Matthew Ancell - Painted Twilight: Anamorphic Monstrosity in Calderón's La Vida Es Sueño

Northwestern University
Painted Twilight: Anamorphic Monstrosity in Calderón’s La vida es sueño

Author(s): Matthew Ancell
Source: Renaissance Drama, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring 2014), pp. 57-90
Published by: The University of Chicago Press for Northwestern University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/674682 .
Accessed: 07/04/2014 12:26
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The University of Chicago Press and Northwestern University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,
preserve and extend access to Renaissance Drama.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Painted Twilight: Anamorphic
Monstrosity in Calderón’s
La vida es sueño
m a t t h e w a n c e l l , Brigham Young University
Those who have compared our lives to a dream are right—perhaps

more right than they realized.
—Michel de Montaigne1
a mong Diego de Velázquez’s (1599–1660) several portraits of dwarves,

Prince Baltasar Carlos with a Dwarf (1631) most approaches the kind of
ambiguity that characterizes some of the artist’s more famous works
(fig. 1). The toddler Baltasar Carlos (1629–46) stands next to an ostensibly fe-
male dwarf.2 While the nature of the event that the portrait commemorates is
disputed, the pairing of the two figures is clearly symbolic, with the dwarf
acting as a foil to the prince in the painting. Clasping a baton in one hand and
the hilt of the sword on his belt with the other, the heir apparent to Philip IV
(1605–65) stands firm with an unlikely austerity for a child his age, while his
playmate carries a rattle and an apple, mimicking a scepter and an orb.3 Jona-
1. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1991), 674.
2. José Camón Azar identifies the painting as El príncipe Baltasar Carlos con una enana and
argues that every aspect of the dwarf’s attire is feminine, even referring to Baltasar’s companion
as “la monstrua.” Camón Azar, Velázquez, 2 vols. (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1964), 437. Most critics,
probably correctly, assume the dwarf is male, but since the rhetorical force of the portrait relies
upon contrasts, the difference seems fitting and reinforces the notion of monstrosity’s ability to
trouble established taxonomies.
3. See José López-Rey, Velázquez: Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vols. (Köln: Taschen–Wildenstein In-
stitute, 1999), 2.122, 124, who, following Camón Aznar, Velázquez, also suggests that the dwarf
appears female and argues that the rattle and apple violate the decorum of a solemn occasion
such as a juramento and, therefore, along with other chronological ambiguities, indicate that the
portrait does not commemorate the event of the oath itself. See also Jonathan Brown and John H.
Renaissance Drama, volume 42, number 1. © 2014 Northwestern University. All rights reserved.
0486-3739/2014/4201-0003$15.00
57

58 RENAISSANCE DRAMA S P R I N G 2 0 14
Figure 1. Diego Velázquez, Prince Baltasar Carlos with a Dwarf, 1631. Boston, Museum of
Fine Arts. Photo Credit: The Art Archive at Art Resource, New York.
than Brown notes that the child’s regalia sets him off against the red back-
ground, as opposed to the dwarf in plainer clothing, whose twisted stance “em-
phasizes the rigid verticality of Baltasar Carlos, the shadowed face is played
Elliott, A Palace for a King: The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV, rev. and expanded ed. (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 55–58.

Anamorphic Monstrosity in Calderón’s La vida es sueño 59
against the smooth complexion of the heir. The contrasting perfection and
imperfection of the two little figures almost unavoidably becomes a metaphor
of the social and natural order.”4 While the sartorial and postural contrasts—
not to mention the real or apparent gender difference—certainly hierarchize
the two figures and represent an established order, the rattle and apple, if taken
as caricatured symbols of royal power, present an implicit challenge to that or-
der. Since the scepter and orbus mundi were connected with the Holy Roman
Emperor, a position no longer held by the Spanish Hapsburgs, Braden Frieder
reads the painting as parodic of lost imperial power. He concludes that
Velázquez’s corpus of jester paintings “mocked the pretensions of courtiers and
favorites, and were perhaps a plea for a weak king to take his rightful place as
head of state. The antics of court jesters drew attention to their defects, but also
pointed an accusing finger at our own.”5 Laura Bass follows this line of thought
and suggests that “the dwarf not only serves as a contrastive foil for royal
perfection but also reminds the viewer of its limits.”6 Svetlana Alpers argues
that this double portrait, like Las Meninas, is about the framing role of art, with
both works containing contradictions that disrupt the proper framing of the
court.7 According to the portrait, the rigid protocols, pageantry, and other acts
of representation that constitute court life have already begun to transform the
baby into an actor in the courtly drama of Hapsburg rule, while the dwarf de-
picts, as Alpers observes, “a certain misrule” that marks a difference between
the two figures: “the prince is framed by art while the dwarf remains resolutely
free of it.”8
Unframed in this sense, the dwarf falls outside the royal order of pictorial and
courtly representation—a straightforward, natural order, in which the viewer is
intended to understand unequivocally the prince’s superiority—and belongs to
another order characterized by misrule, monstrosity, and parody. One could
argue, however, that the dwarf’s proximity to, and doubling of, the prince ques-
tions—if not conflates—these orders because even though the dwarf’s behavior
at court is still subject to the sovereign, the concept of sovereignty itself de-
pends on the premise that the sovereign is free, like the dwarf, from imposed
4. Jonathan Brown, Velázquez: Painter and Courtier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1986), 83.
5. Braden Frieder, “Telling the Truth in Baroque Spain: Past and Present in the Jester Por-
traits of Velázquez,” Discoveries: South-Central Renaissance Conference News and Notes 21 (2004): 17.
6. Laura R. Bass, The Drama of the Portrait: Theater and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 111.
7. Svetlana Alpers, “Interpretation without Representation, or, the Viewing of Las Meninas,”
Representations 1 (1983): 40.
8. Ibid.

60 R ENA ISSANC E DRA MA S P R IN G 20 1 4
limits. This concept of sovereignty is, however, not in effect—either de jure or

de facto—in early modern Spain. As the argument that follows demonstrates,
there are practical and moral limits to kingship, and when transgressed its rep-
resentation is figuratively monstrous.
The portrait, then, emphasizes the monstrous counterpart to the prince that
Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–81) exposes in La vida es sueño by exploiting
a kind of monstrous representation akin to Velázquez’s portraits, especially Las
Meninas.9 Looking at La vida es sueño not as court play per se, but as a play
staged in the public theaters (corrales) and then performed privately for the
court (known as a particular) with the sovereign patron in mind, I argue that
Calderón uses a visual scheme derived from his knowledge of painting to create
a deeply ambivalent dramatic portrait of Philip IV. By manipulating the con-
ventions of perspectival construction, La vida es sueño disfigures the prevailing
political self-representation and symbolic reinforcement of power through an
anamorphic structure in both the court theatrical setting and the conceptual
setting of play. At the same time, Calderón skeptically explores the ambivalence
of perception itself, signified in this play by the theatrical condition of twilight,
a liminal space populated by monsters who incarnate a vacillation between na-
tures, things, and points of view. Such monstrous figures challenge established
ideological categories and disrupt the illusion of verisimilitude.10 The end re-
sult, then, is a play that functions pictorially as it asserts a political, religious,
and philosophical message in an anamorphically decorous fashion that exploits
the perceptually liminal positions of both king and spectators.
I . SPA N IS H A B SOL U T I S M A N D CO U R T RE P R E SE N T AT IO N
Criticism of the last two decades has discredited the conventional wisdom that
Spanish theater of the seventeenth century was a state apparatus intended to
9. Camón Aznar, Velázquez, sees the origin of Las Meninas in the portrait.
10. Roberto González Echevarría, Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and
Latin American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 84, sums up the rela-
tionship between the figure of the monster and its ability to disrupt ideological aesthetics: “The
central tenet of the criticism that aligns Calderón with the doctrines of counterreformist Spain
holds that there is a perfect fit between ideology and art, between belief and expression. In other
words, to uphold the absolute orthodoxy of Calderón’s art one must assume that there is an im-
plicit harmony among all the various codes that make up his theater, an internal unity of form
and meaning. There is no such thing in Calderón, but instead, as in Cervantes, a systematic and
often jarring analysis of the constant friction between reality and doctrine, intention and expres-
sion. The study of the monster makes it possible to observe that aspect of Calderón’s work, as
well as some elements of what we might call the Calderónian baroque. For it should be clear that
the monster is at odds with renaissance aesthetics and its ideal of harmony and decorum and,
furthermore, that the figure questions the very concept of mimesis underlying much of renais-
sance literature.”

