Italian Renaissance art is exhibited throughout Lope de Vega's plays, creating a museum of words where Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Federico Zuccaro, Jacopo Bassano and many others enhance the works with their designs, and design new meanings with their art. Simonides of Ceos refers to poetry as speaking pictures — and Lope unleashes verses that recreate art through allusions to art and through ekphrasis. While Lope's references to Michelangelo are few and often puzzling, allusions and ekphrases of Titian's canvases abound in his texts. In spite of the wealth of material, almost nothing has been written on the subject except for a few essays that have turned to discrete problems in the relationship between Titian and Lope, including questions of empire, mythology, melancholy, Orientalism, and the portrayal of women.

This essay seeks to provide an introduction to the uses of ekphrasis in Lope’s plays by singling out one of his works and studying its pictorial aspects in detail. In La quinta de Florencia, an ekphrastic passage that seems to refer to a painting by Titian is attributed to Michelangelo. But before turning to this puzzle, another question must be resolved which impinges upon it: why does Lope de Vega resort to ekphraseis in his plays, a classical device that is virtually absent from Italian Renaissance theatre and even from French neo-classical drama? And, what are his models in this rhetorical move?

At the inception of La quinta de Florencia, we find that César, the Duke’s secretary, has constructed a pleasure villa outside Florence, surrounded by fountains and gardens. The wealth of its interior is described in terms of works of art:

The description of César's collection would not only recall collections of art in Italy and Spain, but would also foreground the erotic quality of these ‘museums’.

IN chapter 45 of Don Quijote, the knight envisions a conflict at the inn as the discord that took place in King Agramante's camp (De Armas 147ff). This Saracen King, who is said to have come from Africa and laid siege to Paris at the time of Charlemagne's rule, is a purely fictional figure. Invented by Matteo Boiardo as the antagonist for his Orlando inamorato (1495), the figure is further developed by Ludovico Ariosto (Murrin 57–9). Ariosto's work begins somewhat before the abrupt ending of Boiardo's epic, with Orlando's return from the Orient with Angelica, and Charlemagne about to fight the Saracens. But Angelica is taken from Orlando by Charlemagne himself, who does not want a quarrel to escalate between Orlando and Reinaldo. As the poem continues to sing of “knights and ladies, love and arms, of courtly chivalry and courageous deeds,” the many interspersed narratives and the many locations in which they occur (including the moon) make it into a wondrous tapestry which served as base for numerous future works.

The twenty-seventh canto of the Orlando furioso (1532) focuses on Agramante. Here, the Saracen leader, together with Sacripante, Rodamonte and King Sobrino, is about to triumph over Charlemagne in the siege of Paris. Ariosto describes the scene with great pathos and drama as he tells of the shrieks and wails of widows and little orphans scared at the coming onslaught. But in this providential yet playful poem, the Christian God intervenes and orders the Archangel Michael to search for both Silence and Discord. The first will allow Reinaldo's army to arrive silently to help the besieged, while the second will go to Agramante's camp so as to create a major disruption and thus stop the siege. The archangel, thinking he has fulfilled his order, turns to other matters, only to discover that Discord is distracted as she causes monks to throw breviaries at each other in anger at a monastery. Michael plucks Discord from her perch, and while administering a number of blows orders her to enter the Saracen camp once again, and there cause confusion and internal dissent.

During the last months of 1569, the twenty-two year-old Cervantes travels to Italy and enters the service of the soon-to-be Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva in Rome. Italian sojourns were almost de rigueur for Spanish poets, writers of prose fiction, and humanists during the early modern period. Cervantes' voyage, then, resembled the ones of Acuña, Aldana, the brothers Argensola, Cetina, Figueroa, Garcilaso, Hurtado de Mendoza, Medrano, Santillana, and Villamediana. Such voyages were facilitated by the fact that the kingdom of Naples was part of the Spanish empire, while other regions of the peninsula were under Habsburg influence. Cervantes came to Italy after studying in Madrid with the Spanish humanist Juan López de Hoyos and after writing his first verse compositions, which imitated Garcilaso, using his metrical forms, adjectives, and themes. Cervantes' brief humanistic training, and his interest in Garcilaso, who was deeply influenced by the Italian Renaissance, prepares him for an Italian sojourn. While it is said that López de Hoyos taught Cervantes an Erasmism that was no longer tolerated in Spain, Rome would reveal to him the ecclesiastic pomp, ritual, and luxuriant majesty that the humanist from Rotterdam often criticized. It was also a Rome teeming with ruins, which impelled humanists and artists of the Renaissance to turn to archeological pursuits, to focus their attention on rediscovering antiquity, finding in the ancients “a powerful impetus to revive the contemporary world in light of its accomplishments.”