Abstract

The Cadaval 31 codex of the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo and 3693 of the Biblioteca National de Espana are two extraordinary work of art: two epic manuscripts, color illustrated by Jeronimo Corte-Real, their Portuguese author. The poet-painter approach, so original for the medium it uses in comparaison to the rest of the epic production, is perfectly consistent with the enargeia and the visual style of his poems. Text and image share the same rhetoric, serving the figure of the poet artist and humanist, able to shine in every art, so successful in Corte-Real case. This common rhetoric is essential to understand the position of the poet as historian of Portuguese and Spanish wars.

Abstract

The ekphrasis has attracted the recent literary criticism as a key for poetic interpretation. We will check her particular presence in El Bernardo of Balbuena, noted by Frank Pierce, together with La Araucana and La Cristíada, as one of the three great Spanish epic poems. In this baroque poem, the ekphrasis will achieve the greater development in the genre becoming a major articulator of the text. Being a sample of a literary period where the action, the narrative progress, loses relevance in favor to other literary elements, as the descriptive.