LITERARY PÍCAROS AND PÍCARAS AND THEIR TRAVELS IN EARLY MODERN SPAIN

Picaresque Itinerary

Madrid

We will begin our picaresque trajectory in Madrid, where we will visit the lively Barrio de las Letras, the historic neighborhood where Cervantes and playwright Lope de Vega lived and wrote. This neighborhood was the theater district at the time; Madrid’s two corrales de comedia (playhouses) were located here, one of which still functions as a theater. Cervantes’s tomb is located in the Convent of the Discalced Trinitarian Nuns; a short walk from there is the press named after its owner, Juan de la Cuesta, which published Don Quixote. Our visit to this neighborhood will set the stage for discussions of the importance of publishing during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Morning lectures in Madrid will include a visit to the National Library, where we will examine manuscripts and the first editions of picaresque novels.

An afternoon trip to the Royal Palace and the Convento de las Descalzas Reales (Discalced Carmelites) will open discussions of the decision by Philip II in 1561 to found the capital on Spain’s central plateau. Although the original Royal Palace burned down in the eighteenth century, the current palace was rebuilt on its site. Not far from the Royal Palace is the Convent-Museum that houses a collection of royal portraits second only to those of the Palace and the Prado. It is one of the hidden jewels of the capital, and one that still breathes the religiosity embraced by the Habsburg royal family and the court.

No trip to Madrid would be complete without visiting the Prado Museum, perhaps the world’s richest art collection. The Prado forms part of an art triangle that also comprises the Queen Sofía Art Center Museum and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, and you are encouraged to visit these sites during your free afternoons. At the Prado we will tour the paintings by Philip IV’s court painter Velázquez, and Bartolomé Murillo’s works of street urchins, which graphically illustrate the enormous social differences in early modern Spain that produced the picaresque genre.

Ávila

As a bonus on the trip, on our way to Salamanca from Madrid, we will stop for lunch at Ávila, the famous medieval walled city. There, Santa Teresa, known as the saint-pícara, professed in the Convent of La Encarnación, which we will visit to see her actual cell.

 

Salamanca

From Ávila, we will go back in time to the late Middle Ages, to Salamanca and the origins of the picaresque novel. We will discuss chapters of the novel-play La Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, now known as La Celestina for the character of the old bawd introduced in the novel. We will visit the garden of Calisto and Melibea to see how the city honors its famous star-crossed lovers. Salamanca is also the birthplace of Lazarillo, born in a mill over the River Tormes, which still conserves its Roman bridge. As the home of Spain’s oldest university, Salamanca fosters an active student life. We will visit the classroom where fray Luis de León lectured, of special interest to teachers. Another visit will be devoted to Salamanca’s two interconnected cathedrals: the old building houses the chapel of Saint Barbara, where many rigorous doctoral examinations took place in the fourteenth century.

 

Toledo

Following Lazarillo’s path from Salamanca to Toledo, we will visit the imperial city, where the Emperor Charles V held court until Philip II designated Madrid as the Spanish capital. Toledo is noted for its medieval architecture and spectacular setting above the Tagus River; it was also home to Spain’s first Renaissance poet, Garcilaso de la Vega. We will learn about the underside of Toledan society and tour the Hospital built by Cardinal Juan Tavera, the Inquisitor-General, to house the city’s impoverished beggars. Distinguished Toledan historian Dr. Carmen Vaquero will give a special lecture on the city’s history and on Lazarillo de Tormes’s anonymous author. An expert also on Garcilaso de la Vega, Dr. Vaquero will offer an evening tour of the poet’s neighborhood. We will compare the cultured, elite poetry of the period with the striking popularity of the picaresque novel, as two extremes of the literary canon of early modern Spain.

