April
4 , 2003
Don
Quixote and Renaissance Art: A Lecture by Frederick A. de Armas
| 
Frederick
A. deArmas |
Frederick A. de Armas,
Andrew W. Mellon Endowed Chair in the Humanities at the University
of Chicago, will deliver the lecture “A Quixotic Museum:
Cervantes, the Grotesque, and Italian Art” on Monday, April
7, at 7:30 pm in Gamble Auditorium. It is the first lecture of
an annual series organized by the Romance Languages and Literatures
Program at MHC. Interdisciplinary in his approach, de Armas will
connect Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote with
paintings by Italian artists such as Arcimboldo, Botticelli, and
Raphael and will address the impact of grotesque drawings on Cervantes’s
new theory of the grotesque. On April 8, de Armas will deliver
a second lecture, “Dancing with Giants: Ekphrasis in Don
Quijote I.8,” on Don Quixote’s famous battle with
windmills. That presentation will take place Tuesday, April 8,
at 4 pm in Herter Hall 301 at the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst.
| 
Italian
painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo is celebrated for “Summer”
and other grotesque portraits rendered with clumps of fruits
and other materials. He was among those artists who influenced
Miguel de Cervantes, says de Armas. |
Professor de Armas
is an eminent scholar in U.S. Hispanism and an authority on the
European Renaissance. He has been studying the relationship between
the verbal and the visual in early modern Spanish literature and
Italian art for much of his career and has written prolifically
on most aspects of early modern European literatures and cultures.
His most recent book, Cervantes, Raphael, and the Classics
(Cambridge University Press, 1998), shows how Cervantes’s
tragedy La Numancia is engaged in conversation with classical
authors of Greece and Rome, especially through the interpretations
of antiquity presented by the artist Raphael.
Both lectures are
organized by the Mount Holyoke College Romance Languages and Literatures
Program and are cosponsored by the departments of Spanish and
Portuguese, French and Italian, and art at the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst; Smith College’s Spanish and Portuguese department;
Mount Holyoke’s Spanish and Italian department, the first-year
seminar program, and the art department’s Amy M. Sacker
Fund; and the Five College Lecture Fund.
The
counter is
4,784
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