Taking Jealousy at Face Value: Castiglione, Leon Battista Alberti, and the Myth of Iphigenia in Juan Boscán’s “Capítulo”

Abstract

In Juan Boscan’s “Capitulo,” the voice of the poem compares the strategy used to express the pain of jealousy to the method employed by a classical artist in a famous mythological painting. In his artwork depicting the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Timanthes concealed the face of the victim’s father, Agamemnon, with a hood. Unfortunately, the complex representation of jealousy in the poem and its relation to Renaissance art theory has also remained covered up. However, recent studies by Steven Wagschal and Javier Lorenzo help to foreground and examine these and other significant aspects of “Capitulo,” such as self-representation and ekphrasis. Drawing additionally on Wayne Rebhorn’s study of Il Cortegiano, this study explores how the poem portrays the myth of Iphigenia in a visually oriented way evocative of precepts expressed by the fifteenth-century Italian art theorist Leon Battista Alberti. I contend that this descriptive strategy produces an emotionally compelling and sympathetic portrait of the lyric voice stricken with jealousy that reflects ideas articulated in Castilgione’s famous treatise. Finally, this reading argues that, despite explicit claims otherwise, “Capitulo” does ironically put a face on jealousy by appealing to the rhetorical device of occultatio. Consisting of 385 lines of terza rima, “Capitulo” expresses the laments of a lover who describes to his beloved the suffering caused by unreciprocated attention and affection. Yet when, after describing a variety of emotions in detail, the uniquely painful experience of jealousy arises, the poetic voice claims only to be able to approximate the effects of such an emotion by analogy. With this comparative