«Obra toda tejida de una admirable variedad de cosas»: the ekphrasis in «El Bernardo» of Balbuena

Abstract

The ekphrasis has attracted the recent literary criticism as a key for poetic interpretation. We will check her particular presence in El Bernardo of Balbuena, noted by Frank Pierce, together with La Araucana and La Cristíada, as one of the three great Spanish epic poems. In this baroque poem, the ekphrasis will achieve the greater development in the genre becoming a major articulator of the text. Being a sample of a literary period where the action, the narrative progress, loses relevance in favor to other literary elements, as the descriptive.