promulgate the status quo and serve authoritarian interests. The establishment-
propaganda theory—as Melveena McKendrick refers to it—took root and flow-
ered after the appearance of two key works, one by José Antonio Maravall and
the other by José María Díez Borque; read wrongly or rightly, they implicated
playwrights such as Calderón as complacent supporters of an absolutist monar-
chy who used their art to buttress an empire in decline.11
Subsequent historiography has qualified such claims about Spanish abso-
lutism. First, as Henry Kamen has demonstrated, the common assumption
that Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was an absolutist state is
mistaken, absolutism being “more a legal fiction than political reality.”12 Sec-
ond, even though the Hapsburg monarchy’s theatrical spectacles have the in-
tention and the potential to perpetuate that fiction, Calderón is well attuned to
the discrepancy between the Crown’s self-representation and the actual situa-
tion, and his plays foreground that tension. Third, the discrepancy between po-
litical appearance and reality in the Hapsburg court is so great that it helps us
to debunk the notion that Spain was ever so stable and secure that its subse-
quent problems amounted to a “decline.”13 While these points could be elabo-
rated much more fully, suffice it to say that, while it might seem bold for a
dramatist to write a play that lends itself so easily to a critique of kingship, there
is ample leeway in Calderón’s political environment—something that was per-
haps even more true in Spain than elsewhere in seventeenth-century Europe—
to make oblique criticisms of his patron and sovereign while remaining mind-
ful of his position as a courtier. This strategy of “criticism and compliment” has
been well documented in the Stuart courts of Charles I and subsequently by
Hispanists regarding the Hapsburgs.14
11. Melveena McKendrick, Playing the King: Lope de Vega and the Limits of Conformity (Wood-
bridge: Tamesis, 2000), 1.
12. Henry Kamen. Spain, 1469–1714: A Society of Conflict, 3rd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 2005), 159.
13. Golden Age Spain’s supposed political, economic, and social “decline” has consistently
been contrasted with the remarkable quality and quantity of its artistic output. J. H. Elliot has
observed that the term is too imprecise to be of much help and discusses the ways in which the
self-perception of contemporary and subsequent Spaniards helped to create and perpetuate the
notion. While Elliot recognizes the self-deception that makes self-perception of Spanish decline
possible, he does not see it as entirely inaccurate. See J. H. Elliott, Spain and Its World, 1500–1700:
Selected Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 213–86. More recently, Kamen has
rejected as illusory the notion that Spain was in decline from a position of strength, emphasizing,
rather, the exposure of “inherent weaknesses” in the political structure that led to imperial col-
lapse. See Kamen, Spain, 1469–1714, 274–75.
14. See, e.g., Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England
of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Margaret R. Greer, The Play of
Power: Mythological Court Dramas of Calderón de la Barca (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1991); McKendrick, Playing the King; Frederick A. de Armas, “Segismundo/Philip IV: The
Politics of Astrology in La vida es sueño,” Bulletin of the Comediantes 53, no. 1 (2001): 82–100.

The charge that Calderón supported an absolutist monarchy is most often

leveled at the work he produced later in his career, after his ordination in 1651,
which consists mainly of autos sacramentales and mythological court dramas.
The readings of some of these ostensibly dogmatic plays often color interpre-
tations of his earlier dramatic production. Critics are more willing to allow for
the critical possibilities of La vida es sueño than for many other of Calderón’s
works, especially the autos and the court plays. But Margaret Greer, for exam-
ple, rejects the representative and influential condemnation of Marcelino Me-
néndez y Pelayo that the mythological court drama was an “inferior genre” and
argues for a reading of court plays as presenting “oppositional discourse in the
plot.”15 In recent decades, several critics have explored the potential critical
space opened by Calderón’s work—early and late, religious and secular, private
and public—but not all to the same degree.16 While José Antonio Maravall’s La
cultura del Barroco makes an influential case for seventeenth-century Spanish
aesthetic production as state apparatus and leaves little room for subversive
discourse in Spain’s “monarchical absolutism,” it does not devote much atten-
tion to the court drama or the ways in which the monarchy was fooling no one
but, perhaps, itself.17 John Elliot, for one, does not underestimate the sophisti-
cation of the audience and notes that propagandistic works could be “counter-
15. Greer, The Play of Power, 201.

16. Greer (ibid.) complements earlier studies that convincingly add weight to the court
drama. See Sebastian Neumeister, Mito clásico y ostentación: Los dramas mitológicos de Calderón,
trans. Eva Reichenberger and Juan Luis Milán (Kassel: Reichenberger, 2000), 279–311; see also
Robert ter Horst, Calderón: The Secular Plays (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky), 1982.
Dian Fox concludes that “Calderón’s works—and not just the historical comedias, if La vida es
sueño is any indication—clearly support the anti-Machiavellian stance of Golden Age political
theorists” and do not support “absolute rule absolutely.” Fox, Kings in Calderón: A Study in
Characterization and Political Theory (London: Tamesis, 1986), 118. Despite this reevaluation,
Anthony J. Cascardi, The Limits of Illusion: A Critical Study of Calderón (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984), 130, follows the tradition of earlier critics by viewing the court plays as
superficial vehicles of sovereign power. In a more recent work, Cascardi argues, in a nuanced
fashion, that the self-representational aesthetic mode of Calderón’s theater (and not just the
court plays) legitimized and strengthened a Spanish absolutism that was “representative, even
paradigmatic” in Europe, albeit flawed structurally. Cascardi, Ideologies of History in the Spanish
Golden Age (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 77. See also María
Alicia Amadei-Pulice, “Realidad y apariencia: Valor político de la perspectiva escénica en el
teatro cortesano,” in Calderón: Actas del Congreso internacional sobre Calderón y el teatro español
del Siglo de Oro, ed. Luciano García Lorenzo (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cien-
tíficas, 1983), 1531.
17. José Antonio Maravall, La cultura del Barroco: análisis de una estructura histórica (Barce-
lona: Editorial Ariel, 1980). Translated by Terry Cochran as Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a
Historical Structure (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1986).

productive.”18 Despite this self-deception, Philip IV was conscious of national

failures and surprisingly tolerant of criticism—if presented tactfully.
While La vida es sueño, which has been called “the most meaningful, yet
the most difficult, play in the Spanish language,”19 was composed for perfor-
mance in the public theaters (corrales), many corral plays were staged as private
performances ( particulares) at court. N. D. Shergold assumed, given common
practice, “it is almost certain that it would first have been given to the King
as a royal ‘particular’ in the palace.”20 Nearly a century earlier, Juan Eugenio
Hartzenbusch (1806–80) seemed convinced of this as well, since his Biblioteca
de autores españoles lists a court performance of the play in 1635.21 Recent
evidence, however, points to an early version of the play dating no later than
1630.22 Such a chronology means that a particular performance at court of Cal-
derón’s most famous comedia sometime around the date logged by Hartzen-
busch is quite possible, but not likely as a debut, as Shergold assumed. The
title page of La vida es sueño in an edition of collected works by Calderón in
1685 (as well as subsequent editions) affirms that it was presented in the Real
18. Elliot, Spain and Its World, 163.

19. Bruce W. Wardropper, “Apenas llega cuando llega a penas,” Modern Philology 57, no. 4
(1960): 244.
20. N. D. Shergold, A History of the Spanish Stage: From Medieval Times until the End of the
Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 554.
21. See Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, Comedias de don Pedro Calderón de la Barca, 4 vols,
Biblioteca de autores españoles, vols. 7, 9, 12, 14 (1850–56; repr., Madrid: Ediciones Atlas,
1944–45), 669: “La vida es sueño, fiesta que se representó á Sus Majestades en el salon real de
Palacio” (Life is a Dream, a fiesta performed for Their Majesties in the royal salon of the Palace).
Hartzenbusch provides evidence for the latest possible date of the play but no actual documen-
tation, unfortunately, for the court performance itself.
22. La vida es sueño appeared in print in 1636, in two versions. According to José María
Ruano de la Haza, Calderón was composing an early version of La vida es sueño by 1629. See de
la Haza, editor’s introduction, in La vida es sueño, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Castalia, 2000), 8, and La
primera versión de La vida es sueño de Calderón (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1992),
17–32. Ignacio Arellano, Calderón y su escuela dramática (Madrid: Ediciones del Laberinto, 2001),
75–76, rejects this early date, noting the unlikelihood of a play of the magnitude of La vida es
sueño going unstaged or at least unmentioned for so long, and places the completed text at
1635. The discovery of a suelta edition dated 1632–34, however, supports Ruano’s date, especially
since the suelta informs us that the play was performed by Cristóbal de Avendaño, who died in
1634. See Don W. Cruickshank, Don Pedro Calderón (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), 114–15; Alfredo Rodríguez López-Vázquez, “La fecha de La vida es sueño y el entremés La
maestra de gracias, atribuido a Belmonte: 1630–31, por la companía de Cristóbal de Avendaño,” in
Calderón: Protagonista eminente del Barroco europeo, ed. Szilvia E. Szmuk, vol. 2 of Calderón sueltas
in the Collection of the Hispanic Society of America: Con un estudio de Alfredo Rodríguez López-
Vázquez sobre la fecha de La vida es sueño y otro de Jaroslava Kašparová sobre los manuscritos cal-
deronianos de Mlada Vožice. Teatro del Siglo de Oro, Bibliografías y Catálogos 30; Estudios de Lit-
eratura 30 (Kassel: Reichenberger, 2002), 1–19.

Salón at some point.23 That La vida es sueño was apparently adapted into an
allegorical version for the festival of Corpus Christi in 1636 in the village of
Fuente el Saz24 suggests Calderón’s willingness, if not the necessity, to let the
circumstances of this play’s performance modify its production. There are also,
of course, two later auto sacramental versions of La vida es sueño. Surprisingly,
critics have left La vida es sueño unexamined in this court context.25 Any appear-
ance at court would be pregnant with interpretive possibilities and certainly
would have influenced its immediate reception.
Commenting on Diego de Velázquez and Calderón as contemporary court
artists, Greer explains
The dramatist never had the close relationship to the king that Veláz-
quez enjoyed as painter to the king, but he demonstrated from that early
play [Amor, honor y poder (1623)] that he could make his dramatic art
speak diplomatically to kings and princes. Calderón’s practice of includ-
ing an explicit or implicit didactic message in his plays afforded a certain
protection of them from constant moralist opposition to the theater. But
when that message had a clear political relevance, he knew that it was
prudent either to sugarcoat the pill by delivering the message through
classical gods or great figures of past eras or to blur contemporary identi-
ties in such a way that the trajectory of the message from the onstage
dramatic world to his privileged palace audience was not overtly direct.
Instead, he made it visible in a play of mirrors rather like the mirrors
Velázquez employed in Las Meninas and Venus and Cupid.26
23. Germán Vega García-Luengos, Don William Cruickshank, and José M. Ruano de la Haza,
La segunda versión de La vida es sueño de Calderón. Hispanic Studies TRAC, vol. 19 (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2000), 48–49, 84.
24. Cristóbal Pérez Pastor, Documentos para la biografía de D. Pedro Calderón de la Barca (Ma-
drid: Fortanet, 1905), 98–99.
25. See María Alicia Amadei-Pulice, Calderón y el barroco: exaltación y engaño de los sentidos
(Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1990), 145; and Neumeister, Mito clásico y ostentación. Amadei-
Pulice suggests that if La vida es sueño were performed at court before the completion of the
Coliseo in 1640, it would likely have taken advantage of the same kind of perspective scenery as
those after the completion of the Buen Retiro, but of a portable kind employed in various
rooms in the palace. This is hard to confirm, though. Both Amadei-Pulice and Neumeister
examine the relevance of Las Meninas to court performance, but not directly to La vida es sueño.
For the political valences of court theater, see Greer, The Play of Power. One of the best studies
of court performance is Juan Vélez de Guevara’s introduction to J. E. Varey, N. D. Shergold,
and Jack Sage, eds., Los celos hacen estrellas (London: Tamesis, 1970), xiii–cxvii. See also N. D.
Shergold and J. E. Varey, Representaciones Palaciegas, 1603–1699: Estudio y documentos, Colección
Támesis, Serie C, Fuentes para la historia del teatro en España (London: Tamesis, 1982).
26. Margaret R. Greer, “Calderón at Court,” in The Cambridge Companion to Velázquez, ed.
Suzanne L. Stratton-Pruitt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 149.

