How to Paint Don Quixote, & Was He Very Ugly or Very Beautiful?

The Knight of the Sad Semblance: An Iconographical Essay; by Miguel de Unamuno; translated by Joffre Swait.

Translator’s note:

This 1896 essay by Miguel de Unamuno, a renowned Spanish writer and luminary of the Generation of ‘98 who also enjoyed enormous popularity in hispanic America (especially Argentina), purports to be simply an instructive piece to help the visual artists of Spain paint and draw Don Quixote well. The essay quickly becomes much more than that, and what is more, turns out to have an unreliable narrator. Not a common device to use in the essay form, but such, I suppose, is the genius of our Unamuno.

The writer of this essay appears to accept as historical fact the obvious fiction of author Miguel de Cervantes’ narrative setup in his Don Quixote novel. In the novel, Cervantes says that he discovered the writings of a moorish historian, one Cid¹ Hamete, about the knight errant known as Don Quixote. Cervantes, he tells us himself, is merely the translator and occasional editor.

The author of this essay takes this fictional narrative device as factual, at face value, believing that both Hamete and Don Quixote himself existed historically. He is even critical of some of the choices Cervantes made as editor and translator.

This essay contains one of my favorite discussions of the true nature of beauty, or the nature of true beauty, in literature. In fact, I think this discussion is the real reason to read the essay. The rest is just for fun times.

There is a breathtaking and suspenseful feeling in reading this essay that is similar to what the reader experiences in reading Don Quixote. Because the writer of this essay, Unamuno and yet not Unamuno, is established as unreliable at the start, the reader must take everything said with a grain of salt, lightly. Like with the Quixote itself, the truth of the spirit must be seen through layers of falsehood, lunacy, misrepresentation, and misperception.

Which is what this essay is about: understanding that the figure and semblance of Don Quixote was unquestionably ugly, but more deeply and truly, undeniably beautiful.

I hope you enjoy this essay, and that it helps you consider the real nature of truth, beauty, and goodness.

I have, by the way, not often simplified the complexity of Unamuno’s sentences, as complex, really, as any of Cicero’s Latin sentences, but with the added modern convenience of having access to commas, which he uses profusely, as in this sentence; what is more, he adores the semi-colon. It is likely that you will wish to rest along the way, rather than reading it all at once. There are several convenient stopping points along the way.

Joffre Swait

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The Knight of the Sad Semblance: An Iconographical Essay

by Miguel de Unamuno

translation by Joffre Swait

Miguel de Unamuno

“I’ll wager,” said Sancho, “that before long there will not be a single tavern, shop, food cart, or barber shop, upon which the story of our great deeds is not painted; but I hope that they’ll be painted by the hands of a better painter that he who painted these.”

“You’re right, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “because this painter is like Orbaneja, a painter from Úbeda, who when asked what he was painting, responded: ‘whatever emerges,’ and if by chance he had been painting a rooster, he would write below it this is a rooster, so that no one would think it were a fox.”

- from Ch. LXXI of the second part of The Artful Nobleman Don Quixote of La Mancha

The task of painting Don Quixote is plenty more difficult than that of blowing up a dog to see it fart², and is an enterprise among the worthiest to be undertaken by a Spanish painter. It is not that of illustrating the imperishable work of Cervantes, but rather of dressing in visible and concrete flesh a living and individual spirit, no mere abstract idea; it is an enterprise, never more timely than now, when pictorial symbolism wanders through these worlds of God’s, spinning about and seeking a posture to adopt. Spain has in this Don Quixote a symbol that cannot be merely painted, but a symbol true and profound, a symbol in all the etymological and traditional force of the word, a living concretion and summary of realities, the more ideal the more real, no mere exclusion-engendered abstract.

I invite the reader to speculate a little with me regarding the pictorial expression of this living symbol.

The informational factoids necessary to the painting of Don Quixote must be sought through the work of Cid Hamete Benengeli, both within and without it; directly within the work of Cid Hamete, since he was Quixote’s biographer³; within it are discovered depths which the good biographer never plumbed; and outside of it, for outside it lived and lives the artful nobleman.

