The portrait and its ontic values

On Prometheanism in the portraits of Spanish poets of the Golden Age

Abstract

The article opens with the analysis of the basis for certain discussions about art and its creative value (which springs from the human ability to imitate),  spread from Antiquity onwards. It then focuses on the different responses to the connection between fictor and pictor. The dialogue between literature and painting in portraiture from the Renaissance onwards allows for the spread of a discursive space about the portrait which is base on the idea of the Promethean concept. There is a specific formulation of portraiture in which poetry and painting merge in the historic variety of the statute of similarity. With varied responses, the portrayed poet addresses the painter (or the painting) in a panoply of variations that range from the maximum (the stereotype of absolute sameness) to the minimum (the absence of similarity and the loss of value of the painting). In this context, the article delineates very subtle variations on the archetype of similarity and the subsequent value of the artist as a sort of Deus occasionatus. Those variations go from Paravicino and Góngora to sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, including Anastasio Pantaleón de Ribera,
Alonso de Alarcón, Gabriel de Bocángel, José de Valdivielso, Antonio de Solís o Álvaro Cubillo de Aragón. As it reinforces the secret of painting, the gaze is the object of the exercice of looking while emerging at the same time as an antological expression of knowledge about the image and art.