They supported ecclesiastical and social change and were especially attuned to the satirical commentary that he brought to the medium, as they were themselves at that time reading, writing, and translating reformist texts.78 These are the patrons to whom Franchini Guelfi most readily assigns interest in the Spanish picaresque genre, as a sympathetic locus of stereotypes and social criticism levied against the church.79 But, as Chandler argued, such criticisms were felt to be most effectively delivered in a manner “less harsh than lovingly witty”; the goals of both the picaresque author and the pictorial satirist were, after all, reformist, and not meant to destroy the faith.80 For such a critical audience, Magnasco’s approach to corporeal inconstancy must have resonated with desire not to embellish or otherwise enrich the popular sense of life in monastic retreat in a comedic

235 fashion, as in Dusart’s Monk Embracing a Laughing Woman, but to critique the friars on their own terms—as (by the tenets of their orders) professors of discipline, temperance, and piety, whose misbehavior seldom rose to the outrageous level of lewd groping, but who were daily guilty of the sins of pride and sloth. Sloth, avarice and lack of reverence are common to representations of the clergy in the picaresque genre.81 These critiques did not aim to undo the integrity of the various Franciscan orders, but to reveal the imperfect human nature of the men who took their oaths, in much the same way that the picaresque author regularly reminded readers of the frequency with which rogues adopted the cloth, either with a sincere conscience—to be rehabilitated into the godly life (like Guzmán and Simplicissimus)—or with designs to taking advantage of the confidences placed in churchmen by dupable people.82 Despite the relative wealth of writing on Magnasco’s friar-paintings (compared to that relating to his picaresque oeuvre) it has not yet been observed that Magnasco consistently represents the life and activities of mendicants in one fashion when out of doors—ecstatic, prayerful, acquiescent—while his most critical exposés of loutish behavior are reserved for interior scenes, presumably depicting various chambers within the monastic compound. In other words, Magnasco deliberately delineates the physical spaces in which the friars exhibit orderly discipline, and where they permit themselves pleasures of the flesh. In open air scenes like A Procession of Friars, they walk in queues through windswept landscapes, pray at rural altars, and proselytize to gatherings of beggars (c. 1710, Galleria Sabauda, Turin; Figure 127). Inside the cloister, in scenes like Calefactorium with Friars (Figure 108), and Monks Warming Their Feet, they lounge before the fireplace, picking at their callouses in the company of cats (c. 1719-21, Private Collection, London; Figure 128). Due to his singular stylistic approach to the monastic body, viewers would naturally assume that they are witnessing multiple scenes from the lives of the same friars. And in bearing witness to the discrepancies between these friars’ behaviors, Magnasco’s audience assumes an omniscient position from which they gain access to the pictorial equivalents of stock narratives of monasticism—public displays of humility shielding private indulgences—narratives that resemble those promulgated in the picaresque novel.83 In facing monks in such relaxed environs, one might think that Magnasco merely intended to reveal the practices that friars reserved for the misericord: the apartment in a

236 monastery in which certain relaxations of the rule were permitted, and in which monks to whom special allowances were made in food and drink (because of illness, etc.) could eat.84 This is not an indefensible thesis, and it was the basis for William Gaunt’s analysis of these fireside scenes: “They are clustered round, thrusting forward gnarled fingers and distorted toes to the flames; there is something pathetic in the eager gestures with which they warm their cold bodies, a human weakness in those who have forsworn the delights of the flesh but cannot endure its discomforts.”85 But this interpretation again maintains the thesis that Magnasco intended for his viewers to interpret these scenes as recording actual activities, a thesis with which I disagree. At most, I would concede that we may be witnessing activities happening in a fictionalized misericord.

Monastic Fictions

I find these scenes to be much more in keeping with his fictional portrayals of the lives of picaresque rogues discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 than with any discrete documentary tradition relating to monastic orders86 —a tradition with which no art historian has convincingly argued Magnasco’s involvement.87 To my mind, his highly stylized and symbolic approach to the monastic body (such that, in comparison with Dou’s Hermit, it barely registers as human) reveals his thematic intentions to have been allegorical at very least, and indeed I find that there is evidence in his broader oeuvre to suggest that he would have endorsed audiences’ interpretations of these scenes and the individuals who inhabit them as further components of the larger pictorial world of picaresque derivation that I earlier described. My basis for this assertion relies upon two observations made in the discussion of Magnasco’s picaresque “fictions”: first, the frequency with which he recreated the same physical forms—the same individual “characters”—as if their imaginary “lives” were being shown in episodic fashion; and secondly, the reproduction, in multiple, seemingly unrelated scenes, of set pieces, props, and environments that resemble novelistic stock settings into which various character types were cast—the tavern, the grotto, the prison, the lair. This interpretation can most easily be explained with the help of three paintings: Monks

237 Warming their Feet (Figure 128), Pícaros at the Hearth ( c. 1715-20, Private Collection, Venice; Figure 129), and The Latrine of Misery ( c. 1715-20, Private Collection, Venice; Figure 130). These three paintings date roughly to the same period in Magnasco’s career, though I would argue that he sustained an interest in these scenarios and figures for more than thirty years, between 1710 and 1740, and any similar assortment of paintings could be likewise cited as evidence of his intentional blurring of character types and pictorial spaces. I will begin by stating my belief that Magnasco’s Monks Warming their Feet shows an group of five imaginary Capuchin monks and a cat gathered in front of a huge, open-flued fireplace, the hood of which is cracked, and leaking smoke. I say these figures are imaginary, because (as with his roguish character types, the gambler, the soldier-dandy) they all look nearly identical. There are two white-bearded elder friars, a youthful, tonsured novice, and two brothers with close cropped hair. They are all equally tall and lean, with long, bony fingers and feet. This uniformity of personage eliminates any real possibility that these stock personages are intended as representations of real people, and thus we may already be somewhat certain of the scene’s underlying fictitiousness. The space in which the friars gather is equally contrived; it looks rather a lot like a corner of Magnasco’s Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (Figure 48), with its sheer, deeply recessed stone wall, shadowy staircase framed by an arch, and scattered benches and three-legged footstools. But a closer analogue is Pícaros at the Hearth (Figure 129), where the figures are doing exactly what the monks are doing: sitting in a ramshackle room filled with benches and stools, warming their bare feet in front of an open-flued fireplace, the hood of which is split open in exactly the same way as the friars’ fireplace. It must be granted that the fireplace in the pícaros’ chamber is somewhat more ornate, with its scrolled corbels and flat rim used to store a pitcher and some crocks. And the pícaros are smoking and playing cards while the friars are merely resting. But there are figures in both paintings who hold rags up to the fire, presumably so that they may be dried; and there is a cat seated at the feet of the central figure in both paintings. In short, it appears to me that Magnasco felt free to adapt a scenario of lazy refuge into secular and ecclesiastical contexts in exactly the same way, and that this tendency would discourage any reading of his “misericords” as literal depictions of monastic practice. By behavioral measures, depending on which way the audience perceives the narrative as progressing, there is, within the

238 painter’s pictorial universe, the potential for the pícaro to become the friar or the friar to become the pícaro, as, indeed, was the case in the literary genre. The conclusion that Magnasco viewed his friars as essentially connected to the earthy, pauperous existence of vagabonds and beggars is further endorsed by the scenario contained in the pendant painting to Pícaros at the Hearth: The Latrine of Misery (Figure 130).88 If Pícaros at the Hearth is one step away from Monks Warming their Feet, then The Latrine of Misery is a mere two steps. The roguish characters from Pícaros at the Hearth are transplanted into a fetid, scatological cellar—with its requisite archway, staircase, and sheer brick wall—where they perch themselves on the edge of a common bench over the bog pit, before which are scattered buckets, basins, and rags for wiping their bottoms. One would assume that these soiled rags would be washed, and then dried—perhaps before an open fireplace. Based on formal evidence alone, it is clear that Magnasco intended for his audience to perceive related content in his picaresque scenes and his friar-paintings. To my mind, that such an unflattering sequence of relationships could be so readily and logically teased from these three paintings cannot but reinforce the interpretation of Magnasco’s visions of the friary as skeptical and possessed of an existential humor related to that with which he rendered the lives of mendicant vagabonds. What is certain is that Magnasco constructed his friar-paintings from many of the same stock pictorial elements that he used in crafting his picaresque fantasies, and that in so doing, he diminished any case for interpreting his religious pieces as authentic reflections on monastic life. If his lazy friars can be readily interchanged with pícaros on a formal level (i.e. in the course of creating a painting), then the painter’s attitude toward both types must be related. If one is determined to be fictional, then so must the other.