With scrupulous care I have entertained myself by extracting from the living pages of The Artful Nobleman⁴ as many passages as make more or less direct mention of the physical characteristics of Don Quixote.

Behold them here, numbered, accompanied by my comment that the reader of small patience may legitimately pass over them if he wish.

1. “The age of this our gentleman was rubbing up against fifty; he was of a ruddy complexion, his juices dried up, gaunt in the face, a great early riser, and a friend of the hunt.” - Part I, ch. I

2. “By another name he is called The Knight of Sad Semblance…truly your worthiness has the worst form I have ever seen among those here.” - Part I, ch. XIX

3. “…seeing his face from the distance of half a league’s walk, dry and yellow, the unequalness of his arms and the restrained demeanor.” - Part I, ch. XXXVII

4. “Take, lady, this hand…I do not offer it to you that you kiss it, but so that you may gaze on the texture of its nerves, the knotting of its muscles, the width and roominess of its veins, from which you may deduce what must be the strength of the arm that bears such a hand.” - Part I, ch. XLIII

5. “So dry and salty that it looked like nothing so much as mummified flesh.” - Part II, ch. I

6. “...he is a man tall of body, dry of face, striped and wrinkled of members, stringy of hair, with a nose both curved and aquiline, and mustaches big, black, and fallen.” - Part II, ch. XIV

7. “He marveled [at the Green Hood Knight]...the largeness of his body, the gaunt yellowness of his face.” - Part II, ch. XVI

8. “Fluid began to run down the face and beard of Don Quixote…after having cleaned his head, face, beard, and visor.” - Part II, ch. XVII

9. “Upon being disarmed, Don Quixote was left in his narrow sabatons and his chamois waistcoat, dry, tall, stretched out, with jowls that kissed each other from within, making such a figure that the maidens who served him, heedless of any need to hide it, broke up with laughter.” - Part II, ch. XXXI

10. “Don Quixote put on a thousand colors, which variously played irridescent upon his brown skin.” - Part II, ch. XXXI

11. “She arrived with the basin, and with genteel graces and round gestures placed it underneath the beard of Don Quixote; he, for his part, was greatly impressed by such ceremony, and believed it must be the custom of this land to wash the beard rather than the hands; he therefore stretched out his own as much as we was able, at which point the pitcher was poured out, and the soap maiden hastily sudsed up his beard, raising great snowflakes thereon, which were no less white than the lather which covered not only his beard but his entire face, etc.” - Part II, ch. XXXII

12. “Once mounted on Clavileño, as he had no stirrups and his legs dangled, he looked like nothing more than a figure in a Flemish tapestry, painted or woven into some Roman triumph.” - Part II, ch. XLI

13. “‘And if we are not relieved by the Lord Don Quixote, these beards will bear us down to our graves.’ ‘In the land of the moors would tear out my own,’ said Don Quixote, ‘if I did not heal you of yours.’” - Part II, ch. XL

14. “It (one of the cats) leapt upon his face, and with its claws and teeth seized him by the nostrils.” - Part II, ch. XLVI

15. “(Doña Rodríguez) saw him thus, so tall and so yellow…” - Part II, ch. XLVIII

16. “Roque Guinart saw Don Quixote armored and thoughtful, with the saddest and most melancholy expression that same sadness could form.” - Part II, ch. XI

17. “The figure of Don Quixote was something to see: tall, stretched, thin, yellow, narrow at the waist, graceless, and above all, not at all quick.” - Part II, ch. LXII

Any Orbaneja⁵ type may, with a glance at these seventeen quotations, compose a decent enough painting of Don Quixote. The sixth quote, which is the description that the wit of the bachelor Carrasco laid upon the Manchegan nobleman during the adventure of the knight in the forest, has served as a classic passport to all the paintings that have been made of him. Yet even such an official document is not always respected, as he is often pictured with twirled and pointed, rather than “fallen”, mustache tips.