Toledo is an ideal location to discuss the complex relations among Spain’s three major religions. In the medieval period, the city housed the famous School of Translators, which translated Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic texts into Latin and Castilian. We will visit the one thousand-year-old mosque, the Mezquita del Cristo de la Luz, as well as the Synagogue of Santa María la Blanca, the oldest and largest synagogue in the city’s Jewish quarter, and the site of the 1391 pogroms. We will visit the synagogue of El Tránsito, now home of the Sephardic museum, whose collection covers all aspects of the material culture of Jewish presence in Spain. The painting The Burial of Count Orgaz by the Cretan painter Domenikos Theotokopulos, better known as El Greco, in the Church of Santo Tomé, conveys the Christian spirituality that followed the Counter-Reformation. We will also visit the Casa Museo El Greco, which houses other paintings by this mystical painter whose devotional works provide a striking counterpoint to the highly critical images of the Church found in the picaresque works we are reading.

Sevilla

From Toledo, we will return to Madrid to board the AVE (high-speed train) to Sevilla. A center of Muslim culture, Sevilla was the most famous and wealthiest city in the seventeenth century and crucial to Spain’s economy. Its river, the Guadalquivir, flowed from the city to Palos de la Frontera, from where Christopher Columbus sailed to America. Since Sevilla held the monopoly on trade with Spain’s overseas colonies, the city was enriched by the treasures brought from the New World in ships that docked, loaded, and unloaded on the river’s banks. Its economic vitality is documented in the Guzmán de Alfarache, as it naturally attracted a stream of lowlife pícaros, criminals, and outsiders who wished to make good from the activities promoted by trade. The bustling river traffic and the constant negotiations engaged in by merchants are a far cry from the austere Castilian landscape traversed by Lazarillo from Salamanca to Toledo. Cervantes and Mateo Alemán, the Guzmán’s author, both failed tax collectors, familiarized themselves with real examples of picaresque wit and language while imprisoned in Sevilla’s royal jail for mismanaging their accounts. A walk along the Calle de las Sierpes will take us to the jail’s original location, now only a façade in a busy shopping district.

. We will visit the sites where Cervantes’s two pícaros, Rinconete and Cortadillo, tricked and stole along the Guadalquivir, the Cathedral, and the Lonja or Customs House, whose steps served as a meeting place for merchants, now used to house the Archive of the Indies. A visit to the “Archivo de Indias” will give us the opportunity to introduce the New World as the place where pícaros such as Quevedo’s Buscón longed to go, leaving behind the poverty and hunger experienced in the Old World. Sevilla was also the home of Bartolomé Murillo, whose famous paintings of street urchins (which we will have viewed in the Prado) emphasized the pícaros’ childlike qualities. Murillo was commissioned to paint biblical scenes and to design the portal of the Hospital of Charity, which we will visit as a last example of the aristocratic practice of individual donations.

 

Madrid

On our return to Madrid, we will discuss one of best-selling author Maria de Zayas’s novellas, El castigo de la miseria. This short story brings us to the female picaresque; the protagonists have now evolved into the figure of the female trickster, as we saw in La Celestina, but this time their lives are written and told from a woman’s perspective. Dr. José Ignacio Díez-Fernández, professor at Madrid’s Universidad Complutense and expert on Spain’s Golden Age, will lecture on the influence of the picaresque on Cervantes and take us on a tour of Madrid’s Plaza Mayor and its side streets, where pícaros abounded. Our second stay in Madrid will allow the participants time to plan and discuss their Course Projects with the directors, which will be due one month after the participants’ return to the United States.

 

Segovia

Our last visit will be a day trip to Segovia, a city renowned for its Roman aqueduct—the largest and best preserved in the world—and for a bit of fancy, the alcazar or castle that served as model for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. It was in Segovia where Isabel accepted the crown of Castile, which she would rule as Isabel la Católica with her husband Fernando de Aragón. In the Renaissance, Segovia was famous for its wool factories, which when closed, led to the flight of its workers to other cities. As our farewell feast, participants will have opportunity to taste Segovia’s famous suckling pig, while the vegetarians among us will delight in the region’s fresh vegetables.