In The Convent Parlor

I will conclude this chapter and my larger study of Magnasco’s creative intersection with the picaresque literary genre by examining a painting that belongs to both the discussions of his use of picaresque themes and iconography, and his skeptical attitude toward life in religious orders. To my knowledge no art historian has examined Magnasco’s The Convent Parlor for its

239 relationship with the stock picaresque scenario of the young man liaising with a nun in the controlled environment of the convent gallery (c. 1730, Private Collection, Milan; Figure 131). Georg Syamken is the only writer to have focused on the painting, and his conclusion that it represents “an interview of a gallant nature, . . . another allegory of idleness,” ignores two potential textual resources by means of which Magnasco’s audiences could have imagined narrative contexts for the scene: Quevedo’s Pablos, el buscón, and Lesage’s Gil Blas de Santillane.89 Both of these texts include episodes in which the pícaro courts women in a nunnery. Let me begin by briefly describing the painting. Magnasco painted three versions of The Convent Parlor, and the figures and settings of each are virtually identical. A young dandy is seated at a large table set against a wall, while another leans against the table; they are both looking through a tall grate that allows visible passage into a convent yard. Standing behind the grate are seven women dressed in nun’s habits. Joining the dandies in the parlor are a tonsured friar, a cellist, and a lackey of some sort who hovers just over the seated man’s right shoulder. It is clear that there is at least one liaison going on, perhaps more; it is possible that each of the figures in the parlor is there to visit a sweetheart. The seated figure is the center of attention, and he has obviously dressed to impress. His legs are sheathed in the colored ligas twice described by Guzmán as a must-have accessory for any courting gallant.90 Stockings, while a standard fashion accessory for the eighteenth-century gentleman, were not a garment without metaphoric potentiality, and it seems to me that Magnasco has placed special emphasis on the man’s well- turned calf, as it occupies the center of the composition. In his study on luxury and consumption in the Baroque era, Woodruff D. Smith counted close fitting stockings among the articles of clothing that contributed to “fantasies of lasciviousness”—barely disguising the bare leg beneath: “Apart from their apparent practical function of showing off, as it were, the sexual merchandise of the wearer, hosiery presumably connected with male fantasies of sex, [and] potency in all of its meaning.”91 At very least, Magnasco intended for this scene to be interpreted as a meeting of lovers: discounting the interfering wall, the figures lean in towards each other; they smile and peek flirtatiously through the grate; the musician, seated at a cello, one of the most symbolically sexual of instruments, contributes an amorous tone.

240 For the pícaro, there was nothing sacred about the convent. It regularly served as the source point for fleeting infatuations, and as a virtual boarding house where criminals would put up their female partners in confidence scams.92 Pablos describes at length the chaotic scene of evenings at the nunnery, where a rabble of would-be suitors plied the pick-up game with young women whose place in the convent promised the fellow a substantial dowery if he could convince her to withdraw herself and come home with him:

I frequented the convent galleries and, although there was a fairly large court, it was necessary to bespeak a place, just like the first night at the theater. The place seethed with devotees, but I settled myself as best I could and was able to see—strange sight—the different postures of the lovers. One would simply stare without winking: another would stand with one hand on his sword and the other holding a rosary . . . another would stand with up-stretched arms as though in ecstasy: another stood silent with mouth wider open than an importunate woman’s, giving his beloved a view of his entrails down his throat.93

There is, unfortunately, no historical evidence linking Magnasco’s Convent Parlor to Quevedo’s novel, though I have also searched the art historical record for other instances where painters depicted this curious courtship environment and found none. Of course, no one would argue that Magnasco’s painting is wholly without a relationship with some sort of pictorial tradition, and it seems equally unlikely to me that—in the absence of painted counterparts—Magnasco’s parlor scene has nothing to do with scenarios like that described in Pablos, el buscón. As with the earlier examples of iconographic and thematic intersections between pictorial art forms and picaresque texts, there exists here a rich potentiality for intertextual dialogism between Magnasco’s imaginary liaison between a dandy and a nun, and the related cultural schemas of conventual courtship toyed with by picaresque authors. Descriptions like Pablos’s might have set the narrative stage for a viewer’s interpretation of Magnasco’s isolated scene, or the written episode might, in turn, be informed by a reader’s familiarity with the painter’s vision of a convent parlor. Either way, their descriptive and thematic similarities force the two works of art (literary and pictorial) into a dialogical relationship. Especially as so many of Pablos’s words read like captions for Magnasco’s painting:

241 “[The nuns’] look-out was a room pierced all over, and a wall with openings, like a sandbox or pomander. There was something to be seen in every gap: here a miscellaneous heap of things, there a hand or foot. Elsewhere could be seen such things as might make a Saturday meal—heads and tongues, though never brains. . . . One nun would show a rosary: another would wave her handkerchief; here would be seen a glove: there a green ribbon. Some of the nuns would talk aloud: others would cough, and others again would hiss. . . . They press their faces against the gratings, and fire sweet nothings through the loopholes. Making love is a game of hide and seek.”94

Quevedo’s Pablos, el buscón was not the only novel in which a pícaro attends to a nun in a convent parlor. Alain René Lesage’s Gil Blas de Santillane (1714-25; a novel contemporaneous with Magnasco’s creative life) includes an episode where the main character serves as a lover’s proxy. Gil Blas delivers a letter from his deceased friend Don Ambrosio to the man’s lady, “who had taken the resolution of retiring to a convent at Burgos.”95 Gil Blas recounted the meeting as follows: “I besought the attendant at the turning-box to tell that lady that a young man just discharged from prison at Astorga wanted to speak with her. The nun went on the message immediately. On her return, she showed me into a parlor, where I did not wait long before Don Ambrosio’s widow appeared at the grate in deep mourning.”96 While nowhere as dynamic a scene as Quevedo’s, it does reinforce the sense that the convent parlor was a social environment frequented by the pícaro. Magnasco’s seated dandy appears to be holding a sheet of paper out for a nun to take, and while this scene in no way reflects the solemnity of Gil Blas’s delivery of a letter from a deceased lover, we do see behaviors that suggest the exchange of sentimental notes or objects—behaviors surely in violation of the moral strictures of the convent. Any rules against meeting with lovers or carrying on amorous correspondence appear to be unenforced in Magnasco’s imaginary nunnery. If Magnasco intended for The Convent Parlor to be interpreted as a vaguely picaresque lover’s encounter—where clotheshorses vie for the attentions of sequestered religiosi—this again speaks to his general attitude toward the lifeways of anchorites. The skepticism displayed in his portrayals of friars as inconstant in the observation of their orders, and as behaving in a manner analogous to his picaresque character types, here translates into skepticism regarding the dutifulness with which young nuns adhere to their vows of chastity—both in thought and deed.

242 To conclude, Magnasco’s approach to monastic themes exhibits many of the same formal and thematic attributes shown by his paintings of vagabond soldiers, gamblers, and disenfranchized noblemen. These are the fundamentally picaresque attributes of faithlessness, changefulness, and moral ambivalence, which, in the case of his friar-paintings and The Convent Parlor, gently reveal the characters’ underlying (and inevitable) struggle with religious hypocrisy.