I expect that even the most demanding of documentarians must be made content by such scrupulous documentation as that provided by the seventeen preceding quotations. Certainly the Holy Brotherhood itself, taking down the description of that “roadside robber”, could not have made a more complete description, and be aware that official justice may be scrupulous in all this regarding human documentation and the realism of the footprints.

There are data in the preceding which at first sight may seem impertinent, as in quotation XIV; but quickly the discreet reader perceives that Don Quixote must have walked about carrying a nose and nostrils of a size sufficient for a cat to seize upon, with claws and teeth, all at once. There are no insignificant facts, which the anthropometric index recently installed in the Model Prisons proves.

Other facts of remarkable interest, even if they be not included in the preceding documentation, include those who held opinions, such as a belief that Don Quixote “for many years suffered a disease of the kidneys” (ch. XVIII of the second part); to which I add that his yellow coloring and his actions make him to seem bilious, and also that his sense of smell was as lively as his sense of hearing (part I, ch. XX), because a good mental bloodhound could perhaps elucidate the quixotic idiosyncrasies and temperament by sniffing at these tracks. What a pity that some cervantian sage has not undertaken the task of a physiological study of Don Quixote! I believe, for my part, hopefully without having driven the point too far, that his temperament must have been hot and dry, and that this assumption paired with Dr. Duarte’s Test of Wits may take us very far.

The Cid Hamete Benengeli must have been the most punctilious biographer and the most meticulous documentarian, like any good Arab; but his translator, the good gentleman Cervantes, upon coming to the passage in which Don Quixote arrives at the home of D. Diego Miranda, the Knight of the Green Hood (ch. XVIII of the second part), tells us the following:

Here the author paints all the circumstances of Don Diego’s house, painting out for us what the house of a wealthy gentleman farmer contains; but the translator of this tale thought it best to pass over these details, and other trifles, in silence, because it did not fit well with the main purpose of the story, which retains its force more in the telling of truths than in cold digressions.

The truth and its force on one side; upon the other, trifles and cold digressions, the circumstances which documenters of every time have painted with scribe-like fidelity.

And what is truth? What, here, is the truth and its force?

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The truth is the fact, but the fact as total and living, the marvelous fact of universal life, rooted in mystery. Facts and details are reduced by analysis and dissection to a dust of deeds, their living reality vanishing.

The force of the truth of Don Quixote is in his soul, in his Castilian and human soul, and in the truth of his physical figure, in which that soul is reflected. But someone will ask, ought we to extract his soul from his semblance, or his semblance from his soul? That same someone will add that we will be able to, from the hints of his physiognomy and physical characteristics, and through his temperament, glimpse something more of the truth of his soul. To which Don Quixote himself replies, in his description of the factions of Amadis, Reinhold, and Roland (the first chapter of the second part), that “by the feats they did and abilities they were dealt, a good philosophy of their features, colors, and statures may be extracted.”

A good philosophy! No worse, at least, than wanting to extract from the features, colors, and statures what feats have been done and what abilities are dealt; for if from this that may be deduced, then from that this shall be deduced. Convertibility is that which escapes those who, now in the name of idealism, now of realism, which are also convertible, fight for one or another doctrine as did the two knights who, according to Carpenter's profound parable, fought over the color of a shield of which each saw only one side. For Don Quixote good philosophy was, as is natural, his own, the Castilian, the realism that extracts the features from the feats, that proceeds from within to without, centrifugal, willful, that turns windmills to giants, which is no more insane than that which turns giants to windmills, no less realistic and no less idealistic. After all, features do not make for feats, nor feats for features, but rather all things make for all things; flowing endlessly from the great total cause, cause and effect all at once, cause-effect or not-cause-nor-effect, as you wish, which in arriving here all is one and the same. And enough of books of metaphysical gallantries which “by sleeping little and reading much,” dried up the brains of good Alonso Quixano, “in such a manner that he lost his wits.”

