El “Retrato de Su Majestad por Martínez Montañés, esculpido en barro” de Bocángel

This article analizes Gabriel Bocángel y Unzueta’s sonnet “Retrato de Su Majestad por Martínez Montañés, esculpido en barro” in light of the interplays between poetry and painting in Golden Age Spain. The sonnet’s relation to both Velázquez’s Portrait of Juan Martínez Montañés and the poetry of Juan de Jáuregui as well as to Spanish seventeenth-century theoretical writings on visual arts is discussed. Bocángel uses the trope of the competition between the arts in order to theorize how poetry, conceptualized as breath, addresses the challenges of portraying Philip IV.