______

1. This is in contrast to the prevailing tendency of past art historians to separate the artist’s approaches into devotional images (ecstasies and confessions) exemplary images (scenes of industrious nuns) and satires (depictions of lazy monks): see for instance Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 189-218.

2. R.W.B. Lewis has written at length on the many associations to be drawn between the picaresque hero and the pilgrim, or person undergoing a process of spiritual renewal or conversion: R.W.B. Lewis, The Picaresque Saint: Representative Figures in Contemporary Fiction (Philadelphia: Lippencott, 1958). J. Wesley Childers also indexes parochial motifs: Childers, 1977.

3. An Italian term encompassing members of both the contemplative and the mendicant religious Orders: Mandel, 25, n. 1. Benno Geiger’s catalogue of 1949 lists somewhere around 125 of these friar and monk paintings: Geiger, 1949, 44; cited in Mandel, 26.

4. The basis for this tendency of scholars to approach Magnasco’s themes (argomenti) of monastic life as documentary might be based in Carlo Giuseppe Ratti’s first account of the nature of these paintings—painted so as to satisfy his patrons’ desire for insights into the lives of i religiosi: “Hermitages of Camaldolesi or Certosini flagellating themselves or engaged in other acts of self-mortification and penance. Chapters of friars. Processions. Monks studying. Missionaries preaching.” See Ratti, 1768-69. Reprinted in Mandel, 183.

5. The figures are those in Francesco in Italia, nel mondo (Milan: Jaca Book, 1990), 272; cited in Mandel, 29, n. 6. The total number of religiosi residing in all of dwellings of all of the branches of the Franciscan Order in 1762 is given as 134,721, roughly eight percent of the total population of the Italian peninsula. A plurality of these were located in Magnasco’s home region of Lombardy, an area that counted more Capuchins than any other area in Italy.

6. For instance, Hans Dürst, whose study of Magnasco is guided mostly by considerations of prevailing cultural schema, devotes only four pages to the barest descriptions of the painter’s “Eremitenbildern.” See Dürst, 67-70.

243 7. See the first half of his Chapter 2, “Capuchins and Camaldolites”; Mandel, 25-32. Under a later subheading titled “Textual Roots,” Mandel alludes to the potential for intertextual interpretations: “To dissociate the calefactorium scene from any given text—narrative or doctrinal—does not imply that this painting, or any other painting so divorced—is a detextualized, immediate apprehension and reproduction of a reality the eye of the painter has perceived.” See Mandel, 110-113.

8. Wietse de Boer provides the most recent comprehensive treatment of piety in public life during late Counter-Reformation, and centers his arguments in the ecclesiastical seat of Milan, the civic context from which Magnasco would derive his passion for spiritual intensity. See Wietse de Boer, The Conquest of the Soul: Confessions, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (Leiden: Brill, 2000).

9. By my count Muti and Prignano catalogue 94 paintings with monastic themes. See Muti and Prignano, 1996.

10. Morassi, 1967, 13.

11. Here citing Ratti’s phrase describing Magnasco’s artistic originality; Ratti, 1768-69, reprinted in Mandel, 177.

12. Mandel, 31.

13. “Magnasco must have made people gape in astonishment, whether at the topics treated or at the manner of treating them, and most likely at both.” See Mandel, 153.

14. I should here remind the reader of the title of Mandel’s study: The Art of Alessandro Magnasco: An Essay in the Recovery of Meaning. For reference to my description of Mandel’s approach as a critical amalgamation of past scholar’s opinions, see particularly his Chapter 6, “Magnasco Among The Experts”; Mandel, 53-84.

15. See Claudio Guillén, 1987; and Maiorino, 2003, among others.

16. Italian Camaldolites are also called the White Benedictines, well known for their reclusiveness in remote mountain-top hermitages.

17. Magnasco’s Calefactorium with Friars (c.1725, Pasadena, Norton Simon Museum) and the monumental The Observant Friars in the Refectory (1736-37, Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa) offer the most comprehensive and detailed example of his approach to leisure in ordered life. Though Mandel committed his monograph to the former, I have found only one reading of the refectory scene, an eight-hundred word entry from Marco Bona Castellotti’s 1996 exhibition catalogue; Castellotti, 1996, 248-251.

18. Joan Arias, Guzmán de Alfarache: The Unrepentant Narrator (London: Támesis, 1977), 55.

244 19. Antonio Morassi, “The Art of Magnasco,” Frank J. Fata, trans., in Alessandro Magnasco (1667-1749): an Exhibition held at the J.B. Speed Art Museum and the University of Michigan Museum of Art, 1967 (Louisville: J.B. Speed Art Museum, 1967), 11-16.

20. Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600-1750, 3rd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973) 478; cited in Mandel, 82.

21. Franchini Guelfi, 1991, 98; see also Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 250, n. 76, in which she provided a short bibliography on the monastic orders; cited in Diane de Grazia and Eric Garberson, Italian Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 187.

22. Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 231; cited in De Grazia and Garberson, 186.

23. This verdict covers Magnasco’s numerous depictions of Christ (miracles, temptations, crucifixions, etc.), Mary Magdalen, Saint Francis, Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine, Saint , and the like; Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 24; cited in Mandel, 77.

24. Fausta Franchini Guelfi, “Alessandro Magnasco,” in La pittura a Genova e in Liguria dal Seicento al promo Novecento (Genoa: SAGEP Editrice, 1987) 325; cited and translated in Mandel, 77.

25. Lionello Venturi and Rosabianca Skira-Venturi, Italian Painting from Caravaggio to Modigliani, S. Gilbert, trans. (Geneva: Albert Skira, 1952) 17, cited in Mandel, 65-66.

26. See Carl Friedrich’s bibliographical essay, The Age of the Baroque 1610-1660 (New York: Harper, 1952), 50-59. Alexander Blackburn similarly emphasizes Lazarillo’s typological feelings of picaresque anguish over the role that Providence plays in his misfortunes are reinforced in Guzmán de Alfarache and La vida del Buscón. In Blackburn’s words, “These novels are steeped in baroque illusionism: that is, in the feeling that life is a dream and rounded with a sleep,” at the end of which the pícaro hopes for salvation in spite of his misdeeds. See Blackburn 15.

27. Friedrich, 53.

28. For a recent study of the pícaro’s adaptation of Catholic constructs of personal behavior and adornment, see Michael Scham, “Guzmán de Alfarache in light of San Antonio de Padua: Another look at Alemán's cosmovisión,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 83, no. 2 (March 2006): 175- 185.

29. Blackburn 15; José Ortega y Gasset, Man and Crisis, Mildred Adams, trans. (London, 1959) 186.

30. For more on the personal economics of monasticism, see Illana Friedrich Silber, “Monasticism and the ‘Protestant Ethic’: Asceticism, Rationality and Wealth in the Medieval

245 West,” The British Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (March 1993): 103-123.

31. “They—the monks and nuns—were the chosen seekers after a heavenly salvation, one of the conditions of which was charity. It was the business of the poor, in their very necessity, to furnish the opportunity for fulfilling that condition. Indeed it was regarded almost as a providential provision that there should be any poor at all, else how could the religious achieve everlasting bliss. The monasteries, therefore, did dispense charity. The beggar and the vagabond need never faint by the way, although the hidalgo or the rogue in his pride might.” See Chandler, 28-29.

32. “And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness”: Colossians 3:14, King James Version.

33. Gabriel Le Bras, Les ordres religieux: la vie et l’art, 2 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 1979-80) 1:322; cited in Mandel, 96, n. 2.