Therefore, the painter who wishes to paint Don Quixote in good quixotic philosophy must extract from his deeds and character his features, his complexion, and his stature, using the empirical data that Cid Hamete provides us as the ultimate proofs. To achieve this, the painter must uncover his soul, being the means by which, inspired by those stupendous deeds and sublime character, they unearth from their own souls the quixotic soul. And if by some chance they do not carry it within themselves, they must immediately renounce the undertaking, keeping it for another, bearing in mind what Don Quixote himself said:

Let whoever wishes portray me, but let no one ill-treat me, for patience often falters when burdened with insults.

To picture Don Quixote without treating him ill is to dress his soul with an individual transparent body, it is to create pictorial symbolism in the degree of greatest concentration and force into a man-symbol. And to do this one must seek the soul of the Manchegan nobleman inside the eternal pages of Cid Hamete, but also outside them.

Don Quixote lived and lives outside those pages, and the Spanish painter who is worthy of portraying him can surprise him alive in the profound depths of his own spirit, if he search within himself with love, and delves and digs with persistent contemplation. Cid Hamete simply traced out the biography of a real living being; and as there are not a few who live in the error that there never was a man named Don Quixote, one must take up the work that he did in persuading the peoples that there were once knights errant upon the world.

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As soon as an analytical and dissecting science plunges its scalpel into the living fabric where legend and history are interwoven and confused, or tries to signal limits between them and the novel and the fable and the myth, the truth dissipates with life, leaving only verisimilitude, so useful to documentarians and gangsters of every stripe. Only by killing life, and true truth with it, can one separate the historical hero from the fictional, the mythical, the fabulous, or the legendary, and maintain that the one existed entirely or almost entirely; the other only halfway, and the one beyond in no way; because to exist is to live, and whoever works exists.

To exist is to work, and has Don Quixote not worked and continued to work upon our spirits, as active and lively as the knights errant who preceded him acted upon his, as active and lively as so many other heroes whose historical reality is not lacking some Don Álvaro Tarfe to testify to it?

The soul of a people is impregnated with the coming hero before he sprouts into the light of life, presaging him as the distillation of a spirit already diffuse within it, and awaits his advent. In each age, it is said, arises the hero that is needful. It is clear; as in each epoch the hero breathes the great ideas of that then, the only ones great at that then; he feels the needs of his time, the only ones needed at that time, and he is saturated in them. And every hero other than the one needed ends in misery, or despised, in the galleys or the madhouse, or perhaps on the gallows.

The hero is no more and no less than the collective soul individualized, that which by feeling more in unison with the people feels in a way more personal; the prototype and the product, the spiritual node of the people. And it cannot be said that they guide him, but rather that they are his conscience, and the word of his aspirations.

The hero, presaged in august pregnancy, is very often far too sublime to dress in mortal flesh, or the world that is to receive him is over-narrow, so he sprouts instead as an ideal, legendary and novelesque, not from woman’s womb but from man’s fantasy. These are heroes who live and war and guide the people to the fight, and in that fight sustains them, no less real and alive than those heroes of flesh and bone, tangible and perishing. The great Captain, either Francisco Pizarro or Hernán Cortés, carried his soldiers to victory, but it is no less sure that Don Quixote has sustained the energies of struggling fighters, infusing them with verve and faith, consolation in defeat, and moderation in victory. With us he lives and in us he breathes; there are moments in life in which we see a knight emerge mounted upon his Rocinante, coming to aid, like Saint James, those who call upon him. To work is to exist, and how many living beings, made of flesh, imprisoned in straitened today, have wrought less than the sublime madman into whom was reborn glorious Alonso Quixano upon the drying out of his brain and the loss of his reason! When we return to the earth from which we came, will much more remain of us than remains of Don Quixote? What is left of Cide Hamete, his biographer? This pilgrim and contingent world goes along producing the permanent and necessary things of our spirit, this is its greatest reality; the entire story is the idealization of the real by the realization of the real. Did Homer make Achilles, or did Achilles make Homer?

For to try to make anyone understand that Amadis did not exist in the world, nor all the other adventuring knights who are plastered through all the stories, would be to try to persuade them that the sun does not shine, nor ice freeze, nor the earth sustain: for what device could there be in the world that might persuade another that what happened to the Infanta Floripes and Guy of Burgundy, and what happened to Fierabras with the bridge of Mantible during the time of Charlemagne, are not true? I swear by these that it is as true as it is now day; and if it is a lie, then it must also be that there was never any Hector, nor Achilles, nor the Trojan War, nor the Twelve Paladins of France, nor King Arthur of England..." (Part I, ch. XLIX).

