Un soneto de Cervantes a san FranciscoA Sonnet by Cervantes to St. Francis

Among poetic compositions dedicated to St. Francis of Assisi in Jardín espiritual (1585) of Pedro de Padilla, there is, as is known, a sonnet by Miguel de Cervantes (“Muestra su ingenio el que es pintor curioso”), that has been little studied from a pictorial perspective. Indeed, the inventio of Cervantean composition derives from the Horatian dictum “ut pictura poesis” (Ad Pis., 361), applied to the topic of Deus pictor, but the originality of the laudatio is that does not remark platitudes of the Franciscan hagiography but that urges the saint as a pictura traced by ars divina and, by extension, as a microcosmic imago of Christ. In this paper we focus on the elocutive analysis of the poem, and we try to demonstrate his rhetorical design. The pictorial vocabulary is also related to several texts of the Augustinian Fray Luis de León, whose presence in the poem is postulated as a hypothesis. In the sonnet, in brief, “la historia, la poesía y la pintura simbolizan entre sí” (Persiles, III, 14).