34. See Edward Coleman, “Nasty Habits—Satire and the Medieval Monk,” History Today 43, no. 6 (1993): 36-42.

35. Frank Wadleigh Chandler describes two of many such scenarios played out in the picaresque narrative: “Pedro de Urdemalas in refuses an alms to a hypocrite hermit held to be a saint by the people, but Pedro is beaten by the angered anchorite, to whom, in sheer self-defense, he is obliged to be reconciled. To the pícaro’s relief, this Brother Llorente finally departs on a pilgrimage, really eloping with a girl; and he is next heard of scouring Italy in a troop of soldiers. . . . Lazarillo de Manzanares is taken into service by a santero, with whom he leads a merry life, his business consisting in gathering from the rich more than they give.” See Chandler, 101-103.

36. Lesage, The Bachelor of Salamanca, Townsend, trans., 231.

37. Lesage, The Bachelor of Salamanca, Townsend, trans., 191.

38. Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 183-184.

39. Lazarillo, Rudder, trans., 132.

40. Lazarillo, Rudder, trans., 171-172. Chandler cites this episode in his discussion of picaresque satire against the Church: “She is nicknamed the ecclesiastical widow; and her daughters inherit her partiality for gentlemen of the cloth, whose recommendation lies in their being secretive, rich, and patient.” See Chandler, 95-96.

41. Ettore Verga, Storia della vita milanese (Milan, 1859) 289: cited and translated in Mandel, 96, n. 3.

42. M.B. Pranger, The Artificiality of Christianity: Essays on the Poetics of Monasticism, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 12-13.

246 43. Coleman, 36-37.

44. Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 191-194.

45. Vanillo González, J.C. Nimmo and Bain, trans., 101-102.

46. Don Francisco Gomez de Quevedo Villegas, Quevedo, the Choice Humorous and Satirical Works, Charles Duff, ed. and trans. (London: George Routledge and Sons Ltd., 1926), 88.

47.Quevedo, Duff, ed. and trans., 89.

48. For studies that touch upon the stereotype of the fat friar, see Anne K. Kaler, “Who is that Monk in the Hood?: Friar Tuck, Francis of Assisi, and Robin Hood,” Journal of Popular Culture 30, no. 4 (Spring 1997): 51-60; and William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

49. Lazarillo, Rudder, trans., 29.

50. In reference to the abundance of food in the monastery, see Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 3: 243; 5: 103; cited in Gray, 22.

51. Noted in Chandler, 96-97.

52. See Emile Bernard, “Alessandro Magnasco,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 82 (1920): 351-361.

53. Bernard, 356; cited and translated in Mandel, 68.

54. Quoted from Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 212; cited in Mandel, 78.

55. Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 191-196.

56. Quoted from Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 192-193.

57. See the introduction to George Haley, Vicente Espinel, Obras completas I. Introducción general, Vicente Espinel y Marcos de Obregón: biografía, autobiografía y novela, José Lara Garrido ed. (Málaga: Diputación Provincial de Málaga, 1994).

58. Cited in Chandler, 101-102.

59. Vanillo González, J.C. Nimmo and Bain, trans., 172.

60. Vanillo Gonzales, J.C. Nimmo and Bain, trans., 217.

61. In reference to the church as a sanctuary from creditors, see Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 5: 16- 17; cited in Gray, 41.

247 62. Vanillo Gonzales, J.C. Nimmo and Bain, trans., 205.

63. William Rose, “Appendix D” in Grimmelshausen, 393-394. The study originally appeared as the introduction to The Adventurous Simplicissimus, (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1924).

64. For use of this term, see Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 2: 201; cited in Gray, 58.

65. To quote from Mandel’s lengthy discussion of Magnasco’s personal attitude towards piety, “But is it believable that a painter downright satirical or hostile to the regular clergy would have persistently enjoyed the patronage of the church? . . . The best tentative conclusion is that even Magnasco’s most apparently outré friar-pictures did not ruffle ecclesiastic feathers.” See Mandel, 101-109.

66. See the section on “Anti-Papist Caricature” in Francis K. Barasch, The Grotesque, A Study in Meanings (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 101.

67. Chandler, 91.

68. Cristina Geddo, “Alessandro Magnasco: una fortuna critica senza confini,” in Alessandro Magnasco 1667-1749, Marco Bona Castellotti, ed. (Milan: Electa, 1996), 39-50.

69. Geiger, 1949, 38; cited in Mandel, 70.

70. Bernard, 358; cited and translated in Mandel, 68.

71. Bernard, 359; cited and translated in Mandel, 68.

72. See for example Francesco Frangi, “La pittura a Milano negli anni della formazione di Magnasco,” in Alessandro Magnasco 1667-1749, Marco Bona Castellotti, ed. (Milan: Electa, 1996), 77-88.

73. I should note that this is the first time that a comparison has been made between Magnasco’s images of praying friars in rural settings and Geritt Dou’s The Hermit. For more on Geritt Dou, the first and most famous member of the group of artists referred to as the Leiden “fine” painters, see Ronni Baer, “Dou, Geritt” Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press, [July 14, 2006], http://www.groveart.com/.

74. Gordon Hall Gerould, “The Hermit and the Saint,” PMLA 20, no. 3 (1905): 529-545.

75. Gaunt, 55.

76. Dürst, 69; cited and translated in Mandel, 75-76.

77. Franchini Guelfi, 1991, 31-35; quoted from De Grazia and Garberson, 188.

78. Franchini Guelfi, 1991, 31-35 for examples; cited in De Grazia and Garberson, 188-189.

248 79. Franchini Guelfi, 1977, 90.

80. Chandler, 99.

81. Alonso enters the service of a profane sacristan who makes no obeisance when he prepares the church for mass; cited in Chandler, 97-98.

82. One good example of the thoroughgoing badness invested in the monastic stereotype that I have not yet cited is Cortés de Tolosa’s picaresque novella La comadre, in which a lackey named Molino is left behind by his master during an absence in the West Indies. Molino, with another rogue, comes to the city of Jaen, where they don monastic garb, pale their wine read faces with an herb, and go about attending the sick and prisoners, asking alms and reaping a rich harvest. The holy brothers, with feigned humility, calling themselves Peter the Sinner and John the Miserable, then perpetrate a cheat upon the lady betrothed to Molino’s master and upon her mother, both of whom they seduce, rob, and desert. Cited in Chandler, 99-100.

83. See Robert M. Price’s discussion of monasticism in “On Religious Parody in The Buscón,” MLN 86, no. 2 (March 1971): 273-279.

84. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, s.v. “Misericord.”

85. Gaunt, 54-55.

86. See for example the classic study of the history of artistic representations of the monastic orders by Anna Jameson, Legends of the Monastic Orders as Represented in the Fine Arts: Forming the Second Series of Sacred and Legendary Art, 3rd ed. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1863).

87. Mandel makes such an effort in his deconstruction of Magnasco’s somewhat disparate treatment of Capuchins and Camaldolites, but ultimately concludes that neither are documental; Mandel, 29-32.

88. Muti and Prignano, cat. 374-375, 264-265.

89. Syamken, 139-140; see also Mandel, 59, n. 4.

90. Alemán, Gili y Gaya, ed., 2: 19, 118; cited in Gray, 45.

91. Woodruff D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 72-73.

92. Vanillo González, J.C. Nimmo and Bain, trans., 202-204.

93. Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 210.

94. Quevedo, Villamiquel y Hardin, trans., 211-212.

249 95. Lesage, Smollett, trans., 88.