Don Quixote was right in this, and those who, calling him utterly mad, stone him upon seeing him caged, are guilty of the sin of quixotism more than seven times a day; for, who among these critics does not apply at every step the hidden maxim of quixotism: it is beautiful, therefore it is true?

There are fictional characters who never become more than mere homunculi, for they sprout from the virgin fantasy of their author; but others are children of true sexual generation, of a fantasy fertilized and made a mother by the soul of a people. The legendary and novelesque hero, like the historical one, is an individualization of the soul of a people, and however it is the work, so they exist. From the Castilian soul sprang Don Quixote, as alive as that soul.

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The painter will best arrive at a vision of the sublime nobleman by submerging himself with collected spirit into the quixotic soul, extracting from good philosophy and its character the features, color, and stature of that body into which he was incarnated.

But the Cid Hamete, for his part, also saw his hero, visibly dressed, with features, color, and stature, and saw him with a prodigious vision, which is what give such singular importance to the quotations found at the top of this essay. Because it sometimes happens that the revealer of a hero does not see well the shape of that hero, perhaps for want of a visual genius. Thus, in scene II of act V of Hamlet, when the eponymous hero and Laertes fight, Shakespeare causes it to be said by the queen that Hamlet is fat and out of breath, offering him a kerchief so that he might wipe the sweat from his face:

He’s fat, and scant of breath

here, Hamlet, take napkin, rub thy brows.

And who would represent or paint Hamlet as fat? And more, who would recognize Sancho if he were painted with long legs? And yet, Cervantes tells us that among the illuminations that adorned the manuscript of Cid Hamete Benengeli, one portrayed the battle of Don Quixote against the Biscayan, and at the feet of Panza it said Sancho Longshanks⁶, because

…and so it was that he had, according to what the painting showed, a great belly, a short waist, and long shanks, and for that reason he was given the names of Panza and of Zancas⁷, and our history often refers to him by these two surnames. (Part I, Ch. IX)

The Cid Hamete must have seen Don Quixote well, for one thing. For another, Don Quixote's figure must have been neither blurry nor ambiguous, but rather, the only one possible for his soul. For his semblance was so intertwined with his spirit that it would not have been necessary, if he were to rise again today, for any Don Antonio Moreno to put a label on his back.

All of us, upon seeing certain faces, say: 'How much he looks like Don Quixote!' Not a few are nicknamed thus, solely for their corporal appearance, and not for their spiritual content.

The figure of Don Quixote must have been one of those that, once seen, are never unpainted from the mind’s canvas⁸, and his biographer saw it in all reality.

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What most impressed the Cid Hamete in regards to Don Quixote's figure was its sadness, which were no doubt an unveiling and a sign of the profound sadness of his serious soul, abysmatically⁹ serious, sad and bare like the bald Manchegan wastes, and also indicative of a very sad and august solemnity, of a calm sadness and a severe countenance. Sancho christened him with the name of "Knight of the Sad Figure" (quotation II above¹⁰). Roque Guinart found him "with the saddest and most melancholy semblance that sadness could form" (quotation XVI), and all those who encountered him marveled, and were frightened by the sadness of his strange appearance, as if glimpsing through it that immense spirit bent on molding the world to himself. That Castilian Christ was sad up until his most beautiful.

Even the physical features of his face are melancholy; his mustaches fall in a droop, his nose is like an eagle’s beak, his face is dry and walnutty¹¹.

But his was not a complaining, mournful sadness, of the kind with pale face and hair in carefully arranged disarray, a wheezing sickly sadness of sentimental selfishness. Rather it was the sadness of a fighter resigned to his fate, like that of those who seek to break their Lord's whip while kissing his hand; it was a seriousness raised above the glad and the sad, which are both confused within it; neither childish optimism nor senile pessimism, but a sadness filled with robust resignation and simplicity of life.

