"Una 'gota' de terra": El paisatge mallorquí a la prosa pictòrica de Santiago Rusiñol

Abstract

Summary: It is generally assumed that all the arts are symbiotic. For this reason, many artists will dedicated themselves to more than one, for example Santiago Rusiñol, whose legacy consists in a copious literary as well as pictorial work. Literature and painting suit very well to be complemented, to influence reciprocally and sometimes also to conjugate together. A literary genre that brings together both arts is the ecphrasis, namely the minutely description of persons, objects, topographies and situations from the perspective of the observer. It is supposed that Homer is the founder of the ecphrasis, especially through his famous description of Achilles’ shield. This article studies different cases of ecphrasis about some Majorca landscapes from the travel book L’Illa de la Calma, where some good examples of pictorial prose / verbal painting appeared. In these examples, one can appreciate the painter’s vision and perspective, where instead of the brush he uses the poet’s feather. These descriptions allow to be segmented into paragraphs, which could be transformed very easily into landscape pictures and be interpreted and «contemplated» as such. Here Rusiñol exhausts all possible stylistic literary recourses in order to pull out to the maximum the visual advantage of the ecphrasis and he even quotes absent persons and objects – something not possible in a painting –, or sometimes he also invokes painters whose influence is notorious on some of these verbal paintings. [Keywords: Santiago Rusiñol, L’Illa de la Calma, Modernisme, prose, Majorcan landscape, ecphrasis / verbal painting]