96. Lesage, Smollett, trans., 88-89.

250 CONCLUSION

The paintings of Alessandro Magnasco constitute a unique episode in the Late Baroque representation of picaresque themes, characters, and extrapolations. Over an active career of more than fifty years, Magnasco developed a highly original painterly manner which, when combined with picaresque subject matter adapted from Spanish and Italian literature, presented viewers with images of literary pícaros in many guises—beggars, gypsies, soldiers, and monks—social and religious deviants cast in fictitious landscapes and interiors. I am not the first to have proposed that Magnasco’s paintings share thematic and iconographic affinities with the picaresque literary genre, but this study is the first to confront the conceptual and methodological consequences of proposing such intertextual relationships. From the beginning, this study has sought to expand upon other scholars’ limited interpretations of Magnasco’s “picaresque” oeuvre. To date, these interpretations have lacked any textual endorsement provided by primary sources (the original content of the novels and novellas), and none has made use of the conceptual resources available through contemporary literary scholarship, in which genre typologies, reception theories, and notions of fictitiousness have all been gainfully applied to picaresque texts. In short, I have sought to expand the operative definition of a picaresque text to include pictorial representations of comparable content (both thematic and iconographic), to the end of justifying other scholars’ habits of calling Magnasco’s paintings “picaresque.” In so doing, I have tested the relatability of a number of works—by Magnasco and by his forebears—to the most paradigmatic novels, including the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache, Quevedo’s La vida del buscón, Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares, Estebanillo González, and Lesage’s Gil Blas de Santillane. These comparative analyses have explored artists’ use of literary conventions like stock characters (the beggar boy, lazy soldier, inquisitor, galley slave, disenfranchised nobleman), typological settings (the roadside tavern, bandits lair, inquisitorial prison, gypsy encampment), and thematic schemas

251 (hunger, servitude, imprisonment, self-aggrandizement through costume and deportment), such that the resultant work contains within it the potential to prompt viewers to perceive the image as representing fictional people and places analogous to those defined and conventionalized by the picaresque author. Magnasco is not alone in his discourse with the literary genre. He participates in a limited tradition of dialogically picaresque paintings—representations adapted from the premises and character staffage of popular novels—the history of which begins with the illustrated frontispieces to the earliest published editions of Lazarillo and Simplicissimus, and continues into the “fine-art” forums of genre painting and in the seventeenth century. But unlike the emblematic approach of the illustrators, or the tacit sentimentality and moralizing implicit in the portrayals of picaresque imagery by painters like Diego Velázquez, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and Jusepe de Ribera, Magnasco withholds judgement upon his subjects. His characters struggle with the very same questions of identity, motivation, economics, and juridical injustice that the rogue’s life poses to the picaresque protagonist. Neither sympathetic nor expressly critical towards its low-life subject matter, Magnasco's “painterly picaresque” is as morally ambivalent as its literary counterpart. And as a result, his audiences are left with the task of imagining any underlying meanings. In the absence of documentary evidence describing the specific appeal of Magnasco’s paintings to contemporary audiences, his art first comes across as playful, entertaining diversions. In the absence of correlative texts elaborating his oft-repeated schemas, his transient gamblers, tormented prisoners, piquant convent parlors, and lonely portraits of beggared noblemen appear as mere formal exercises. This study has mitigated these absences by investigating a specific textual context within which the schemas of his oeuvre may be understood. I have assumed from the beginning that these paintings do not contain all of the information needed to fully understand their meaning. I have assumed that there are tangential stories behind each scene. Basing my research on the hypotheses of other art historians, I sought these contexts in the picaresque narrative. The results of my study are even more interesting than I expected, and there remains a rich vein of ideas for further research. Magnasco’s Satire of a Nobleman in Misery, an ostensible caricature of the hidalgo, holds great potential for revealing the development of the far richer and

252 more multifaceted Quixote type through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century. The theories of fictitiousness that inform Magnasco’s treatment of picaresque character types might be gainfully applied to the study of his paintings of the Commedia dell’Arte, or his bacchanalian scenes which show creatures from classical antiquity frolicking alongside vagabonds. But for now, I have achieved my objective of rectifying a crucial deficit in the literature on Magnasco. I have described numerous examples where the texts of specific picaresque novels correspond to the character types, settings, and episodic particulars of his paintings. I have demonstrated that works like Den of the Soliders and Pícaros, The Interrogation, and Monks Warming their Feet represent imaginary spaces populated by imaginary characters, and that these characters and scenarios are akin to those found in Guzmán, Estebanillo González, and El Buscón, among other typic novels. I have explored how Magnasco renders his spaces and characters in expressive brush strokes of earthy hues, placing emphasis on the contorted, elastic physicality of his subject matter, a technique that at once heightens the sense that these scenes are imaginary, and reinforces the corporeal, existential worldview of the picaresque author. I have proposed for the first time that these paintings are applicably fictional in both their origins and function, and I have supported this proposal through the application of contemporary critical theories relating to the formal and ideational attributes of fictional texts in general, and picaresque texts in particular. In sum, I have provided ample evidence that Magnasco’s paintings are conceptually related to the themes, motifs, and satirical mien standardized by the authors and critical historians of the Spanish picaresque literary genre.

253 FIGURES

Figure 1: Anonymous, La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas . . ., woodcut (Alcala de Henares: Salzedo Librera, 1554), frontispiece.

254 Figure 2: Anonymous, La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes desus fortunas y adeur sidades, woodcut (Burgos, 1554), frontispiece.

255 Figure 3: Anonymous,Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache, engraving (Madrid, 1599), frontispiece.

256 Figure 4: Jean Baptista Morales (Fecit), Lopez de Úbeda, La pícara Justina, engraving (Madrid, 1605) frontispiece.

257 Figure 5: Anonymous, Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch, engraving, (Renchen, 1668) frontispiece.

258 Figure 6: Leonard Bramer, Illustration from Lazarillo de Tormes, ink and wash on paper, after 1635. Graphische Sammlung, Vienna. [Lazarillo, Robert S. Rudder trans., p. 9.]

259 Figure 7: Leonard Bramer, Illustration from Lazarillo de Tormes, ink and wash on paper, after 1635. Graphische Sammlung, Vienna. [Lazarillo, Robert S. Rudder, trans., p. 65.]

260 Figure 8: Leonard Bramer, Illustration from Lazarillo de Tormes, ink and wash on paper, after 1635. Graphische Sammlung, Vienna. [Lazarillo, Robert S. Rudder, trans., p. 91.]

261 Figure 9: Caravaggio, St. Francis in Ecstasy, oil on canvas, 92.5 x 128. 4 cm, c. 1595. Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.]

262 Figure 10: Caravaggio, The Entombment, oil on canvas, 300 x 203 cm, c. 1602-03. Pinacoteca, Vatican. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.]

263 Figure 11: Adam Elsheimer, Il Contento, oil on copper, 30.1 x 42 cm, c. 1607. National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. [Keith Andrews, Adam Elsheimer, Il Contento. (Edinburgh: The National Gallery of Scotland, 1971), cover illustration.]

264 Figure 12: Diego Velázquez, Old Woman Frying Eggs, oil on canvas, 101 x 120 cm, 1618. National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.]

265 Figure 13: Diego Velázquez, Peasants at the Table (El Almuerzo), oil on canvas, 96 x 112 cm, c. 1620. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.]

266 Figure 14: Diego Velázquez, Musical Trio (Los músicos), oil on canvas, 87 x 110 cm, c. 1617-18. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.]

267 Figure 15: Diego Velázquez, The Servant (La mulata), oil on canvas, 55 x 104 cm, c. 1618-19. The Art Institute of Chicago. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.]

268 Figure 16: Diego Velázquez, The Waterseller of Seville, oil on canvas, 106.7 x 81 cm, 1623. Wellington Museum, Apsley House, London. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.]

269 Figure 17: Attributed to Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Francisco de Quevedo (detail), oil on canvas, c. 1630. Wellington Museum, Apsley House, London. [La Obra Poética, http://jaserrano.com/unamuno/poes_archivos/image007.jpg]

270 Figure 18: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Young Beggar, oil on canvas, 137 x 115 cm, c. 1649. Paris: The Louvre, Paris. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.]

271 Figure 19: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Boys Eating Fruit (Grape and Melon Eaters), oil on canvas, 146 x 104 cm, c. 1650. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.]

