309
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_34
Chapter 34
The Dream of Don Quixote
34.1 Early Ecological Epics
Miguel de Cervantes [Cerbantes] (ca. 1547 to April 22 [Earth Day], 1616). The
details of a life give little to the biographer. Maybe his mother was a converso, a
Jewess who converted to Catholicism to avoid persecution.
1
Perhaps the son, while
enslaved by the Turks, helped build a famed mosque in Istanbul (Kılıç Ali Paşa
Külliyesi) sometime between 1578 and 1580, after assorted travels in Italy, which by
turns led him into the miserable thick of the effort by European Catholic states, fired
up by Pope Pius V and Phillip II of Spain to fight the ever-escalating threat of
Ottoman adventurism at sea. His left arm was left enfeebled by the Battle of Lepanto
on October 7, 1571. A year later, Paolo Veronese painted “The Allegory of the Battle
of Lepanto” (at the Venetian Gallerie dell’Accademia), in which we can all but
decipher the muted, militant novelist-to-be, a warring microscopic dot in armor that
is Cervantes aboard one of the 400 rowing skiffs beside galleons—hailed at the time
as the greatest naval battle and victory in Western history. Veronese’s incomprehensibly complicated scene of teeming violence is on a par with Albrecht Altdorfer’s
“Battle of Alexander at Issus,” rendered 42 years earlier (at Munich’s Alte
Pinakothek). If we are to believe the myths surrounding Cervantes’ role in all of it,
the fact he took three bullets was all the pedigree he should ever need in order to
have something to say (Fig. 34.1).
More to come, of course, including kidnapping and his being held hostage by
other Ottomans. Eventually, a ransom that would liberate him into a Europe overwhelmed by wars and revolts, of annihilations, mobs, axes, fire, and trampling, as
art historian Claude-Henri Rocquet would write of the period.
2
The embers of
Erasmus (1466–1536), and with him his calls for peace, had long died out. When
1 See Cervantes, by Jean Canavaggio, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1990, pp. 18–19
2 See Bruegel or The Workshop Of Dreams, by Claude-Henri Rocquet, Translated by Nora Scott,
The University of Chicago Press, 1991.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_34
Chapter 34
The Dream of Don Quixote
34.1 Early Ecological Epics
Miguel de Cervantes [Cerbantes] (ca. 1547 to April 22 [Earth Day], 1616). The
details of a life give little to the biographer. Maybe his mother was a converso, a
Jewess who converted to Catholicism to avoid persecution.
1
Perhaps the son, while
enslaved by the Turks, helped build a famed mosque in Istanbul (Kılıç Ali Paşa
Külliyesi) sometime between 1578 and 1580, after assorted travels in Italy, which by
turns led him into the miserable thick of the effort by European Catholic states, fired
up by Pope Pius V and Phillip II of Spain to fight the ever-escalating threat of
Ottoman adventurism at sea. His left arm was left enfeebled by the Battle of Lepanto
on October 7, 1571. A year later, Paolo Veronese painted “The Allegory of the Battle
of Lepanto” (at the Venetian Gallerie dell’Accademia), in which we can all but
decipher the muted, militant novelist-to-be, a warring microscopic dot in armor that
is Cervantes aboard one of the 400 rowing skiffs beside galleons—hailed at the time
as the greatest naval battle and victory in Western history. Veronese’s incomprehensibly complicated scene of teeming violence is on a par with Albrecht Altdorfer’s
“Battle of Alexander at Issus,” rendered 42 years earlier (at Munich’s Alte
Pinakothek). If we are to believe the myths surrounding Cervantes’ role in all of it,
the fact he took three bullets was all the pedigree he should ever need in order to
have something to say (Fig. 34.1).
More to come, of course, including kidnapping and his being held hostage by
other Ottomans. Eventually, a ransom that would liberate him into a Europe overwhelmed by wars and revolts, of annihilations, mobs, axes, fire, and trampling, as
art historian Claude-Henri Rocquet would write of the period.
2
The embers of
Erasmus (1466–1536), and with him his calls for peace, had long died out. When
1 See Cervantes, by Jean Canavaggio, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1990, pp. 18–19
2 See Bruegel or The Workshop Of Dreams, by Claude-Henri Rocquet, Translated by Nora Scott,
The University of Chicago Press, 1991.