So very sad was the appearance of the Knight of Sad Semblance that Sancho called it “the worst” (quotation II), and the quick-witted maiden Altisidora, unloading her spite by calling him a straying rapscallion, wished never to see before her eyes, "not only his sad figure, but his ugly and abominable countenance" (chapter LXX of the second part). Which leads us, as if by the hand, to ask: was the Knight of Sad Semblance ugly?

…I can’t imagine,” said Sancho, “what this maiden saw in Your Worthiness that made her so surrender and submit to you. What gallantry, what verve, what grace, what face, what individual or combined of these qualities so enamored her of you? Because truly, truly, I often stop to look at Your Worthiness from the tip of your toes to the last hair on your head, and I see more things to frighten than to enamor: and as I have also heard it said that beauty is the first and principal part to cause love, since Your Worthiness has none, I know not what the poor girl fell in love with. ‘Then know, Sancho,’ replied Don Quixote, ‘that there are two kinds of beauty, one of the soul and another of the body: that of the soul sallies forth and shows out in the understanding, in honesty, in good conduct, in liberality and good breeding, and all these qualities can be present in and fit within an ugly man; and when our gaze is on this beauty, and not on that of the body, then often love is born with energy and excellence. I, Sancho, see very well that I am not handsome, but I also know that I am not deformed; and it is sufficient for a good man to not be a monster in order to be well loved, as long as he has the qualities of soul that I have told you.’ (Part II, chapter LVIII)

Had Don Quixote been more of a minutious scrutinizer of recondite obscurities, he would have cited the saying that beauty is the radiance of goodness, and he could have argued in his favor much more, something about that which beats beneath the feminine aphorism that “with both man and bear: the uglier, the handsomer.”

Everyone draws the distinction between the beauty of correction and that of expression; everyone speaks of the insipidity of shapely faces, and of the grace of ugly ones. And it happens that, in every man’s taste, there is a war between a traditional concept of human beauty with another that is still in the process of its formation. Given that beauty is the immediate expression and flower of goodness, each changes in relation with the other. There is a traditional human beauty, more or less athletic, expressive of the goodness of human animals, of the barbarous fighter for life, of the barely disguised savage, a beauty of muscular balance; and on the other hand, the concept of another human beauty is being formed, revealing the goodness of rational and social man, and the splendor of intelligence. A Spencerian would say that just as militant societies, based on competition and law, produced their type of human beauty, so shall industrial societies, based on cooperation and justice, produce theirs.

All of human history is nothing more than a long and sad struggle of adaptation between Humanity and Nature, just as the history of each man is reduced to the vicissitudes of the combat that in his body, which is a bloody battlefield, contend his spirit and the world around him; and to the degree that his spirit, penetrating the world, penetrates also himself, the body and the spirit build up memory of each other and organize each into one the other, and the body becomes an increasingly transparent carnal garment and letter of the spirit. Perhaps the day will come when the most beautiful body will be that with the most beautiful soul.

Physiognomy is the unique science, the basis of all others, for we only know the physiognomy of things – so Lavater¹² taught. Not it is, but perhaps it shall be, for however much man is woven of contradictions and born of struggle, his physiognomy, only in part (how minimal how often!), belongs to him, and it is not given to know his soul by his face. There are hypocritical semblances, and what terrible tragedies, of truly Aeschylian proportions, are those that are engendered by the deceit of lying faces!

Since the body is not yet transparent and dressed by the soul, future human beauty has not yet fully formed, and so the beauty of the featherless biped still dominates.

But one must believe with an artistic faith, as it were an aesthetic dogma, that every deep and intimate character, pure and anchored onto its foundations, may live in perfect harmony with the carnal tunic that clothes it, adjusting the clothing to its contours.

A physiognomic facial feature is a gesture petrified, transmitted perhaps by heredity; persistent pain leaves its mark, virtue beautifies, and vice uglifies. In Spain, we say that the face is the mirror of the soul, that face and heart until death do them part, and that the habit does not make the monk.