272 Figure 20: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Four Figures on a Step, oil on canvas, 107 x 142.5 cm, c. 1655-60. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.]

273 Figure 21: Jusepe de Ribera, Blind Old Beggar, oil on canvas, 124.5 x 101.7 cm, c. 1632. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin. [http://www.oberlin.edu/allenart/collection/ribera.html]

274 Figure 22: Jusepe de Ribera, The Sense of Touch (Il ceico di Gambassi), oil on canvas, 125 x 98 cm, c. 1632. The Museo del Prado, Madrid. [Alfonso E. Pérez Sanchez and Nicola Spinosa, Jusepe de Ribera, 1591-1652. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), cat. 27, p. 99.]

275 Figure 23: Jusepe de Ribera, The Club-Footed Boy, oil on canvas, 164 x 92 cm, c. 1642. The Louvre, Paris. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.]

276 Figure 24: Merisi (Caravaggio), The Cardsharps, oil on canvas, 90 x 112 cm, c. 1596. Kimbell Art Museum, Forth Worth. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.]

277 Figure 25: Michelangelo Merisi (Caravaggio), The Fortune Teller, oil on canvas, 115 x 150 cm, c. 1596. Musei Capitolini, Rome. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.]

278 Figure 26: Pieter Van Laer (Bamboccio), Landscape with Morra Players, oil on canvas, 33.5 x 47 cm, c. 1630. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.]

279 Figure 27: Salvator Rosa, Cardplayers, oil on canvas, c. 1635. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome. [Jonathan Scott, Salvator Rosa: His Life and Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 8.]

280 Figure 28: Salvator Rosa, Beggars’ Encampment, oil on canvas, c. 1640. Matthieson Gallery, London. [Scott, p. 45.]

281 Figure 29: Jacques Callot, Le Mendiant au rosaire, from Les Gueux, etching, 13.8 x 8.2 cm, c. 1622-23. [Chone, Paulette ed. Jacques Callot, 1592-1635 (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1992), cat. 328, p. 279.]

282 Figure 30: Jacques Callot, Capitano de Baroni, from Les Gueux, etching, 14.4 x 9.3 cm, c. 1622-23. [Chone, cat. 317, p. 276.]

283

Figure 31: Jacques Callot, La Caverne des brigands, from Les Caprices, etching, 5.6 x 8 cm, c. 1616. [Chone, cat. 200, p. 235.]

284 Figure 32: Jacques Callot, Le Gentilhomme à la grande canne, from Les Caprices, etching, 5.65 x 8.4 cm, c. 1616. [Chone, cat. 210, p. 237.]

285 Figure 33: Jacques Callot, Le paysan se déchaussant, from Les Caprices, etching, 6 x 8.2 cm, c. 1616. [Chone, 213, p. 237.]

286 Figure 34: Jacques Callot, L’Auberge, from Les Caprices, etching, 6 x 8.2 cm, c. 1616. [Chone, cat. 218, p. 238.]

287 Figure 35: Jacques Callot, Le Mendiant aux béquilles, coiffé d’un chapeau, from Les Gueux, etching, 13.8 x 8.7 cm, c. 1622-23. [Chone, cat. 231, p. 277.]

288 Figure 36: Jacques Callot, La dame décolletée conversant avec deux gentilshommes, from Les Fantaisies, etching, 6.3 x 8.3 cm, c. 1635. [Chone, cat. 368, p. 291.]

289 Figure 37: Alessandro Magnasco and Antonio Francesco Perruzzini, Procession of Capuchins, oil on canvas, 230 x 285 cm, c. 1700. Private collection, Rome. [Alessandro Magnasco 1667-1749, Marco Bona Castellotti, ed. (Milan: Electa, 1996), cat. 19, p. 145.]

290 Figure 38: Alessandro Magnasco and Antonio Francesco Peruzzini, The Shipwreck, oil on canvas, 115 x 173 cm, c. 1700. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. [Castellotti ed., cat. 20, p. 147.]

291 Figure 39: Alessandro Magnasco and Marco Ricci, Hunting Scene, oil on canvas, 85 x 111 cm, c. 1706-07. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford. [Harold Acton, The Last Medici (London: MacMillan, 1980), fig. 68.]

292 Figure 40: Salvator Rosa, Scene of Witchcraft, oil on canvas, 75 x 64 cm, c. 1670. Giorgiana Corsini, Florence. [The Italians, www.theitalians.com.au.]

293 Figure 41: Salvator Rosa, Anchorites Tempted by Demons, oil on canvas, 65 x 83 cm, c. 1665. Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.]

294 Figure 42: Detail from Salvator Rosa, Anchorites Tempted by Demons, [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.]

295 Figure 43: Detail of Alessandro Magnasco, Sacreligious Robbery, oil on canvas, 160 x 240 cm, c. 1731. Quadreria Arcivescovile, Milan. [Castellotti ed., cat. 61, p. 221.]

296 Figure 44: Salvator Rosa, Soldiers Gambling, oil on canvas, 77.1 x 61.6 cm, c. 1658. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. [Dulwich Picture Gallery, http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk.]

297 Figure 45: Michael Sweerts, Soldiers Playing Dice, oil on canvas, 86.7 x 74 cm, c. 1656-1658. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. [El Museo de arte Thyssen-Bornemisza, http://www.museothyssen.org.]

298 Figure 46: Alessandro Magnasco, The Players (I giocatori), oil on canvas, 49 x 36 cm, c. 1725. Private Collection, Genoa. [Laura.Muti and Daniele de Sarno Prignano, Alessandro Magnasco. (Faenza: Edit Faenza, 1994) cat. 418, p. 613.]

299 Figure 47: Alessandro Magnasco, The Guard (Corpo di guardia), oil on canvas, 69 x 46 cm, c. 1740. Borromeo Collection, Isola Bella. [Castellotti ed., cat. 75, p. 245.]

300 Figure 48: Alessandro Magnasco, Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (Ritrovo di pícaros e di soldati), oil on canvas, 91 x 129 cm, c. 1715. Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa. [Castellotti ed., cat. 33, p. 171.]

301 Figure 49: Detail of Alessandro Magnasco, Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (Ritrovo di pícaros e di soldati), Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa. [Castellotti ed., cat. 33, p. 171.]

302 Figure 50: Marco Ricci, Travelers Attacked by Highwaymen, oil on canvas, c. 1715. Private Collection, Belluno. [Muti, fig. 129, p. 113.]

303 Figure 51: Giacomo Ceruti, Evening at the Piazza, oil on canvas, 210 x 298 cm, c. 1730. Museo Civico d'Arte Antica, Palazzo Madama, Turin. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.]

304 Figure 52: Alessandro Magnasco, The Hospital, oil on canvas, 44 x 82 cm, c. 1708. Museul de Arta, Bucharest. [Muti, cat. 40, p. 64.]

305 Figure 53: Jacques Callot, The Hospital, from Les Grands Misères de la Guerre, etching, 1633. [Chone, cat. 521, p. 407.]

306 Figure 54: Alessandro Magnasco, The Sacking of a Church (Saccheggio di una chiesa), oil on canvas, 45 x 82 cm, c. 1708. Museul Brukenthal, Sibiu. [Muti, cat. 325, p. 194.]

307 Figure 55: Jacques Callot, The Devestation of a Monastery, from Les Grands Misères de la Guerre, etching, 1633. [Chone, cat. 512, p. 404.]

308 Figure 56: Jacques Callot, The Feast of the Bohemians, from Les Bohémiens, etching, c. 1623. [Chone, cat. 347, p. 284.]

309 Figure 57: Alessandro Magnasco and Giuseppe Antonio Pianca, Assault of the Brigands, oil on canvas, 40 x 60 cm, c. 1730. Collection of Alberto Robiati, Lodi. [Muti, cat. 142, p. 578.]

