Bocángel?s Silva «El Retrato» : A Textual Trojan Horse?

2020

ABSTRACT: Gabriel Bocángel’s silva «El retrato» (c. 1638) is a textual Trojan horse in the war for poetic patronage in the early modern Spanish court. Written on the wedding of the poet’s cousin to Juan de Cetina, secretary to the Admiral of Castile, the poem is a verbal portrait of the bride that undermines not only the tradition of the descriptio puellae, but also the Count-Duke of Olivares’s power. As a panegyric of the latter’s enemy, the text employs the botanical images of the laurel and the ivy, exploiting the full sense of their symbolic meaning. As an appeal for the patronage of poetry and letters at court and an exercise in «self-fashioning» (Greenblatt), the text makes the lovers…