Appearances to the contrary, many of Calderón’s works contain an embedded

critique of the monarchy that manifests itself on the aesthetic level and even in
the plot. McKendrick has treated this strategy of “decir sin decir” persuasively.
She concludes that “Calderón saw the court theatre’s role vis-à-vis the Crown
as being that of educator as well as celebrant, pointing out in suitably discreet
fashion the dangers that beset the prince, the strain between private inclination
and public duty, the need for self-knowledge and self-control.”27 Importantly,
the criticism is not of the natural order of sovereign rule, but rather of misrule.
For La vida es sueño is, to a large extent, the story of a king whose ability to in-
terpret his world is impaired and his understanding of sovereign powers mis-
taken. The argument that follows superimposes different frames of reference
to foreground the dramatically pictorial tensions and ambiguities that obtain in
a play that intends to, among other things, simultaneously praise and educate
the king by drawing upon political, painterly, teratological, and theological dis-
courses.
I I . AN A M O R P H OS IS
Fundamental to this study, then, is an understanding of anamorphosis, both
as an artistic technique of distortion based on the principles of linear perspec-
tive, and as a conceptual model of monstrosity that challenges the assump-
tions upon which linear perspective, as usually figured by post-Renaissance
thinkers, rests.28 While the term was not invented until 1657 by a student of Atha-
nasius Kircher, the technique, in various forms, had been in practice since the
early sixteenth century. Anamorphosis refers to the manner in which an image,
by means of the geometrical principles and methods of linear perspectival rep-
resentations taken to their logical extremes, is intentionally distorted, but can be
reformed by the assumption of an oblique vantage point or through the use of
curved mirrors (known as catoptrical anamorphosis). A neologism created from
morphe or “form” and the preposition ana, which can be rendered into English as
both dis- and re-, the term literally means “distortion” or “reformation.” Hanneke
Grootenboer notes that this polyvalence “creates a double bind, pointing to the
product, the actual image, as well as to the process of its reshaping, that is, the
viewer’s search for the right point of view.”29
27. McKendrick, Playing the King, 31.

28. On the relationship between perspective and anamorphosis, see Lyle Massey, Picturing
Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 37–69.
29. Hanneke Grootenboer, The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-
Century Dutch Still-Life Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 101.

In the seventeenth century, anamorphosis interrogated both the ontology and

epistemology of representation. As Jurgis Baltrušaitis explains, “Anamorpho-
sis . . . plays havoc with elements and principles; instead of reducing forms to
their visible limits, it projects them outside themselves and distorts them so that
when viewed from a certain point they return to normal . . . [Anamorphosis]
embraces a poetry of abstraction, an effective mechanism for producing optical
illusion and a philosophy of false reality. It is an enigma, a wonder, a marvel.”30
Artists employed anamorphic techniques to, among other reasons, conceal
messages and present visual arguments in a skeptical mode.
In order to illustrate this mode, I turn briefly to the most famous case of
anamorphosis in painting, The Ambassadors (1533) by Hans Holbein the Youn-
ger (ca. 1497–1543). Any direct influence of Holbein’s painting on the artistic
and dramatic production of the Spanish court seems highly unlikely, but The
Ambassadors reveals a constellation of themes and issues that are strikingly
similar to those of La vida es sueño. In fact, Baltrušaitis claims that Holbein
“conceived his Vexierbild in terms of a theatre, with a change of scene and
décor as in a dramatic spectacle.”31 It can be considered as a two-act play, he
maintains; a spectator begins the first act by entering through a main door
and seeing the two nobles from the painting from a set distance, as if on a
stage at the back of the room. While impressed by the display of worldly
accomplishment and wealth, as well as the naturalism of the work, the visitor
notes the anamorphic figure near the floor. Advancing, the visitor observes
increasing realism in the details, but the object only grows more mysterious.
The second act begins with the spectator exiting through the door to the right,
troubled by the enigma, and then glancing back at the previous room to dis-
cover the human skull in proper proportion, a symbol of the death and the end
of the play.32 While Baltrušaitis’s summary of the “plot” depends partly on an
unverifiable in situ analysis, it contains several points of contact with Calderón’s
play. First, he firmly situates The Ambassadors in the tradition of vanitas, the
vanity of earthly power as indicated by the two diplomats themselves, but also
the vanity of knowledge as formulated by Erasmus (ca. 1466–1536) in The Praise
of Folly (1509).33 By Calderón’s lifetime, Neostoicism had all but vanquished the
optimistic elements of the extensive influence of Erasmian Humanism in
Spain, although the reemergence of classical skepticism radicalized Erasmus’s
30. Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Anamorphic Art, trans. W. J. Strachan (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey,

1977), 1.
31. Ibid., 104.
32. Ibid., 104–5.
33. Ibid., 96.

critique of human knowledge clearly at work in The Ambassadors.34 Further-

more, the occasion for the painting—the admonition to a monarch—as well as
its theological subtexts concerning the Reformation not only resonate with the
themes and plot of La vida es sueño, but demonstrate the utility of anamorpho-
sis in expressing the diplomatic and interpretive challenges associated with
such matters. That is, the operations in both works serve to both mask and
reveal information while exploring epistemological and ontological questions
in the process. Baltrušaitis concludes that as the skull is revealed, “the rest of
the scene disappear[s] completely.”35 In fact, the linear perspective plane dis-
torts rather than disappears. While the viewer does come to a clear vision of the
hidden image—and to some extent, a provisional meaning—in the painting, La
vida es sueño does not end with the same clarity for its protagonist. For the
spectators, the effect is perhaps similar, since they know the truth of Segis-
mundo’s situation, which grounds them in an ontological certainty. Neverthe-
less, the prince’s doubts must remain, since any epistemological fixity he might
enjoy has been troubled by the previous oscillation between existences, each
seeming to be real while morphing the previous into a monstrous distortion of
his current state.
In this way, then, La vida es sueño is a drama that functions as an anamor-
phic painting, just as The Ambassadors is an anamorphic painting that func-
tions like a drama. Using a figure such as anamorphosis, however, raises an
issue endemic to comparisons of literature with the visual arts. That is, what
would pictorial phenomena look like in literature? Since similar epistemologi-
cal assumptions govern the aesthetics of many seventeenth-century artists and
writers, their expressions are analogous, but not identical, because the change
in medium prevents any direct transference of a technique. Luis de Góngora
(1561–1627), for example, employs an anamorphic poetics that distorts language
and hides its meaning by means of hyperbaton and periphrasis, yet reveals a
complex aesthetic harmony and intelligibility when viewed from a certain van-
tage point.36 Literary anamorphosis can also express itself in wit or conceits, that
is, conceptually. Just as visual anamorphosis functions by “combining and con-
trasting multiple images, compressing them in space,” verbal anamorphosis, as
34. For an extensive treatment of skepticism in early modern Spain, see Jeremy Robbins,
Arts of Perception: The Epistemological Mentality of the Spanish Baroque, 1580–1720 (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2007). For the presence of Montaigne, see Juan Marichal, “Montaigne en España,”
Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 7 (1953): 259–79.
35. Baltrušaitis, Anamorphic Art, 105.
36. See Matthew Ancell, “Este . . . Cíclope: Góngora’s Polifemo and the Poetics of Dis-
figuration,” Hispanic Review 79, no. 4 (2011): 547–72.