310 Figure 58: Alessandro Magnasco, Interrogations in a Jail, oil on canvas, 44.5 x 82.5 cm, c. 1708. Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna. [Castellotti ed., cat. 28, p. 161.]

311 Figure 59: Jacques Callot, Plundering a Large Farmhouse, from Les Grands Misères de la Guerre, etching, c. 1632-33. [Chone, cat. 511, p. 404.]

312 Figure 60: Jacques Callot, The Strappado, from Misères et Malheurs de la Guerre, etching, c. 1632-33. [Chone, cat. 516, p. 406.]

313 Figure 61: Alessandro Magnasco, Transfer of the Prisoners, oil on canvas, c. 1725. Frederick Church’s Home, State Historic Site, Olana. [Castellotti ed., fig. 31, p. 36.]

314 Figure 62: Alessandro Magnasco, The Interrogation, oil on canvas, 73 x 58 cm, c. 1725. Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt. [Muti, cat. 92, fig. 327.]

315 Figure 63: Alessandro Magnasco, The Tortures, oil on canvas, 73 x 58 cm, c. 1725. Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt. [Muti, cat. 93, fig. 326.]

316 Figure 64: Jacques Callot, Les Supplices, etching, 11 x 22 cm, c. 1630. [Chone, cat. 527, p. 411.]

317

Figure 65: Alessandro Magnasco, Giuseppe che interpreta i sogni (Joseph the Dream Interpreter), oil on canvas, 134 x 177 cm, c. 1726. Private Collection, Milan. [Castellotti ed., cat. 32, p. 169.]

318 Figure 66: Alessandro Magnasco (with Clemente Spera), Halt of the Brigands, oil on canvas, 112 x 162 cm, c. 1720-30. National Hermitage, Saint Petersburg. [Castellotti, cat. 50, p. 199.]

319 Figure 67: Alessandro Magnasco, Soldiers Feasting, oil on canvas, 59.1 x 44.8 cm, c. 1725. Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco: Museum purchase, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum. [Muti, cat. 310, fig. 313.]

320 Figure 68: Alessandro Magnasco, Soldiers and a Charlatan among Ruins, oil on canvas, 65 x 88 cm, c. 1720-30. A.S. Drey, Monaco. [Muti, cat . 240, p. 393.]

321 Figure 69: Modern recreation of eighteenth-century gypsy-themed toile.

322 Figure 70: Giacomo della Porta, (Pompilio de Benedetti, fecit.) Grotesque face, detail of the fountain in Piazza Campitelli, 1589, Rome.

323 Figure 71: Alessandro Magnasco, Kitchen Scene with Maid and Pícaro, oil on canvas, 95 x 120 cm, c. 1709-10. Lechi Collection, Brescia. [Muti, cat. 37, fig. 217.]

324 Figure 72: Alessandro Magnasco, Kitchen Scene with Nobles and Servants, oil on canvas, 95 x 120 cm, c. 1709-10. Lechi Collection, Brescia. [Muti, cat. 36, fig. 216.]

325 Figure 73: Alessandro Magnasco, Arrival of the Galley Slaves to the Prison at Genoa, oil on canvas, 116 x 143 cm, c. 1736-38. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux. [Muti, cat. 32, fig. 360.]

326 Figure 74: Alessandro Magnasco, Embarkation of the Galley Slaves at the Port of Genoa, oil on canvas, 116 x 143 cm, c. 1736-38. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux. [Muti, cat. 33, fig. 32.]

327 Figure 75: Alessandro Magnasco, Satire of a Nobleman in Misery, oil on canvas, 73.7 x 58.7 cm, c. 1719-25. Detroit Institute of Arts, Gift of Luigi Grassi (36.14) [Bissell, Derstine, and Miller, p. 125, cat. 39; photo © 2004, Detroit Institute of Arts.]

328 Figure 76: Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Umori diversi, etching, 1696. Collezioni d’Arte e di Storia della Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna. [Bissell, Derstine, and Miller, p. 124, fig. 1.]

329 Figure 77: Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, In casa sua ciascuno è re, etching, 1694. Collezioni d’Arte e di Storia della Cassa di Risparmio, Bologna. [Bissell, Derstine, and Miller, p. 125, fig. 2.]

330 Figure 78: Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Non conosce la pace, el non la stima, chi provata non ha la guerrain prima, from the series Proverbi Figurati, etching, 1678. [Le Collezioni d’Arte della Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna: Le Incisioni; Vol. I., Franca Varignana, ed.]

331

Figure 79: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Soldiers and Pícaros, oil on canvas, 46 x 87 cm, c. 1725. Galleria Nazionale, Stoccarda. [Franchini Guelfi, 1977, plate 52, p. 367.]

332 Figure 80: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Soldiers and Pícaros, oil on canvas, 46 x 87 cm, c. 1725. Galleria Nazionale, Stoccarda. [Franchini Guelfi, 1977, plate 51, p. 365.]

333 Figure 81: Alessandro Magnasco, Den of the Gypsies and Soldiers (Ritrovo di zingari e soldati), oil on canvas, 125 x 172.5 cm, c. 1710-15. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. [Castellotti ed., cat. 22, p. 151.]

334 Figure 82: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Den of the Gypsies and Soldiers (Ritrovo di zingari e soldati), [Castellotti ed., cat. 22, p. 151.]

335 Figure 83: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Embarkation of the Galley Slaves at the Port of Genoa, oil on canvas, 116 x 143 cm, c. 1736-38. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux. [Muti, cat. 33, fig. 32.]

336 Figure 84: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (Ritrovo di pícaros e di soldati), [Castellotti ed., cat. 33, p. 171.]

337 Figure 85: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Den of the Gypsies and Soldiers (Ritrovo di zingari e soldati), [Castellotti ed., cat. 22, p. 151.]

338 Figure 86: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Den of the Gypsies and Soldiers (Ritrovo di zingari e soldati), [Castellotti ed., cat. 22, p. 151.]

339 Figure 87: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Den of the Gypsies and Soldiers (Ritrovo di zingari e soldati), [Castellotti ed., cat. 22, p. 151.]

340 Figure 88: Adriaen Brouwer, The Card Players, oil on canvas, 29 x 39 cm, c. 1635. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. [Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu.]

341 Figure 89: Alessandro Magnasco (with Clemente Spera), detail from Halt of the Brigands, oil on canvas, 112 x 162 cm, c. 1720-30. National Hermitage, Saint Petersburg. [Castellotti, cat. 50, p. 199.]

342 Figure 90: Tony Johannot, Don Quixote Reading, wood engraving from Volume I of the1836 edition of Louis Viardot's translation of Don Quixote, (Paris: J.J. Dubochet, 1836), Frontispiece.

343 Figure 91: William Lake Price, Don Quixote in His Study, albumen silver print from wet collodion negative, c.1855. Austin: University of Texas Libraries.

344 Figure 92: Honoré Daumier, Don Quixote Reading, oil on wood panel, 33.6 x 26 cm, c.1867. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Felton Bequest 1923, 1276-3. [http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au]

345 Figure 93: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (Ritrovo di pícaros e di soldati), [Castellotti ed., cat. 33, p. 171.]

346 Figure 94: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (Ritrovo di pícaros e di soldati), [Castellotti ed., cat. 33, p. 171.]

347 Figure 95: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Den of the Soldiers and Pícaros (Ritrovo di pícaros e di soldati), [Castellotti ed., cat. 33, p. 171.]

348 Figure 96: Alessandro Magnasco, The Wedding Banquet (Banchetto nuziale), oil on canvas, 86 x 118.5 cm, 1731. The Louvre, Paris. [Castellotti ed., cat. 65, p. 229.]