As man becomes more harmonious, more perfect, that is, more complete; as he becomes more and better adapted to the environment in which he lives and more intimately communes with it, the more the face becomes the mirror of the soul. For in reflecting the secular result of the mutual action and reaction between the subject and the environment, with his features being both inherited from different and even opposing ancestors, once acquired, the face will conform itself to the soul, and it will be its true expression when they fold one into the other, and the subject and the environment that receives him agree as one.

The man who most and least resembles himself – said Lavater – he whose character is at once simpler and more varied, more constant and more uneven, the one who despite his liveliness and great activity is always in concord with himself, whose most mobile features never lose the character of firmness that distinguishes his whole being, let such a man be sacred to you.

With a character like Don Quixote, so pure, so of a piece, so defined against the environment in which he lived, one must admit as an aesthetic axiom that his face was a very clean mirror of his beautiful soul. And this beauty of his soul is what must penetrate the painter who desires to portray the face that mirrored it.

But it is not only the body that is the letter of the spirit in social man, in dressed man; it is also the clothing.

“The nude is art!”, exclaim many.

Indeed. It is the art of representing the featherless biped, not homo politicus, not dressed and social man. The nude in Greek sculpture reflects in part the Hellenic soul; but the modern nude, which is slowly and laboriously emerging amid pains and agonies, is better expressed by the ever-rich complexity of the folds in suits of clothing, which is the environment adapted to itself by the subject.

That is, a suit of clothing is not to be understood as the uniform of snobbery and the elegance of the day, or as the perfectly tailored suit. The life of clothing lies in its bend, in its fold. It is difficult to understand its depth while doors remain closed to those who do not wear a top hat, stigma of slavery, symbol and triumphant remnant of all the deformities that certain savages imprint on the head.

Ruskin teaches, in his Mornings in Florence, that care in folding and drapery, and minute detail in its expression, are signs of idealism and mysticism, citing the folds of the Parthenon’s caryatids¹³ and the robes of our own priests; while Titian reveals, with his large heaps of ample clothing, artists less concerned with the soul than with the body. It has been said that when people moved from paganism to Christianity, they clothed images of naked goddesses, making them virgins. They clothed them, here is all, and this all is much more than those who maliciously cite the historical fact believe it to be.

Here the passages from Don Quixote which reference the knight's clothing would be relevant; but let us leave it to the painter who attempts to portray him to explore and study them. And with the clothing, the world entire in which he lived. To go down these paths would take us too far.

In short, one must paint Don Quixote with the force of his truth and in good quixotic philosophy, with faith, believing in his unquestionable real, heroic and effective existence, discovering his carnal vestment through his soul, and taking advantage of the data provided by his biographer Cid Hamete, who was a man of prodigious visual faculty.

It would be a curious task to analyze how Don Quixote has been and is being painted in different times and countries, which study would be part of an investigation into the transformations of Quixotism. Because there is a different type of Don Quixote for the diverse peoples who have more or less understood him. There is the French one, handsome, with twisted and stiff mustache ends, not drooping, without much sadness, more like the Aragonese of Avellaneda than to the Castilian of Cervantes¹⁴; there is the English one who is much closer to the Spanish, and therefore to the true one. The truest ones are the Spanish, as is natural, and if all of them were taken and merged into one, as is done with composite photographs, so that the common features were reinforced while the differences were left in shadow, neutralized by each other, an empirical archetype could be obtained, nebulous and graphically abstract, from which the painter could extract the true figure of Don Quixote. Such an archetype is the image that our painters and draftsmen, and even those who are not such, have vaguely felt in their mental retina; the one that makes them exclaim: how much that man looks like Don Quixote! Before such a vaguely glimpsed archetype, a painter of genius must give individual and vivid expression, painting him with the minute scrupulosity with which certain English painters paint angels and ideal beings, with the fierce detail with which Hunt¹⁵ pursued his models, with the vigorous Castilian reality that Velázquez gave to mythological heroes. He must be painted with faith, above all, with the faith that comes from a quixotic idealism, the source of all truly real works, the idealism that ends up dragging behind it, whether they like it or not, all the Sanchos of the world; he must be painted with the faith that creates what we cannot see, believing firmly that Don Quixote exists and lives and acts, as those marvelous primitive men of old believed in the lives of the saints and angels they painted.

