“Extraño todo”: The Soledades Pigeon House from A to Z

Abstract

«All of it strange, / design, structure and style», says the poem in reference to the dovecote described in the second Solitude. Strange compared to what? What did a pigeon house in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries look like, how were they represented in literature, emblematics, and painting, and what does the pigeon house in The Solitudes have to do with Góngora’s poetics? I would like to approach these questions from three different angles: traditional Philology, Art History, and Philosophy, including Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, Agamben’s notion of the «power-of-not», and Heidegger’s concept of «unveiling». The paper is divided into ten parts: The Artistic Farm, The Poem’s Original Version, «Common Things», «Design», «Structure», The Tree-House of the Prince of Caserta, «Style», The Poetics of Strangeness, The «beautiful strangeness» of the Alba Castle in Garcilaso’s Second Eclogue and Pigeon Houses in Flemish and Dutch Art—in other words, Góngora’s pigeon house from A to Z.