349 Figure 97: Alessandro Magnasco, six examples of the soldier/dandy figural type from multiple paintings.

350 Figure 98: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Arrival of the Galley Slaves to the Prison at Genoa, oil on canvas, 116 x 143 cm, c. 1736-38. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux. [Muti, cat. 32, fig. 360]

351 Figure 99: Alessandro Magnasco, The Nuptial Parade (Corteo nuziale a cavallo in un bosco), oil on canvas, 87.5 x 117 cm, c. 1731. Staatliche Museen Gemäldegaleri, Berlin. [Muti, cat. 21, fig. 355]

352 Figure 100: Alessandro Magnasco, Assault of the Highwaymen, oil on canvas, 69.5 x 95 cm, c. 1730-33. Collection of Charles E. Roseman, Cleveland. [Muti, cat. 47, fig. 358.]

353 Figure 101: Alessandro Magnasco, The Beggar Painter (Il pittor pitocco tra zingari e suonatori), oil on canvas, 94 x 95 cm, c. 1720. Museo Giannettino Luxoro, Genoa. [Castellotti ed., cat. 78, p. 253.]

354 Figure 102: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from The Beggar Painter (Il pittor pitocco tra zingari e suonatori), oil on canvas, 94 x 95 cm, c. 1720. Museo Giannettino Luxoro, Genoa. [Castellotti ed., cat. 78, p. 253.]

355 Figure 103 : Alessandro Magnasco, detail from The Beggar Painter (Il pittor pitocco tra zingari e suonatori), oil on canvas, 94 x 95 cm, c. 1720. Museo Giannettino Luxoro, Genoa. [Castellotti ed., cat. 78, p. 253.]

356 Figure 104: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from The Beggar Painter (Il pittor pitocco tra zingari e suonatori), oil on canvas, 94 x 95 cm, c. 1720. Museo Giannettino Luxoro, Genoa. [Castellotti ed., cat. 78, p. 253.]

357 Figure 105: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from The Beggar Painter (Il pittor pitocco tra zingari e suonatori), oil on canvas, 94 x 95 cm, c. 1720. Museo Giannettino Luxoro, Genoa. [Castellotti ed., cat. 78, p. 253.]

358 Figure 106: Giuseppe Maria Crespi, The Artist in his Studio, oil on canvas, 57.3 x 42.9 cm, c. 1735. Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum. [Spike, cat. 29, p. 169.]

359 Figure 107: Luis Egidio Meléndez, Self Portrait, oil on canvas, 100 x 82 cm, 1746. Musée du Louvre, Paris. [http://cartelen.louvre.fr.]

360 Figure 108: Alessandro Magnasco, Calefactorium with Friars, oil on canvas, 94.2 x 134.6 cm, c. 1725. Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena. The Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena. [Castellotti ed., cat. 40, p. 183.]

361 Figure 109: Alessandro Magnasco, Landscape with Processing Capuchins, oil on canvas, 235 x 176 cm, c. 1720-30. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. [Castellotti ed., cat. 44, p. 189.]

362 Figure 110: Alessandro Magnasco, Graveyard of the Trappists, oil on canvas, 91 x 129 cm, c. 1720. Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa. [Castellotti ed., cat. 34, p. 173.]

363 Figure 111: Alessandro Magnasco, Spiritual Exercises of Monks in a Ravine, oil on canvas, 48 x 34 cm, c.1735-40. Berl Collection, Vienna. [Muti, cat. 379, fig. 349.]

364 Figure 112: Alessandro Magnasco, Monks Eating in a Grotto, oil on canvas, 72.5 x 56.2 cm, c. 1740. Szépmüvészeti Mùzeum, Budapest. [Muti, cat. 41, fig. 351.]

365 Figure 113: Egbert van Heemskerck, Drinking Monk, oil on panel, 31 x 27 cm, c. 1680. Museum Bredius, The Hague. [http://www.museumbredius.nl/schilders/heemskerck.htm]

366 Figure 114: Cornelis Dusart, Satire of a Capuchin Monk, etching, c. 1690.

367 Figure 115: Alessandro Magnasco, details of monastic physiognomies. [Franchini Guelfi, 1977, pls. 15 and 28, pp. 293 and 319.]

368 Figure 116: Philips de Koninck, The Friar About Town, ink and wash on paper, c. 1660. Private Collection. [Franchini Guelfi, 1977, fig. 210, p. 195.]

369 Figure 117: Cornelis Dusart, Monk Embracing a Laughing Woman, oil on canvas, c. 1695. [Franchini Guelfi, 1977, fig. 208, p. 192.]

370 Figure 118: Alessandro Magnasco, The Friar Barbers, oil on canvas, 99 x 73 cm, c. 1720. Museum of Western and Eastern Art, Odessa. [Castellotti, ed., cat. 73, p. 241.]

371 Figure 119: Alessandro Magnasco, Capuchins in Contrition before their Superior, oil on canvas, 58 x 88 cm, c. 1730-40. Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. [Castellotti, ed., cat. 72, p. 239.]

372 Figure 120: Alessandro Magnasco, details from Capuchins in Contrition before their Superior, [Castellotti, ed., cat. 72, p. 239.]

373 Figure 121: Alessandro Magnasco, detail from Capuchins in Contrition before their Superior, [Castellotti, ed., cat. 72, p. 239.]

374 Figure 122: Francesco del Cairo, Saint Francis in Ecstasy, oil on canvas, 74 x 53 cm, c. 1630-33. Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan. [Castellotti, ed., cat. 2, p. 111.]

375 Figure 123: Alessandro Magnasco, Saint Francis Consoled by Angels, oil on canvas, 118 x 92 cm, c. 1690-95. Galleria di Palazzo Bianco, Genoa. [Castellotti, ed., cat. 17, p. 141.]

376 Figure 124: Alessandro Magnasco, Christ Bearing the Cross, oil on canvas, 82 x 57 cm, c. 1690-1695. Vitali Collection, Pistoia. [Muti, cat. 286, fig. 56.]

377 Figure 125: Geritt Dou, The Hermit, oil on canvas, 46 x 34.5 cm, c. 1670. National Gallery of Art, Washington. [www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2000/dou/full34.htm.]

378 Figure 126: Alessandro Magnasco, Friars in a Grotto, oil on canvas, c. 1730. Private Collection [Franchini Guelfi, 1977, plate 15, p. 293.]

379 Figure 127: Alessandro Magnasco (and Marco Ricci?), A Procession of Friars, oil on canvas, c. 1710. Galleria Sabauda, Turin. [Franchini Guelfi, 1977, fig. 84, p. 92.]

380 Figure 128: Alessandro Magnasco, Monks Warming their Feet, oil on canvas, 57 x 41.5 cm, c. 1719-21. Private Collection, London. [Muti, cat. 151, fig. 427.]

381 Figure 129: Alessandro Magnasco, Pícaros at the Hearth, oil on canvas, 56 x 67 cm, c. 1715-20. Private Collection, Venice. [Muti, cat. 375, fig. 430.]

382 Figure 130: Alessandro Magnasco, The Latrine of Misery, oil on canvas, 52.5 x 38 cm, c. 1715-20. Private Collection: Venice. [Muti, cat. 374, fig. 429.]

383 Figure 131: Alessandro Magnasco, The Convent Parlor, oil on canvas, 72 x 56 cm, c. 1730. Private Collection, Milan. [Franchini Guelfi, 1977, pl. 31, p. 325.]

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414 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Charles Preston McLane was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1974. He attended the University of Florida, where he received a BA with Highest Honors in Sociology in 1996. After graduation, he traveled to Moscow, Russia where he studied philology and art history at Moscow State University, graduating in 2000 with an MA in Art History. He then returned to Florida to continue his studies in the Department of Art History at Florida State University. He was named an Appleton Scholar, served as a curatorial fellow at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art and the Appleton Museum of Art, and later joined the staff of the College of Visual Arts, Theatre and Dance as a research assistant for the Museum of Fine Arts at Florida State University. He lives in Tallahassee with his wife Yelena and their daughter Lidia Beatrice.

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