It is often stated by critics that the Quixote is a theatrical, graphic, and visual book. Thus, visual representations, like theatrical performances, popular iconography, and book illustrations, have been recognized as significant contributions to the understanding of Cervantes’ masterpiece. Nevertheless, the thousands of woodcuts, engravings, etchings, drawings, and lithographs that have accompanied the text, from children to critical editions, are, for the most part, a little known interpretative tradition and a much neglected critical and didactic resource.
Obstacles, such as the difficulty to get access to rare books, have prevented the illustrative tradition from being well appreciated by scholars, students, and readers in general. In 2001 the Cervantes Project (CP) started the creation of a hypertextual archive to include digital images of the illustrations taken from over 600 of the most significant editions to form the textual iconography of the Quixote. Our main objectives are to make the illustrations more accessible and to establish their contribution to the reception and interpretation of the text. To date, the CP has digitized and made available online more than 20,000 images, supported by a fully searchable database, finding aids, and complemented by rich metadata and innovative visualization tools (http://dqi.tamu.edu/).
The availability of the archive will contribute to the understanding and appreciation of Cervantes’ novel by initiating new explorations from many perspectives: textual, artistic, critical, bibliographical, and historical. In particular, we provide resources and assistance to examine the reception and evolution of the Quixote’s visual readings across time, culture, audience, and mi-lieu. Furthermore, the images can be grouped according to several layers of content to cater for the users’ need for information selection of a specific critical focus. This is achieved by cataloguing each image using a comprehensive taxonomy of the episodes, adventures, themes, and characters. We are now in the process of embedding tags in the textual narrative, both in English and Spanish editions, to establish thematic interlinking between the narrative units and the subject of the illustrations.
From a research and education perspective, these novel iconographic approaches in our project enable readers to go beyond the literary aspect of Cervantes’ works. As an invaluable pictorial depository, we also emphasize supplying information regarding the historic value and artistic significance of the images. The hermeneutic and aesthetic values of each individual image can be carefully examined by art historians and the results incorporated in the archive as scholarly commentary. Additionally, we are developing biographical documentation about the hundreds of artists and engravers that have illustrated the Quixote. These rich scholarly commentaries will help to boost the study of book illustration art, which has been to date secondary in Art History, in aspects such as the evolution of techniques, from the first woodcuts in printed books to modern mechanical offset processes, and the influence or achievement of an engraver, illustrator, or lithographer.