Ernest Gilman phrases it, “compresses ideas in time.”37 The analogical relations
between different media remain valid and fruitful as long as they are not viewed
as identities.38
By presenting us with two possible vantage points, anamorphic representa-
tion puts into question the coherence of our perceptions and presents the am-
bivalence of the skeptical dilemma by asking the viewer to assume an alter-
nate position in order to bring part of the image into focus. Neither position
is privileged, and the viewer is forced to confront the dilemma of choosing
which position is the correct one. As the vantage points are irreconcilable, what-
ever position the viewer adopts obviously distorts the view of the other. Ana-
morphosis, in disrupting the distinction between reality and appearance, in
“producing hallucinations,”39 displays the essentially positional nature of hu-
man understanding. This is Segismundo’s dilemma, but the interrogation of
his status extends to the king and to other viewers of the play who must con-
tend with shifting points of view, liminal positions, and epistemologies that are
figured anamorphically—or monstrously if you will—in order to destabilize
their claims and promote caution and the exercise of good, if fallible, judgment.
I II . P R O P H E C Y A N D M O N ST R O SI T Y
Frederick de Armas has tracked the widespread knowledge and interpretation
of certain astronomical phenomena in seventeenth-century Spain and deter-
mined that Calderón, as well as his public—including the Inquisition—would
have been aware of the link between the prophecies arising from them and
Philip IV. He concludes: “La vida es sueño, then, is built upon a rather thorny
premise—that the new king will reflect the heavenly writings, both positive
and negative. The play is an astro-political experiment that looks at the pre-
dictions years after the event, when Segismundo has grown up, when Philip IV
has become king. From the vantage point of the future, La vida es sueño shows
how the prophecies were fulfilled: how Philip could be viewed both as monster
37. Ernest B. Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth
Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 84. Gilman’s book remains the seminal
study of literary anamorphosis in English studies. In the Hispanic sphere, see César Nicolás,
Estrategias y lecturas: las anamorfosis de Quevedo (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Ex-
tremadura, 1986); David R. Castillo, (A)wry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Pica-
resque (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001). As applied to Calderón, see Bradley
J. Nelson, “The Marriage of Art and Honor: Anamorphosis and Control in Calderón’s La Dama
Duende,” Bulletin of the Comediantes 54 (2002): 407–42.
38. Gilman, The Curious Perspective, 9.
39. Baltrušaitis, Anamorphic Art, 2.

and as quasi-divine being.”40 The resonances between the plot and the actual
astronomical phenomena to which it alludes are amplified by the monstrous
imagery in the text, as well as, one assumes, the imagery on stage. The text
of the play, quite explicitly, depicts Segismundo, and by implication Basilio and
Philip IV, as monstrous. Before Segismundo becomes an ethical monster when
released from the tower into the court, he is a psychological monster from the
perspective of his parents’ imagination. For example, Basilio recounts the queen’s
prepartum visions of their son’s monstrosity:
su madre infinitas veces,

entre ideas y delirios
del sueño, vio que rompía
sus entrañas atrevido
un monstruo en forma de hombre
y entre su sangre teñido
la daba muerte, naciendo
víbora humana del siglo
(Lines 668–75)
[Time and again his mother, seized by the images and hallucinations of
dreams, watched as a monster in human form broke forth defiantly from
her entrails and, drenched in her blood, brought her death through its
own birth, an inconceivable human viper.] (102)41
Even from the play’s first word, “Hipogrifo” (hippogriff ), it presents spec-
tacles that are monstrous in every sense of the term. Monstro, as defined in Co-
varrubias’s contemporary lexicon of seventeenth-century Spanish, describes Se-
gismundo with peculiar force:
Es cualquier parto contra la regla y orden natural, como nacer el hombre

con dos cabezas, cuatro brazos y cuatro piernas; como aconteció en el
condado de Urgel, en un lugar dicho Cervera, el año 1343, que nació un
niño con dos cabezas y cuatro pies; los padres y los demás que estaban
presentes a su nacimiento, pensando supersticiosamente pronosticar algún
40. De Armas, Segismundo/Philip IV, 87.

41. Citations of La vida es sueño are from Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La vida es sueño, ed.
Ciriaco Morón Arroyo, 25th ed. (Madrid: Cátedra, 1998). Translations of La vida es sueño are
from Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Life’s a Dream: A Prose Translation and Critical Introduction,
ed. and trans. Michael Kidd (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004). Other translations,
unless otherwise noted, are my own.

70 RENAISSANCE D RAMA S P R I N G 2 01 4
gran mal y que con su muerte se evitaría, le enterraron vivo. Sus padres
fueron castigados como parricidas, y los demás con ellos. He querido traer
solo este ejemplo por ser auténtico y escribirle nuestros coronistas. Díjose
monstro, lat. monstrum, a monstrando, quod aliquid significando demonstret.
[MONSTER is any birth against the natural order and rule, for instance,
when a man is born with two heads, four arms and four legs, as hap-
pened in the County of Urgel, in a place called Cabrera in 1343. There a
child was born with two heads and four legs. The parents and others
present, thinking superstitiously that this birth was an omen of great
catastrophes which could be avoided by the death of the child, buried
him alive. His parents were punished as parricides (sic), and the others
as well. I have wanted to bring forth only this example because it is an
authentic one that has been written down by our chroniclers. In Latin mon-
ster was monstrum a monstrado, quod aliquod significando demonstret.]42
As the etymology of monstro, Covarrubias gives the Latin “monstrado, that which
must be shown, exhibited, brought to light, be made manifest, that which must
be brought to knowledge, demonstrated, designated, pointed out,”43 in addition
to monstrum, which denotes an evil omen or portent, or “monster” in the more
common sense of a terrible, exceptional being. Both words and senses of mon-
stro (or monstruo in variant contemporary and modern usage) derive from moneo,
which means “to admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach,” and “also to an-
nounce, predict, foretell.”44 Within the semantic field of the word monstr(u)o,
then, are all the senses embodied in Segismundo: a prodigy, a terror, an excep-
tion, but also a revelation, and a demonstration.
Here, another aspect of court culture is germane: the many dwarves, de-
fined and considered monstruos by Covarrubias. González Echevarría points
out that “there was certain theatricality built into the figure of the monster,
and a special space was assigned to it in the palace. Like Velázquez, Calderón
drew heavily on this already codified role of the figure. Even if their monstros-
ity is not ugly or grotesque, one should not underestimate the strangeness of
Calderón’s cross-dressing protagonists. Made up of contradictory characteris-
42. Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611; repr.,
Pamplona: Universidad de Navarra, 2006), ed. Ignacio Arellano and Rafael Zafra, 812. Transla-
tion from González Echevarría, Celestina’s Brood, 96–97.
43. Translation quoted in González Echevarría, Celestina’s Brood, 104.
44. Charlton Thomas Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (New York: Harper &
Bros., 1879; repr. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 1st ed., s.v. “Moneo.”

tics, Calderón’s monsters are as prodigious as the freaks the kings kept for
their amusement and delight.”45
The anamorphic analogue does, in fact, involve a different sense of mon-
strosity; it is not only a double, contradictory image, but also a disfigured one.
But the disfigurement is a matter of perspective and can be refigured to proper
proportion. The initial confusion of the distorted and ambiguous image re-
solves itself, yet the potential to revert remains. A scene from the beginning of
the play illustrates this. As the Russian noblewoman Rosaura (disguised as a
man) and the gracioso Clarín enter Poland, they begin to perceive, in the fading
light of day, a building barely distinguishable from its rocky surroundings.
Rosaura describes the sight:
Rústico nace entre desnudas peñas

un palacio tan breve,
que el sol apenas a mirar se atreve.
Con tan rudo artificio
la arquitectura está de su edificio,
que parece, a las plantas
de tantas rocas y de peñas tantas
que al sol tocan la lumbre,
peñasco que ha rodado de la cumbre.
(Lines 56–64)
[Lying crudely among the barren crags, it’s a palace so insignificant that
even the sunlight barely reaches it. Its crude architecture is such that it
could pass for a boulder that rolled off the mountaintop and settled at the
foot of all these rocks and crags that strive toward the sun’s warmth.] (92)
What the two travelers have discovered is of course the tower in which Segis-
mundo is imprisoned. Nearly indistinguishable from the base of the mountain,
the tower underscores the thematics of hidden-ness in La vida es sueño. The tower
incarnates and conceals Basilio’s prophecy, a riddle about fate and free will.
Segismundo himself, once revealed, alternates not only between locations, tower,
and palace, but between prince and monster, and the two never disentangle.
The tower also acts as the locus of transition, a threshold between what
Segismundo perceives as the indistinguishable experiences of life and dream.
The fact that the prince is confined to the tower signals the primary theologi-
45. González Echevarría, Celestina’s Brood, 104.

72 R E NAISSA NCE DRA MA S PR IN G 20 1 4
cal issue of La vida es sueño: Calderón’s plays consistently emphasize that an

adverse fate cannot be avoided but rather should be confronted and conquered
through a process of self-mastery, an exercise of free will—precisely what
Segismundo’s incarceration denies him. In theological terms, adverse destiny
takes the form of original sin, while in humanist terms it is the protagonist’s
“capacity for self-destruction.”46 Prophecies are also, of course, a matter of
interpretation, and interpretation of visual, oneiric, and astrological phenom-
ena are fallible. And that fallibility is exemplified here by the inability of Ro-
saura and Clarín to discern whether what they see in the twilight is actually a
tower or merely a rock. This tower, or “palacio” as Rosaura describes it, hous-
ing a prodigious monster that provokes wonder, surprise, and terror in those
who encounter its inhabitant, is the mirror image of the palace from which
the king made his astrological prophecy. In this sense, it is a reflection of its
palatial counterpart and invites a perceptual inversion of space.47 The percep-
tual confusion here foregrounds the liminality of the tower that is Segismun-
do’s “cuna y sepulcro” (cradle and grave; 195) as he moves back and forth
from the tower to the palace, from one pole of action to the other, from life to
death, from prince to prisoner, from beast to king.
In the soliloquy by Segismundo that follows the travelers’ discovery, he
compares himself to a monster, describing beasts that are “monstruo[s] de su
laberinto” (monsters in their labyrinth; 140). In a series of metonymies that
begins with the hippogriff, the play draws parallels between that mythological
tribrid, Rosaura (man-woman), Basilio (astrologer-king), Astolfo (Pole-Russian),
and of course Segismundo, the Prince-beast variously described (often by him-
self ) in such terms as “esqueleto vivo . . . animado muerto” (living skeleton . . .
breathing cadaver; 201–2), “víbora humana” (human viper; 675), and “un com-
puesto de hombre y fiera” (a composite of man and beast; 1547). Perhaps the
most elegant formulation is, again, Segimundo’s own:
. . . porque más te asombres

y monstruo humano me nombres,
entre asombros y quimeras,
soy un hombre de las fieras
y una fiera de los hombres.
(Lines 209–12)
46. Melveena McKendrick, Theatre in Spain, 1490–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1989), 166.
47. “Stage space was used flexibly, sometimes resulting in the inversion or subversion of
natural physical relationships.” J. M. Ruano de la Haza, “The Staging of Calderón’s La vida es
sueño and La dama duende,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 64, no. 1 (1987): 56.