But not even the letter is always respected. At best, quotation VI is taken into account, and sometimes not even that, since it is currently fashionable to paint him based on other paintings, at second or third or nth hand, like the caricatures of our public figures. And thus we see that he is ordinarily represented without a beard, despite quotations VIII, XI and XIII, which I have cited to demonstrate that he had one, and not even taking into account the fact that Cid Hamete does not mention that he shaved it, since it was natural for it to grow.

An analytical study of Don Quixote's physiognomy as it appears in the cidhameteian text would would go nicely with this essay, and could fill it out to a more ideal length.

It would be seen, among other curiosities, how Don Quixote agrees with Lavater regarding the significance of the hand, and how this gentle and candid physiognomist found that quixotic noses reveal impetuous natures and cling stubbornly to their ideas. But I hope that even the most dissatisfied documentarian will be satisfied with my diligence and the scrupulousness of my factological investigations, without the additional analysis above suggested. It is no less necessary when it comes to suggesting a truth so true, but seemingly so misguided and absurd, as that of the real and effective existence, real because it is ideal, effective because it is operational, of the Knight of Sad Semblance, nor is it less necessary when one believes that, despite all the factology, there is no such thing as an insignificant fact, but rather all are mysterious and miraculous.

There remains one final question, the one which most suggests itself, and it is this: is painting Don Quixote quixotically, in good philosophy as a living symbol of the best of the Castilian soul, a task for which any contemporary Spanish painter is fit?

I leave this question to the reader.

1st of November of 1896.

1. Cid = Lord

2. A reference to an anecdote of Miguel de Cervantes, Prologue to the Reader, Second Part of Don Quixote. Please note that all footnotes are Joffre Swait’s, and that none of Unamuno’s own copious footnotes to this essay have been included.

3. Cide Hamete Benengeli is the fictional biographer of Quixote upon which Cervantes “bases” his story; a conceit of this essay is to speak of the Cide as a legitimate and historical source.

4. i.e. the novel Don Quixote itself, whose full title is The Artful Nobleman Don Quixote of La Mancha.

5. A fictional painter, mentioned twice in the Quixote, who labeled his painting (e.g. “this is a rooster”) so that no one would mistake the intended image. See epigraph.

6. Sancho Zancas

7. Panza means belly or potbelly, and may be thought of as paunch, with which it shares an etymological root; zancas may refer to the feet, paws, or legs of humans or any animal, but especially the legs of birds.

8. La figura de Don Quijote debió de ser de las que una vez vistas no se despintan jamás…

9. The English abysmal is usually abismal in Spanish. Abismático, which Unamuno uses here, is present in the dictionary of the Real Academía Española, but not in every dictionary. I find the word so charming, and honestly, different enough in meaning, that I wished to preserve some form of it in English. To me it is suggestive of some form of abyssal or infernal mechanism, the system of the hole, rather than simply the hole itself.

10. In this essay and in my Quixote translation work I usually render this as “Knight of the Sad Semblance”.

11. seco y avellanado el rostro. The literal translation of avellanado would be “hazelnutted” or “hazelnutty”. The word, besides referring to dry hazelnuts, is used to mean wrinkly and shriveled. I thought walnuts a better reference for most English speakers.

12. Johann Kaspar (or Caspar) Lavater, 15 November 1741 – 2 January 1801, was a Swiss poet, writer, philosopher, physiognomist and theologian. He held holy orders in the Zwinglian church. He is best known for his physiognomic work.

13. A sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column.

14. Here, Unamuno is suggesting that the French do not really understand Quixote. Alonso Fernández de Avellanada was the pseudonym of a hack writer (history has not been kind to him) who put out a sequel to the first part of Don Quixote before Cervantes himself had. In part II of his epic, Cervantes includes mocking references to Avellanada’s knockoff.

15. William Holman Hunt, an English Pre-Raphaelite painter.