Chasing Quijote,,...on ,'Sancho's, Trail....

Don Quixote and Jesus Christ: The suffering “Idealists” of Modern Religion

Rebekah Marzhan

(Hamline University, Minnesota USA)

The figure of Don Quixote symbolizes the absurdity of idealistic pursuits. As such, readers have been able to temporally appropriate this medieval knight as representative of their own historical situation. Through a lineage of poetry, essays, novels, and scholarship, artists and writers have lifted the spirit of Quixote from Cervantes’ pages and revived the heralded knight of folly as a symbol of the incongruous place of not only faith in ideals but faith of a religious or spiritual nature in the modern, rational world.[1]

 While this progression of thought has been well developed and explored through literary movements, modern illustrations of Don Quixote have been largely neglected in scholarship. Thus, to see how Don Quixote’s legacy has been revived visually in the twentieth century, scholars may turn to the work of Salvador Dalí (Fig.1). Through a series of illustrations for a 1945 edition ofQuixote, Dalí utilizes the iconography of Jesus Christ to express Don Quixote as an irrational figure who suffers for his idealistic pursuits.[2]

To understand Dalí’s iconographic system of illustrating Quixote, one must begin by examining how Cervantes established the figure of Don Quixote as a suffering idealist. Next, one can turn to the twentieth century and how this knight came to be reinterpreted through the Modernist Spanish literary movement called the “Generation of 1898.” 

This movement lifted Don Quixote to the place of savior and spiritual leader, seemingly elevating his status to one of power and influence. 

As such, Don Quixote could be interpreted as a symbol of authority in his role as a unifying force in the divided Spain at the turn of the century. Then, taking influence from their identification of Don Quixote as a Christ-like figure, one can examine Dalí’s illustrations. As a child of this Modernist movement, Dalí demonstrates iconographic tendencies related to Christ. However, in the place of a conquering force, Dalí portrays a suffering protagonist. Thus, the visual connection between Dalí’s Don Quixote and Christ can beiconographically linked through comparing suffering crucifixion images of Surrealist precursor Hieronymus Bosch and other iconographic traditions associated to Christ. Through this process, Don Quixote is revealed as the suffering idealist who foolishly pursues his own destruction.

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