[to give you more reason to be astonished and to call me a human

monster—I am, amid bewilderment and illusion, a man among beasts
and beast among men.]
The fusion of contraries embodies the scholastic notion of violence—“quime-

ras” (chimeras) suggesting the mythological hybrid creature—but also figures,
on the microcosmic level of the characters, Segismundo’s macrocosmic ontologi-
cal and epistemological oscillation between dream and reality. Indeed, at Ro-
saura’s appearance, an image parallel to the hippogriff emerges. Clarín has diffi-
culty describing or “painting” the scene ( pintallo) of the “flying” (vuela; line 2685)
horse and rider:
En un veloz caballo
(perdóname, que fuerza es el pintallo
en viniéndome a cuento),
en quien un mapa se dibuja atento,
pues el cuerpo es la tierra,
el fuego el alma que en el pecho encierra,
la espuma el mar, el aire su suspiro,
en cuya confusión un caós admiro,
pues en el alma, espuma, cuerpo, aliento,
monstruo es de fuego, tierra, mar y viento
(Lines 2672–81)
[We are approached by a swift horse—forgive me, but its description

requires considerable detail—upon which a careful map is drawn in
which the body is formed of earth, the soul is made up of fire trapped in
the chest, the frothy mouth partakes of the sea, and air is exhaled in its
hot breath; the motely figure inspires chaos, for its body, soul, frothy
mouth, and breath form a monster of earth, fire, sea, and wind.]
The horse and rider appear in the wilderness between the palace and the tower,
repeating and intensifying the opening scene of the play. This time dressed as
a woman but with the weapons of man, “monstruo de una especie y otra” (a
monstrous hybrid; line 2725), the mounted Rosaura incarnates the cosmos.
Such an apocalyptic figure dramatizes the unstable and often inscrutable world
of the play inhabited by characters who, in turn, are constituted by seemingly
intractable tensions. This is a world of in-between-ness, of horizons, of twilight.
Just as twilight stalls time, permitting the conflict to unfold, it also allows the
differentiation of previously indistinguishable objects. Cesáreo Bandera sees
this crepuscularidad as fusing all the opposites in play, in the same way that the

74 R EN AISSANC E DRA MA S P R IN G 20 1 4
tower is nearly indiscernible from its surroundings. He observes: “Las típicas

antítesis paralelísticas del lenguaje calderoniano (hombre-fiera, cuna-sepulcro,
vivo-cadáver o esqueleto vivo, etcétera) están inspiradas en esa misma norma
de la indiferenciación, de la fusión y confusión de contrarios” (The typical
parallelistic antitheses of Calderónian language [man-beast, cradle-grave, live-
corpse or living skeleton, etc.] are inspired in that same norm of indifferen-
tiation, of the fusion and confusion of contraries).48 While I agree that op-
posites are fused, the very crepuscularity of the images and rhetorical tropes
foregrounds their alterity and forces the focus on the differential space in be-
tween. The constant oscillation between opposites calls attention to their differ-
ence, which takes place in the dilation of twilight.49 It is as if time stops, de-
ferring the action while simultaneously allowing contraries to battle. Even as
Rosaura and Clarín see the tower and struggle, in the crepuscular light, to
construe it correctly, so Segismundo encounters particular phenomena but can-
not ascertain the validity of his interpretation. Always on the threshold of a
shift in perspective, he becomes convinced of the illusory nature of his expe-
rience. In the process, Segismundo receives an education in ethical judgment
and restraint. Basilio too learns from these lessons of perception, as does, one
hopes, Philip IV, for these characters may be read as his dramatic portrait and
enact the possibilities of his reign.
I V . C AL DE RÓ N A ND PA I NTI N G
Calderón’s extensive knowledge of and dialogue with the visual arts allows
him to paint a portrait of the king in La vida es sueño that enacts such skepti-
cally productive criticism and illustrates the dramatist’s skill in representing
the monster’s vexations of the monarch. While at the courts of Philip IV and
Charles II, Calderón rubbed shoulders not only with Velázquez, but also with
many court painters such as Alonso Cano, Juan Carreño de Miranda, Fran-
cisco Rizi, and Claudio Coello. The inventory Coello made at Calderón’s death
in 1681 enumerates a large and valuable art collection. Comparisons between
the art of painting and poetry, theoretical statements, and metaphors about
painting abound in his works, and three of his plays revolve explicitly around
painting as the main plot element. In addition, four years before his death,
Calderón admitted a long-standing interest in painting in a rare prose work,
48. Cesáreo Bandera, Mimesis conflictiva: ficción literaria y violencia en Cervantes y Calderón,
Biblioteca Románica Hispánica 2, Estudios y Ensayos 221 (Madrid: Gredos, 1975), 207.
49. On La vida es sueño and dilatio, see Edward H. Friedman, “Deference, Différance: The
Rhetoric of Deferral,” in The Prince in the Tower: Perceptions of La vida es sueño, ed. Frederick A.
de Armas (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1993), 41–53.

the Deposición a favor de los profesores de la pintura (1677), translated, mislead-

ingly, as “Tractate in defence of the nobility of painting.” This text, “exhumed”
by Ernst Robert Curtius, in his own words, was written as a statement of ex-
pert witness on behalf of Madrid painters in their effort to secure respect—
and the appropriate tax status—as practitioners of an arte liberal.50
Not surprisingly, there is a fair amount of criticism comparing Calderónian
drama to the works of contemporary painters, particularly Velázquez. Most of
it makes formal comparisons or argues for the possible influence of a certain
drama on a certain painting, or vice versa, particularly at the scenic level.51
One scholar published an extensive, although far from exhaustive, index pic-
torius of Calderón’s dramatic corpus.52 Another study enumerates similarities
critics have found between Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas (The Spinners) or Fable
of Arachne (1656–58) and Golden Age Spanish theater, Calderón’s works in
particular.53 Also, it is quite possible Las Hilanderas was inspired by Darlo todo
y no dar nada (1651), one of the three plays in which Calderón deals specifi-
cally with the theme of painting, the other two being El pintor de su deshonra
(ca. 1644–46) and its auto sacramental version (ante-1647). The views on paint-
ing expressed by the characters in these plays often reflect the predilections of
sixteenth-century painting, following Alberti and others: proportion, symme-
try, and clarity. Calderón’s plays in general, and La vida es sueño in particular,
however, display a patently baroque aesthetic that seems to run counter to
these values, for the undeniably reciprocal relationship between painting and
drama in Calderón’s works goes beyond the metaphorical, allusional, or tech-
nical level. In his dramas, Calderón enacts an aesthetic representation that op-
erates on a conceptual level on par with Velázquez, with whom he was in
healthy and productive competition.
The Deposición raises many questions about Calderón’s views on art, not
because he expresses anything radical, but precisely because he does not. Be-
fore discussing the relationship between Calderón’s drama and art, it is neces-
sary to examine briefly the type of argument Calderón makes in the Deposición
and the possible motives for that argument. The text repeats many familiar
arguments about the role of the painter and representation in general, as ar-
50. Ernst Robert Curtius, “Calderón und die Malerei,” Romanische Forschungen 50, no. 2
(1936): 89–136. The text was republished from a more reliable source in Edward M. Wilson, “El
texto de la ‘Deposición a favor de los profesores de la pintura’, de Don Pedro Calderón de la
Barca,” Revista de archivos, bibliotecas y museos 77 (1974): 709–27.
51. See, e.g., Everett W. Hesse, “Calderón and Velázquez,” Hispania 35, no. 1 (1952): 74–82.
52. See Helga Bauer, Der Index Pictorius Calderons: Untersuchungen zu seiner Malermetaphorik
(Hamburg: Cram, DeGruyter, 1969).
53. See Ana M. Beamud, “Las Hilanderas, the Theater, and a Comedia by Calderón,” Bulle-
tin of the Comediantes 34, no. 1 (1982): 37–44.

76 R E N A I S S A N C E DR A M A S P R I N G 20 1 4
ticulated in the contemporary Italian schools of thought. Important here is the

intent to glorify painting. Calderón invokes the Classical notion of the deus
pictor, God as the painter of the cosmos, who fashions humankind in his im-
age. Curtius lists affinities between Calderón’s dramas (particularly the autos)
and the art theory in the Deposición in that it “shows in structure, reasoning,
and style, that personal refashioning of traditional ideological material. . . . En-
cyclopedic reading, which however is held under control by the energy and
meaningfulness of his intellectual combinations; the most subtle conceptual
development and harmonious intertwining of all themes; scrupulous analysis, which
proceeds with strict symmetry and from which there is finally built up a manifest
whole, conceived according to the laws of proportion—these stylistic characteristics
of Calderón’s art are also recognizably apparent in the deposition.”54 There is
certainly little room for argument that, as Curtius characterizes them, Calde-
rón’s works mirror the theory presented in the Deposición in some aspects,
including the concern for symmetry and proportion.
The question becomes, however, one of reconciling, or at least accounting
for, Calderón’s patently monstrous aesthetics given his apparent position on
painting as expressed in the Deposición. There are, of course, several possibili-
ties, none of which is necessarily exclusive of the others. One is that Calderón
departed from the aesthetics prominent in his early production and became
more conservative aesthetically after his ordination and dedication to the writ-
ing of court dramas and autos. Another possibility is the fact that art theory
in the seventeenth century had not caught up to its practice. While not devoid
of theoretical content, contemporary Spanish treatises on painting by Fran-
cisco Pacheco (1564–1654, Velázquez’s mentor and father-in-law), Antonio
Palomino (1655–1726, Velázquez’s biographer), and others are overwhelm-
ingly concerned with practical matters: preparing the canvas, mixing paint,
and detailed technical advice about how to paint specific genres. Highly influ-
enced by Italian mannerist theory, the Diálogos de la pintura (1633) of Vicente
Carducho (1576–1638) is an exception that relies heavily on Italian academics
such as Federico Zuccaro (ca. 1542–1609) and Vasari (1511–74) and privileges
theory over practice.55
Writing on Titian (ca. 1488–1576), Carducho addresses some of the prob-
lems of perception and art and anticipates the much fuller treatment by Marco
54. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R.
Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 562.
55. See Vicente Carducho, Diálogos de la pintura: su defensa, origen, esencia, definición, modos y
diferencias, ed. Francisco Calvo Serraller (Madrid: Turner, 1979), 259–335; Zahira Veliz, ed.,
Artists’ Techniques in Golden Age Spain: Six Treatises in Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1986), 22–23.

