Engravings of the Quixote in ^{seventeenth-century} French : prints by Jacques Lagniet

There are few texts that, like Quixote, have aroused such an intense and frequent impulse among visual artists towards the desire or necessity of illustration. In the West, perhaps only the Bible and the Divine Comedy could compare with Quixote in the process of generating images to accompany or, sometimes, supplement and replace reading. In all cases, whether the representation of a narrative proposed by a text of which it is a visual continuation, or the representation of what is narrated as a starting point for the creation of an object separate from the text itself, we need to ask ourselves what place each visual work occupies between the two possible poles that define the relationship between image and written narrative, i.e. the pole of pure, subordinate illustration and the pole of visual recreation. The lecture will attempt to determine the position of the thirty-eight engravings of the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, published by Jacques Lagniet between 1650 and 1652, in relation to this polarity. The links and distances between image and text in Lagniet's work have, in effect, established a mode of appropriation of the Quixote story that goes beyond the grotesque to achieve a joyous abundance of meanings whose convergence remains impossible.