Garcilaso: Life and Fame

Garcilaso de la Vega 1498?-1536

 

Garcilaso de la Vega was born in the city of Toledo to an aristocratic family. His long and illustrious pedigree included the 15^th-century poet-soldier, the Marqués de Santillana, and the poet-historian Fernán Pérez de Guzmán.  From an early age, Garcilaso received a humanistic education in court circles, learning Latin, Greek, French and Italian, and mastering several musical instruments.

 

As a second son, Garcilaso was ineligible to inherit his father’s estate and so took up the expected course for young men in his situation: a military career. In 1520 he was named “Contino” (“Imperial Guard”). The following year he fought for the king, Carlos I (Charles I, later V of the Holy Roman Empire) against the rebellious “comuneros” (“commoners”) of Toledo. In 1523, he was named a Knight of the prestigious Order of Santiago.

 

As a soldier, Garcilaso travelled extensively fighting in the king’s service in Germany, Italy, North Africa, and France. He also suffered the king’s displeasure in 1531 when he witnessed the clandestine betrothal of his nephew to the wealthy heiress to the powerful Alburquerque family. He was punished by being sent into exile first to an island in the river Danube and later to Naples. He served the Spanish viceroy to Naples, don Pedro de Toledo, for a period before returning to the king’s good graces.

Garcilaso died fighting for Carlos in Nice (France) on October 14, 1536, twenty-five days after sustaining serious injuries in a skirmish near the town of Frejus. He was buried in Nice, but two years later his widow had his remains moved to Toledo and interred in the Church of San Pedro Mártir.

 

Garcilaso was married in 1525 to Elena de Zuñiga –a lady-in-waiting at the court-- but he also had other romantic attachments.  His first love was Guiomar Carrillo, from a noble family in Toledo, by whom he had an illegitimate son, Lorenzo, in 1520-21.  His marriage to doña Elena was likely one of convenience rather than love. It produced 5 children.  In 1526, during the wedding of Carlos V to the Portuguese princess, Isabel, Garcilaso met Isabel Freire, one of the princess’s ladies-in-waiting. For a long time Isabel Freire was believed to be the inspiration for many of Garcilaso’s love poems, but that view is now largely discarded. It seems likely, too, that between 1527 and 1529 Garcilaso had an affair with a lady named Elvira from Extremadura. This can be deduced from a will made by Garcilaso in 1529 which, besides recognising his illegitimate son, Lorenzo, also alludes to the possibility that Elvira may have had a child by him.

 

Poet, musician, linguist and soldier, Garcilaso was the epitome of the Renaissance man as described by his Italian contemporary, Baldassare Castiglione, in his famous manual for courtiers, Il Cortegiano, (“The Courtier”) published in1528.

Garcilaso was widely admired in literary circles in Naples, and corresponded with Pietro Bembo the Venetian scholar, literary theorist and the arbiter of literary taste at the time.  He counted as intimate friend another soldier-poet, the Catalan Joan Boschà (in most manuals called by his Castilian equivalent, Juan Boscán). 

 

 The Arrival of Italianate Poetry in Spain and Garcilaso's Early Fame

 

The birth of Italianate poetry in Spain can be traced to a fortunate meeting of Boscán with the

Venetian ambassador, poet and classical scholar, Andrea Navagero. It took place in the Generalife Gardens in the Alhambra Palace of Granada, in June of 1526 following the celebrations of the marriage of Carlos I with Isabella of Portugal (in Seville). We know from Boscán himself that Navagero encouraged him to write sonnets and other Italian stanza forms, the composition of which he admits was difficult at first.  Still, he defends his decision, arguing that the new verse was more serious, more artistic, much better, and sufficiently flexible to adapt itself to any style approved by the ancients.  Boscán acknowledges, too, that he was encouraged by Garcilaso, who also decided to try his hand at the new style. Of the two, Garcilaso was the superior poet, and it is he who normally (and perhaps a little unfairly) receives the accolades for being the first Spaniard to write in the “Italian style.”

 

Garcilaso’s fame rests on a relatively small poetic output, the major theme of which is love: 40 sonnets, 3 eclogues, 5 “canciones,” 2 elegies (one to Boscán), an epistle in blank verse to Boscán, all using Italian verse forms and metres, and 8 short “coplas” in traditional Castilian metre.

 

Garcilaso’s poetry was published in 1543, seven years after his death. It was Boscán –Garcilaso’s literary executor — who prepared Garcilaso’s poems for publication, together with his own, but he died suddenly in 1542.  Fortunately Boscán’s widow took over the task, bringing out in a single volume in 1543 the works of both men. Their success was immediate and far reaching, although there were some detractors who opposed their Italianate innovations.

 

The poetry of Boscán and Garcilaso continued to be printed together until 1569, when Garcilaso’s verse first appeared by itself. By now Garcilaso was held in such high esteem that two annotated editions of his poetry appeared within a few years of each other.  The first was in 1574 by Francisco Sánchez, a professor of Rhetoric at the University of Salamanca; the second was in 1580 by Fernando de Herrera, a major poet and leading cultural figure from Seville. Like the great classical and Italian writers –e.g. Virgil, Horace, Petrarch—Garcilaso had become a model to be imitated and emulated.

 

Sources:

Dent-Young, John transl. Selected Poems of Garcilaso de la Vega  Chicago 2009

Grossman, Edith   The Golden Age: Poems of the Spanish Renaissance. W.W. Norton Bilingual edition 2006

McCaw, John  and Spinnenweber, Kathleen eds. Anthology of Spanish Golden Age Poetry European Masterpieces 2007

Rivers, Elias ed  Renaissance and Baroque Poetry of Spain Prospect Heights Illinois Waveland Press 1988 (With English prose translations of the poems.)

Walters, Gareth  The Cambridge Introduction to Spanish Poetry: Spain and Spanish America, Cambridge 2002 

Wardropper, Bruce   Spanish Poetry of the Golden Age  New York, Meredith Corporation, 1971

 www.garcilaso.org Useful web site in Spanish