Boschini (1613–78) of borrones, anamorphosis, and similar techniques.56 For

the most part, though, Carducho argued for the dibujo (Italian disegno), or ide-
alized, mode of painting, as opposed to the colorido (Italian colorito) mode. The
former emphasized perspective, the idea, drawing, well-structured composition,
and what Carducho called the pintor interior, as embodied by Michelangelo
(1475–1564), while the latter referred to a naturalistic style that emphasized
brushstroke, surface, imitation, and fidelity—the pintor exterior, as embodied by
Caravaggio (1573–1610).57 Carducho’s fervent opposition to the colorido tech-
nique was such that he referred to Caravaggio as an “AnteMichaelAngel” (anti-
Michaelangelo), although it seems that his disdain was not for Caravaggio him-
self, whom he admired, but rather for his less talented followers.58 Even by the
time Calderón makes his defense in 1677, most seventeenth-century art theory
had yet to describe, much less endorse, the full-fledged monstrosity and distor-
tion evident in Calderón and implicit in Velázquez.59 It seems likely as well that
if Calderón had written a treatise on dramatic poetics, it would have sounded
similar to the Deposición, since even in the literary sphere, few theorists cham-
pioned baroque aesthetics as fervently or with the sophistication that Baltasar
Gracián (1601–58) did in his Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1648).60
Moreover, the prominent Spanish Golden Age art theorists shared with
Calderón the same goal: to elevate the status of painting. Calderón elaborates
on the nobility of the art—not its theoretical, conceptually distorting effects—
and he would have been acutely aware of his audience. The theocentric compo-
nent of Calderón’s art-theory, as Curtius characterizes it, makes precisely this
claim of nobility in comparing the act of painting with that of God’s creation.
Even supposing that Calderón had an articulate artistic theory that reflected his
aesthetics more fully, he would not have been better served by using it in his
treatise. Just as his criticism of his monarch and patron was skillfully circum-
spect, he makes a rhetorically appropriate plea for the status of art by relying
on traditional formulations of its nobility.
The very examples that Curtius cites from Calderón’s dramas indicate this
tactful prudence, in addition to suggesting an anamorphic aesthetic. Curtius
56. See Marco Boschini, La Carta del Navegar pitoresco: Edizione critica con la “Breve in-
struzione” premessa alle Ricche Minere della Pittura Veneziana, ed. Anna Pallucchini (Venice:
Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale, 1966).
57. For a discussion of how Velázquez incorporates both of these two modes, see Emily
Umberger, “Velázquez and Naturalism II: Interpreting Las Meninas,” Res 28 (1995): 94–117.
See also Alpers, “Interpretation without Representation.”
58. Carducho, Diálogos de la pintura, 271.
59. For a critical anthology of Spanish painting theory, see Francisco Calvo Serraller, La
Teoría de la pintura en el Siglo de Oro, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Cátedra, 1991).
60. Baltasar Gracián y Morales, Agudeza y arte de ingenio, ed. Evaristo Correa Calderón
(Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1969).

78 R EN AISSANC E DRA MA S P R IN G 20 1 4
describes Darlo todo y no dar nada, wherein three painters have been commis-
sioned to paint the portrait of Alexander the Great as a gift for his impending
wedding. Alexander has a squint in one eye, which the first painter chooses
not to represent and is dismissed for his flattery and deception. The second
painter renders the defect all too accurately, disrespectfully violating decorum,
and the king dismisses him as well. The third painter tactfully paints the
monarch in half profile, thus avoiding the issue of whether to show or to dis-
regard the imperfection. Alexander appoints him as court painter. By a change
in perspective, the crafty and diplomatic painter hides the disfiguration, yet
sacrifices the traditional mandate of absolute clarity on which beauty was sup-
posed to depend. This legend had already played itself out in Hapsburg his-
tory when Philip IV’s great grandfather, Charles V, appointed Titian as the
official portraitist after his decorous rendering of the emperor’s deformed
jaw.61 This instance illustrates Calderón’s sensitivity to artistic techniques and
practices of his day, since full-profile portraits had given way to half-profile by
this time.62 But even more importantly, this oft-cited episode signals Cal-
derón’s understanding of perspectival techniques and, especially, the method
of anamorphosis. It does not, of course, refer to the technique of anamor-
phosis itself, but rather to its possibilities. Anamorphosis hides an aspect
while exposing another. In this story, it is a method of representing the dis-
figured but also its inverse: that is, disfiguring that which is represented.
Calderón expresses in the Deposición that the retrato reveals the divine qual-
ities of the soul: “no contenta con sacar parecida la exterior superficie de todo
el universo, elevó sus diseños a la interior pasión del ánimo. . . . llegó su
destreza aun a copiarle el alma, significando en la variedad de su semblantes”
([painting] is not satisfied to render similar the exterior surface of the entire
universe, but has elevated its designs to the interior passion of the soul. . . . its
skill was able to copy the soul, representing the variety of its countenances].63
Eunice Joiner Gates compares Calderón’s position with the work of his peer:
“Velázquez’ many portraits of King Philip IV were doubtless prompted by the
artist’s fascination not only with the traits which differentiate individuals but
also with the more elusive qualities which characterize a particular individual
61. Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991), 502; Frederick A. de Armas, Quixotic Frescoes: Cervantes and Italian
Renaissance Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 118.
62. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later
Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950), 198; Eunice Joiner Gates, “Calderón’s In-
terest in Art,” Philological Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1961): 59.
63. Wilson, “El texto de la ‘Deposición,’ ” 717.

Figure 2. Diego Velázquez, Philip IV, 1652–55. Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo Credit:
Alfredo Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, New York.
at a given moment.”64 This description suggests the bust portrait in the Prado,
Philip IV (1652–55; fig. 2), the last extant portrait of the monarch by Velázquez
(excluding Las Meninas [1656–57] as well as other portraits of unsure authen-
ticity).
64. Gates, “Calderón’s Interest in Art,” 57.

80 R E NAISSA NCE DR AMA S P R IN G 2 01 4
The portrait reveals some of the physical flaws associated with the Haps-
burgs, which are actually quite typical of the Spanish dynasty, and unique to
them. Contrasted with earlier portraits, the mature sovereign’s vulnerability
and sense of failure seem to seep out of the canvas, even though his physical
appearance is inaccurately firm and healthy. In this work, Velázquez performs
the kind of crystallization of a momentary quality that Calderón describes. The
attempt to capture a being in flux, for the passions of the soul are by defini-
tion not stable, emphasizes the distinction between art and Nature that both
the painter and playwright demonstrate elsewhere. That is, Nature, the truth
of art, is contingent. When Velázquez immortalizes Philip with a portrait that
reveals his hidden fragility behind a regal but flawed visage, he also makes a
comment on the instability of truth that idealistic art attempts to deny. Our view
of Philip, from a particular moment, angle, and distance, presents a subtle ex-
position on the positional nature of understanding.
In more dramatic fashion, La vida es sueño exemplifies this kind of contin-
gency of knowledge as it dramatizes the problem of seeing and interpretation
by creating monstrous images that question the constructions placed on what
we see and presents us with an action, not an exposition, demanding our in-
terpretation. In short, it presents us with a predicament. Its dramaturgical
scheme creates anamorphic effects that reinforce a skeptical outlook, particu-
larly emphasizing the disparity between reality and illusion, and the monster
and king, in the Spanish court.
V. THE PRINCE I N THE TOWER / THE K ING ON STAGE

Naturally, in the rare instances when it is possible, the interpretation of a play
should not be limited to its literary text but should include all the aural and
visual components, as well as its accompanying dramatic performances such
as the loa, entremés, and fin de fiesta, when applicable.65 But even in isolation,
transplanted from the corrales to court as a particular performance, the political
valences of La vida es sueño would have an added weight, since the play not
only equates Philip IV with the monstrous Segismundo by means of the ce-
lestial phenomena that are their fictional references, but also equates Philip
with the fictional Basilio by means of the audience arrangement in Calderón’s
dramatic portrait.
65. J. E. Varey, “The Audience and the Play at Court Spectacles: The Role of the King,”
Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 61 (1984): 405. This contextualization is the basis of Amadei-Pulice’s
monograph. For music in Calderónian-era theater, see Louise K. Stein, Songs of Mortals, Dia-
logues of the Gods: Music and Theatre in Seventeenth-Century Spain (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993).

