“Si en miembros no robusto”: el retrato ecuestre de las Soledades y la maniera suave

Abstract

The focus of my paper is not whether the equestrian portrait of the second Soledad alludes to the XI count of Niebla or not, but rather what kind of portrait it is. An equestrian portrait of a delicate young man who pulls softly on the reins of a bluish white horse imbued with a loose majesty? Who has ever seen a royal equestrian portrait of such characteristics when the genre has always embodied the pinnacle of virility and patriotism? Should it not be instead the equestrian portrait of a robust rider who pulls violently on the reins of a sorrel horse imbued with Cesarean majesty? The main literary sources of the episode are Statius’ ekphrasis of The Colossal Equestrian Statue of Domitian, the equestrian portrait of Lesbino in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, and Philostratus the Elder’s ekphrasis of Hunters—two of them descriptions of works of art. But does it not also resemble El Greco’s Saint Martin and the Beggar? How exactly and why was El Greco known as “the Góngora of the poets for the eyes”? Finally, how shall we understand Barbaro’s statement that painting represents “a tenderness in the horizon of vision that is and is not”? Is that what Góngora’s softness means?