Goya's Don Quixote
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Ernst Fischer: A work of art unites reality with the imagination. The witches in Shakespeare and Goya are more real than the idealized peasants and artisans in many a genre painting. The humdrum round of daily life heightened to fantastic pitch in Gogol or Kafka reveals more about reality than many a naturalistic description. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are more real, this day, than hundreds of neat, prosaic characters in novels 'drawn from life'. If we choose to define realism not as a method but as an attitude - as the depiction of reality in art we shall find that almost all art (with the exception of abstract art, tachism, etc.) is realist art.
The work of Francisco Goya, the only Spanish artist whose oeuvre truly spanned both the Enlightenment and Romanticism, has challenged all the attempts of critics and art historians to pigeonhole it as belonging completely to either epoch.
Goya's Don Q:
The manner of Goya's drawing echoes the transgression of the boundary between the real and the imagined presented pictorially by the fantastic creatures of Don Quixote's imagination. These strange figures defiantly penetrate the frontier between "fiction" and "reality" as they swirl about the reading gentleman, threatening and seducing him. The person of Alonso Quijano/Don Quixote himself begins to undergo a metamorphosis, as he becomes a liminal character partaking in both realms. In his excitement he falls to one knee, points to a passage of his open book, and looks directly at the viewer. His body is substantial, but his hair defies the laws of gravity as it stands straight on end, "as if an electric current shot out of his sick cranium."
The identity of the phantasmagorical creatures is much more richly multivalent when set within both the iconographic tradition of Don Quixote and Goya's own iconography of satyrs, witches, and flying creatures escaped from nightmares. – Critical Images The Canonization of Don Quixote – Rachel Lynn Schmidt, 1990
On Quixote charging the windmills In A.D. Reader Pt. I:
Paul Klee: The tragicomic hero with the wing, a modern-antique Don Quixote. Unlike the divine creatures born with only one angel's wing, this man is forever trying to fly. He keeps breaking his arms and legs, but that does not prevent him from clinging to his idea of flight. I wished to capture the contrast between his monumental solemn attitude and his already ruinous state.
We thus quite happily return to the principle of justice, to the old warhorse on which the reformers of the earth have rocked for ages, for lack of surer means of historic transportation. We return to that lamentable Rosinate on which the Don Quixotes of history have galloped toward the great reform of the earth, always to come home with their eyes blackened.
Gustav Doré's Quxiote:
Asimov: In the centuries before Milton, the works of fiction that were most popular were the romances of chivalry --fantastic tales of knights and monsters. These were satirized by Miguel de Cervantes in his great book Don Quixote de la Mancha, which was published in 1605, sixty years before Paradise Lost. Don Quixote did something that satires but too rarely do: it killed the thing it satirized.
Daumier's Quixote:
Adorno: Don Quixote may have served a particular and irrelevant program, that of abolishing the chivalric romance, which had been dragged along from feudal times into the bourgeois age. This modest program served as the vehicle by which the novel became an exemplary artwork . The antagonism of literary genres in which Cervantes's work originated was transformed, in his hands, into an antagonism of historical eras of, ultimately, metaphysical dimension: the authentic expression of the crisis of immanent meaning in the demystified world.
Max Slevogt's Quixote:
'Sir, sorrow was not ordained for but beasts men, yet if men do
exceed in it they become beasts' says Sancho Panza to Don Quixote.
Friedrich Schlegel, like most of the German Romantics, read Don Quixote in such a way that laughter and tears coexist in an ironic tension.
Delacroix's Quixote:
Shklovsky: The fact is that Sancho serves a stringing device-he strings together all the folk wisdoms, while Don Quixote strings together all the bookish and high-society wisdoms.
Bloch: [on dialectical method]...it frees the consciousness of dialectical mediation in totality from the petrified state in which the narrow-minded understanding holds on to its contradictions. For this understanding there are clear isolated alternatives: either sensual pleasure or peace of mind, either the soap box or the ivory tower, either creeping empiricism which only rarely smells the soles of reality or unworldly idealism a la Don Quixote, as if, as Chesterton once mocked, the human brain must always be divided in conflict: one side repeating invariable calculations while the other dreams impossible dreams. Opportunism, which sees itself as realpolitik, in fact maintains itself outside existing reality just as much as utopian radicalism. The one stands under this reality, the other reaches above it, both are thus untrue, both are isolated and exaggerated formations. The dialectic of the totum resolves all these abstract dualisms, it opens up a comprehensive viewpoint from which fixed duality disappears. This duality is in fact naiveté.
