Helena Percas de Ponseti

Cervantes: The Writer and Painter of “Don Quijote”.

University of Missouri, 1988. First edition. 0826206891 ix/110 pages.

Volume, measuring approximately 6.25” x 9.25”, is bound in dark gray cloth, with stamped silver lettering to spine. Book and dust jacket are like new. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.

“The story of Don Quijote, tilting at the windmill is familiar to nearly everyone, yet the complex intricacies of Cervantes’s fiction are often overlooked. In this study of Cervantes’s personal point of view as it is revealed in his writing, Percas de Ponseti shows that “Don Quijote” actually contains two overlapping stories written by two authors - Cervantes and his narrator/surrogate Cide Hamete Benengeli - whose opinions about characters and events are, at times, opposite.

Percas de Ponseti argues that Cervantes developed his fiction on both a narrative level of action and dialogue and a visual, “pictorial” level in which forms, textures, and colors qualify or transform what is said or intimated on the first level. By examining the interplay between these levels, she explores how visual images support or contradict both the characters’ statements and Cide Hamete’s understanding of the events he narrates and thus reflect Cervantes’s opinions of seventeenth-century Spanish society.

In addition, she notes a very specific correspondence between Cervantes’s imaginative style and a very modern conception of art. She concludes her book with a discussion of the analogues among Cervantes, Goya, and Picasso to point out how all three artists address in the same humorous vein the timeless questions of truth and art.”