Corral performances generally had simple and efficient staging with mini-
mal scenery, relying on costumes and the power of the text itself to create
theatrical illusion. Performances at court were another matter. Initially staged
to recreate the corral experience at court, the flexibility of the comedia, as Mc-
Kendrick observes, “lent itself with consummate ease to development into a
superior version of the court spectacle provided elsewhere in Europe by the
masque.”66 Philip IV and his court were addicted to the theater, and their
performances would soon reach an unparalleled level of spectacle. In 1626,
the Count-Duke of Olivares (1587–1645) requested that the hydraulics engi-
neer Cosme Lotti come from Tuscany to construct waterworks for the palace
gardens. A skilled and clever designer of stage machinery and settings, he
thrilled audiences already used to spectacular dramatic machinery and de-
signed perspectival settings with an unprecedented amount of detail.67 On
June 1, 1635, in one of the palace rooms, Calderón staged a machine-play, La
fábula de Dafne, that featured Lotti’s three typical scenes: cave and sea, cave
and mountain or woods, and palace and the temple of Pallas, which Amadei-
Pulice notes are the three scenes repeated in La vida es sueño.68 While this fact
might suggest a court performance of La vida es sueño using Lotti’s machinery,
and might also explain the great geographical inconsistency in the play of an
ocean within body-throwing distance from the Polish court, it is unverifiable
due to the inconsistent documentation surrounding early court performance.
The Coliseo del Buen Retiro was not completed until 1640, approximately
the same time as the Alcázar renovations. Some time before the 1655 ground
plan (fig. 3), based on the Italian model, an architectural proscenium was built,
providing a picture stage, a drop curtain, visible-change stage machinery, wings
and a backcloth to provide the perspective settings, and machinery for aerial
effects: “The stage . . . gradually receded towards a rear window which at ap-
propriate moments allowed a final distant perspective, not of artificial trees and
shrubs, but of the real Retiro gardens beyond.”69
A performance of La vida es sueño at court a few years prior would not have
had the elaborate perspective stage sets that occasioned plays performed on the
Coliseo. Nevertheless, what the plan demonstrates is the effacement of the
distinction between the actual and the illusory created by Baroque scenographic
techniques that not only extended inward to deeper planes of the stage to the
gardens outside but also outward toward the spectators, particularly the mon-
66. McKendrick, Theatre in Spain, 211.

67. Ibid., 215.
68. Amadei-Pulice, Calderón y el barroco, 173.
69. Brown and Elliott, A Palace for a King, 217. This image is a detail of a plan of the Coliseo
of the Buen Retiro, 1712 or 1713. Ibid., 216.

Figure 3. Ground plan of the Coliseo of the Buen Retiro. 1712. By permission of the
Bibliothèque nationale de France.
arch. As Emilio Orozco Díaz describes, in the sumptuous European court fes-
tivities, actual and fictional spaces are confused and superimposed. Nobles and
the monarchs themselves took part in court festivals and could appear as
characters in ballets or dramas, even assuming an allegorical significance in the
ensemble or incarnating the very reality of the royal persona.70 As noted by
Brown and Elliot, though, while court spectacles not surprisingly dominate the
contemporary reports, many performances were not spectacles but private per-
formances of comedias by professional companies. In addition, “members of
the court could write and act in their own theatrical entertainments, which
provided opportunities for the coterie of royal secretaries and palace officials
to make jokes about each other for the amusement of themselves and their
masters.”71 We see, then, that at regular court plays, spectacles, and particulares,
the royal family was part of the drama. At the center of the theater of court life,
the rigidity of royal etiquette required the ritual and theatrical arrival and depar-
ture of the king:
Once seated Philip IV, with cramp-defying control, apparently moved

nothing but his eyes. Since the play itself was merely a spectacle within
a greater spectacle within a greater and more significant spectacle, the
70. Emilio Orozco Díaz, El Teatro y la teatralidad del Barroco (Barcelona: Planeta, 1969), 89.
71. Brown and Elliott, A Palace for a King, 223.

picture stage of the salón dorado [in the Alcázar] and even that of the
Coliseo only partly succeeded in creating the illusion of theatre normally
associated with the proscenium stage. Not only were the Royals, seated
outside the theatrical space, the prime object of attention, but the theat-
rical space itself reached out to participate in the symbolic ritual of mon-
archy. . . . The auditorium in both [palaces] remained illuminated
throughout the performance to allow the principal protagonists to re-
main visible, and this again blurred the distinction between the world of
the stage and that of the court which contained it.72
This ritualized arrangement intentionally reinforces the traditional hierarchy

as it organizes the audience in relation to the monarch even as is collapses the
distinction between representation and reality.
La vida es sueño dramatizes this oscillation between reality and illusion and
connects that movement with the monarchy as such, in that, as we have seen,
there is a strong identification between the king and both Segismundo and Ba-
silio. While Amadei-Pulice has argued that the purpose of Calderónian drama
was to impose an autocratic point of view,73 I would argue that the audience
arrangement, the tower/cave setting, and the astrological and plot identifica-
tions between the fictional and historical monarchs open up possibilities for
criticism. The oblique angle of the spectators’ points of views would allow and
even encourage the displacement of the real monarch with his representa-
tion on stage. Las Meninas accomplishes a similar effect, although without the
oblique criticism present in Calderón’s play. The sovereign represented in the
work of art mirrors the one outside the frame of representation in an ellipti-
cal, dual-foci (palace and tower), anamorphic structure.74
The court arrangements were an inversion of the raucous corral perfor-
mances, where the royals would watch the crowd as part of the entertainment.
In its inception, the point was to reproduce the conditions of the public the-
ater, since the royalty enjoyed the dynamic created by the public spectators. In
fact, the queen once had mice let loose among the female playgoers at a cor-
ral for comedic effect, “a spectacle more pleasing than decent” according to a
72. McKendrick, Theatre in Spain, 222–24.

73. Amadei-Pulice, “Realidad y apariencia,” 1531.
74. González Echevarría seems to be alluding to something similar when he states: “In the
end Segismundo attains the crown, but he continues to be dressed as a monster, while Basilio,
who has been dethroned, remains in the palace,” and then suggests a connection to Sarduy in
the footnote: “Severo Sarduy’s theories on the baroque epistemé propose that the characteristic
figure of the Baroque is the ellipsis, with its two centers, one of which is the elision of the
other” (González Echevarría, Celestina’s Brood, 112–13). He does not elaborate, nor does he
extend the baroque figure of the ellipsis to the palace and tower, as is argued here.

contemporary report.75 The viewing public at court became mere spectators

and the king part of the action.
As Brown and Elliot document, court theater in seventeenth-century Spain
created “an impression of wealth and power; it was an attempt to achieve the
sublime in the service of the state.”76 While the monarchs took their pleasures
in court entertainments, ministers had more freedom to govern themselves.
Olivares, whose enthusiasm for such entertainments had waned by the mid-
1630s, complained in 1639: “we have spent these days at the Buen Retiro in
fiestas, which are the worst of all torments. Dancing in the midst of care and
trouble, and frittering away time on inanities.”77 Greer describes the power
dynamics in operation at court performances:
The text of royal power, the text fundamental to all court spectacles, was
conveyed in two ways, the first the physical disposition of the theatre it-
self. Wherever the plays were presented, in the Coliseo of the Buen Retiro,
the Salón Dorado of the Alcázar, or the open air, the viewing area was
arranged so that the play was one pole of the spectacle, while the royalty,
seated on an elevated, well-lighted platform at the end of the hall, consti-
tuted the other pole. The royal party occupied the spot where the perspec-
tive scenery created its most perfect illusion of reality. Other spectators
were arranged hierarchically, the most notable closest to the king, and in
such a manner that both poles of the spectacle were visible to them.78
Figures 4 and 5 demonstrate the primacy of the king in relation to his sub-
jects. Figure 4 shows the king with the queen at his right, both seated upon a
dais.79 Figure 5 shows a similar spectacle from an even more oblique angle.80
Here I would emphasize that even in a particular, such as one performed in
1637 of which we have a description of the seating arrangements, the royalty
form a teatro or “box” and are the primary object of attention of the spectators
who surround it, not the play on stage, which was an “accessory.”81 It is pos-
sible these images are compressed in depth, but both poles of the action are
available to the audience, and in the Coliseo, there would have been aposentos
in tiers behind the dais and on both sides.
75. Brown and Elliott, A Palace for a King, 217.

76. Ibid., 237.
77. Ibid., 223.
78. Greer, The Play of Power, 82–83.
79. Shergold, A History of the Spanish Stage, plate 7a.
80. Ibid., plate 7b.
81. Greer, The Play of Power, 83.

Figure 4. Scene from a court play, c. 1680. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de
France.
If, as Shergold is confident, Segismundo’s tower is represented in the discov-

ery space, a disclosable compartment in the middle of the stage,82 then the his-
torical and fictional sovereign figures become two poles in an elliptical structure
in which their identities converge and the audience is free to mix associations
between Philip IV and the various images of monstrosity discussed earlier. The
virtual gaze of Basilio and the real gaze of Philip IV are fixed on the tower—the
incarnation of a mistaken interpretation—the latter by virtue of his position in
the audience and supreme patron of the performance, the former by virtue of
the spatial construction of the drama (with tower and palace as the two locales
between which the action of the play oscillates) and his hubristic obsession with
astrology.
While the seating arrangement is intended to reinforce the representation
of sovereign power, when combined with a plot critical of a king, it has the
potential to support a critical reading as well. The dramatic foci of La vida es
sueño, the palace and the tower, call into question the certainty of any partic-
ular viewpoint. In this mode, Calderón creates a conceptual anamorphosis in
82. Shergold, A History of the Spanish Stage, 554. In a particular performance, the discovery
space could be constructed using a movable curtain.

Figure 5. Scene from a court play, c. 1680. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de
France.
which the prince’s actions seemingly render him monstrous at the beginning
and middle of the play, but through the moral education of experience and
reflection, he is revealed to Basilio and the audience as the rightful sovereign.
His anamorphosis is not a formal feature, but rather the perceived deformity
of dramatic representation. González Echevarría summarizes that
[An] analysis of the monster in Calderón allows us to affirm that his

obsession with painting has to do with a deeply rooted feature of his
aesthetics. The visual nature of the monster, made up of different spe-
cies and perspectives, seems to represent Calderón’s zeal for rendering
visible a concept of representation that eludes the precision and coher-
ence of logical as well as poetic discourse. The most profound element
of the Calderonian Baroque can be found in this tendency to turn apo-
ria into a vision that contains contradictory appearances without having
them cancel each other out, appearances that are so contradictory and
multiple that they reenact the clashes of the dynamic reality they repre-
sent.83
83. González Echevarría, Celestina’s Brood, 112–13.

Figure 6. Diego Velázquez, Velázquez and the Royal Family (Las Meninas), 1656–57. Madrid,
Museo del Prado. Copyright of the image Museo Nacional del Prado / Art Resource, New York.
As noted, Calderón’s aesthetics in La vida es sueño anticipate Las Meninas

(fig. 6), a work intended explicitly for an audience of one, Philip IV.84 Both
works involve the intended viewer as a figure in the play85 and exploit the
theme of illusion as they blur the lines between art and actuality. Neither work
84. Brown, Velázquez: Painter and Courtier, 259.

85. Philip IV is equated not only with Basilio but also with Segismundo, since an astrologi-
cal event presaged both their births. See de Armas, Segismundo/Philip IV.

is anamorphic in the conventional, formal sense, but conceptually the oper-

ations are similar in both as they use dual foci to create irresolvable ambiguity
for the spectator in Las Meninas and for Segismundo in La vida es sueño.
Velázquez’s masterpiece requires the viewer to uncover the elliptical subject,
that is, the royal couple. We can never be certain, however, of what the de-
picted canvas contains. Attempts to solidify the interpretation, which must be
made from the royal point of view, run counter to the purpose of the painting
and limit its virtuosity.86
La vida es sueño, then, enacts the difficulty of seeing in the broad sense.
The interpretation given by its audience and characters is entirely positional.
From his vantage point, Philip could see himself represented onstage in the
palace or in the tower—especially in the corresponding vanishing point—as
Basilio or Segismundo. The audience, of course, could observe both foci, the
king on his dais and the fictional monarch onstage, from an oblique position
and make seductive comparisons as they viewed the collapse of the crepuscu-
lar threshold between reality and representation.
While it is no doubt partially true that the court employed drama as means
of political control—Maravall’s thesis—court plays were decidedly polyvalent.87
McKendrick observes: “As literary texts they functioned as propaganda only in
the widest sense that they endorse the generally accepted values of their time,
and even so their recommendations are directed as much at the monarchy
itself as at its faithful subjects.”88 As a corral play, the particular performance
of La vida es sueño would allow Calderón to effect his education of the Crown
elliptically, with both the ambiguous plot and the correspondences between
the royal figures of the drama and the actual monarch. The visual scheme of
Calderón’s comedia first hides the Prince, then reveals him. Once visible, the
rebels free him once again. He thus comes into focus as the legitimate ruler.
A shift in perspective reveals what was previously hidden, legitimating that
view and casting doubt on the certainty of the previous interpretation. La vida
es sueño concludes with the deeply troubling act, at least for many modern
readers, by Segismundo of throwing the rebel soldier who freed him into the
same tower where he had been imprisoned. Segismundo’s new vantage point
as king moves him to construct the rebel’s actions as insubordinate and to
forgive his father’s mistake.
86. See Matthew Ancell, “The Theology of Painting: Velázquez and the Picturing of Philos-
ophy,” The Comparatist 37 (May 2013): 156–68.
87. See Maravall, La cultura del Barroco; Greer, The Play of Power, 82.
88. McKendrick, Theatre in Spain, 237.

As a sovereign figure, Segismundo remains ambiguous. Astute viewers

cannot help but wonder if they are to equate Philip IV, seated on his throne in
the palace, with Basilio and his interpretive follies, or with Segismundo, who
has the potential for great good and great evil. He is crowned still wearing
pelts—a man-beast—and, in that sense, remains a monster, since we cannot
be completely sure what his further reign will entail. Segismundo’s own doubt
about the nature of his experience will persist the rest of his days as he
suspends final judgment on the nature of his experience and perception, real-
izing that it could be another distortion or illusion. One hopes that the play
will have the kind of effect prescribed by Melchor de Cabrera y Guzmán:
el Príncipe, viendo representar acciones heroycas de otro, templa las que

más le apassionan y halla quien sin nota le acusa de error ú descuydo, y
toma modelo para adelante. El señor mira como en vn espejo lo imper-
fecto de su proceder, y como buen pintor borra el defeto y fealdad para
quedar sin la mancha que le dedora.89
[The prince, seeing a representation of another’s heroic actions, tempers

those that most excite him and finds the one which most reveals his
error or negligence, and takes it as model from that point on. The noble
sees the imperfection of his behavior as if in a mirror, and like a good
painter effaces the defect and ugliness so as to remove the stain that tar-
nishes him.]
Calderón—as dramatic portraitist—does not remove the defect but allows for
the viewing sovereign to decide and interpret for himself what kind of mon-
arch he should be. Calderón’s dramatic visual scheme underscores the contin-
gent nature of our understandings. It conjures up illusions even as it calls
attention to their very artificiality through verbal and theatrical shifts in per-
spective, while refraining, ostensibly at least, from final judgment on the am-
bivalent status of his monarch and patron.
In Segismundo’s words:
¿Qué os admira? ¿Qué os espanta,

si fue mi maestro un sueño
y estoy temiendo en mis ansias
89. Emilio Cotarelo y Mori, José Luis Suárez García, and Universidad de Granada, Biblio-
grafía de las controversias sobre la licitud del teatro en España, Archivum, reprod. facs. de la ed.
(Granada: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Granada, 1997), 97.

90 R ENA ISSANC E DRA MA S P R IN G 20 1 4
que he de despertar y hallarme

otra vez en mi cerrada
prisión? Y cuando no sea,
el soñarlo sólo basta:
pues así llegué a saber
que toda la dicha humana
en fin pasa como sueño,
y quiero hoy aprovecharla
el tiempo que me durare,
pidiendo de nuestras faltas
perdón, pues de pechos nobles
es tan propio el perdonarlas.
(Lines 3305–19)
[What’s so amazing, what’s so shocking, given that my teacher was a

dream? And still I fear, deep down inside, that one day I shall awaken to
find myself locked away in my cramped prison. And if that doesn’t
happen, it’s enough to dream it’s so, for that’s how I came to realize that
all human joy is, in the end, as ephemeral as a dream. So I’d like to take
advantage of this happy moment while I can . . . (to the audience) and
ask you to overlook our flaws, for forgiveness should come naturally to
noble souls.] (152–53)
The final image of the newly crowned but pelted king returns us to Prince
Baltasar Carlos with a Dwarf, which functions, along with the play and ana-
morphic drama The Ambassadors, as a vanitas, a memento mori. By juxtapos-
ing and superimposing contradictory pictures of the king within La vida es
sueño, Calderón constructs a complex interpretative labyrinth that exposes the
folly of dogmatism and instead, like Montaigne, prompts us—and more di-
rectly, Philip IV—to assay our experience and refine our judgment. As we wan-
der between realities—in the twilight between the palace and the tower, life
and dream, certainty and doubt, proper self-restraint and absolute misrule,
monster and monarch—we recognize the contingent nature of that experience
and can attempt to respond with faith and reconstruct the possibilities of mean-
ing in a skeptical world cognizant of the epistemological and ontological fragility
of life.


Matthew Ancell - Painted Twilight: Anamorphic Monstrosity in Calderón's La Vida Es Sueño

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Matthew Ancell - Painted Twilight: Anamorphic Monstrosity in Calderón's La Vida Es Sueño

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Northwestern University

Painted Twilight: Anamorphic Monstrosity in Calderón’s La vida es sueño

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

Those who have compared our lives to a dream are right—perhaps

a mong Diego de Velázquez’s (1599–1660) several portraits of dwarves,

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

limits. This concept of sovereignty is, however, not in effect—either de jure or

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

The charge that Calderón supported an absolutist monarchy is most often

15. Greer, The Play of Power, 201.

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

productive.”18 Despite this self-deception, Philip IV was conscious of national

18. Elliot, Spain and Its World, 163.

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

Appearances to the contrary, many of Calderón’s works contain an embedded

27. McKendrick, Playing the King, 31.

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

In the seventeenth century, anamorphosis interrogated both the ontology and

30. Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Anamorphic Art, trans. W. J. Strachan (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey,

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

critique of human knowledge clearly at work in The Ambassadors.34 Further-

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

su madre inﬁnitas veces,

Es cualquier parto contra la regla y orden natural, como nacer el hombre

40. De Armas, Segismundo/Philip IV, 87.

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

Rústico nace entre desnudas peñas

45. González Echevarría, Celestina’s Brood, 104.

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

cal issue of La vida es sueño: Calderón’s plays consistently emphasize that an

. . . porque más te asombres

46. Melveena McKendrick, Theatre in Spain, 1490–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

[to give you more reason to be astonished and to call me a human

The fusion of contraries embodies the scholastic notion of violence—“quime-

[We are approached by a swift horse—forgive me, but its description

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

tower is nearly indiscernible from its surroundings. He observes: “Las típicas

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

the Deposición a favor de los profesores de la pintura (1677), translated, mislead-

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

ticulated in the contemporary Italian schools of thought. Important here is the

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

Boschini (1613–78) of borrones, anamorphosis, and similar techniques.56 For

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

64. Gates, “Calderón’s Interest in Art,” 57.

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

V. THE PRINCE I N THE TOWER / THE K ING ON STAGE

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

66. McKendrick, Theatre in Spain, 211.

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

Once seated Philip IV, with cramp-defying control, apparently moved

This content downloaded from 129.237.47.66 on Mon, 7 Apr 2014 12:26:39 PM

This ritualized arrangement intentionally reinforces the traditional hierarchy

72. McKendrick, Theatre in Spain, 222–24.