Count of Villamediana

Juan de Tassis y Peralta, 2nd Count of Villamediana, (Lisbon, 1582 - Madrid, August 21, 1622), Spanish Baroque poet, generally attached to culteranismo, although he followed this aesthetic in a very personal way.

Biography

He was the son of María de Peralta Muñatones, descendant of the Marquises of Falces, and Juan de Tassis y Acuña, 1st Count of Villamediana and Correo Mayor of the kingdom, who, thanks to his work as organizer of the postal service, He would receive the title of nobility in 1603, although his paternal grandfather Raimundo de Tassis, established in Valladolid, had already held the post of King's Post Office and had married Leonor, a lady belonging to the powerful Zúñiga family, a descendant of the King Pedro I of Castile.

He was born in Lisbon because his father, Juan de Tassis y Acuña, was part of King Felipe II's entourage when he entered Portugal in December 1580 where he remained until 1583. His father was a quarrelsome man (he had the face covered in scars from at least five duels of honor, all of which he had emerged victorious) and Juan de Tassis lived in the palace environment since his childhood, receiving an excellent education from the humanist Luis Tribaldos de Toledo and Bartolomé Jiménez Paton, who dedicated the Mercurius Trimegistus to his pupil; these two tutors gave him a deep knowledge of the classics and he even composed some poems in excellent humanistic Latin; but, although he went through the university, he did not conclude any degree.

We know nothing about Juan de Tassis until Philip III went to the Kingdom of Valencia in 1599 to celebrate his marriage to Margarita of Austria. He was already known because his first two sonnets had appeared in print that same year: «He who seeks of love and fortune" and "Glory and honor of the Indian West" in the preliminaries of two books. On the occasion of the royal trip, he had to replace his father in the procession —who was ambassador in Paris— and, at barely eighteen years old, he accompanied the monarch to Valencia, distinguishing himself so much that the king named him a gentleman of his house and mouth the October 9 of the same year, shortly before returning to Madrid. On December 31, 1599, he was also granted a deed of emancipation by his parents and grandmother, and before his return to Valladolid he was still granted a new power of attorney general dated in Madrid on January 14, 1601.

In the palace he met Magdalena de Guzmán y Mendoza, daughter of Lope de Guzmán y Guzmán de Aragón and Leonor de Luján, a woman of great influence at Court as the widow of Martín Cortés y Zúñiga, II Marquis of Valle de Oaxaca, of who was his second wife, and future governess of the son the queen was going to have. Despite the age difference, they had a very troubled relationship that ended badly. An anonymous sonnet, which circulated around Madrid, insinuated that he did not behave very well with her, and even went so far as to slap her in front of everyone in the middle of a comedy performance. For this reason, it was said, Magdalena always loved him and hated at the same time, according to the biographer of the poet Luis Rosales.

After the Court was transferred to Valladolid, where it remained for five years, in 1602 he married Ana de Mendoza y de la Cerda, daughter of Garcia Hurtado de Mendoza, IV Marquis of Cañete, descendant of the famous Marquis of Santillana and his second wife, Ana Florencia de la Cerda. Several children were born from this marriage, all ill-fated. This was not his first choice because before this marriage he had tried to marry other court ladies who rejected him. His father finally obtained the title of count of Villamediana in 1603, but died early in 1607, a year after granting testament; his heir son Juan assumed the title and position of Correo Mayor of the kingdom, which he inaugurated when the Court had already moved to Madrid in 1606, making himself known for his aggressive, reckless and womanizing attitude and soon acquiring a reputation as a libertine lover of luxury and precious stones, cards and horses. He also dressed like a dandy with a disorderly life as a player given over to vices, and he created a reputation as a fearsome adversary not only on the table for his great intelligence, but also for his foul-mouthed satirical talent, exercised with particular boldness against the high nobility. He was prosecuted for his homosexuality, although he was not convicted of his death.

All these excesses earned him three banishments from the pious Felipe III, apart from having ruined several important knights, also for his already mentioned very strong satires, in which he mercilessly taunted the miseries of almost all the Great Ones of Spain, since, as belonging to the same class as them, he knew their defects and weaknesses well: he knew where to attack them and how to hurt them. From this period are the sonnets «From this eclipsed veil, in a dark tone», «From the body stripped of the subtle veil» or «From a teeming flower fragrant flight» dedicated to the death of the queen, or the sonnet «Sea para bien, en hora good sea», included in the preliminaries of the book by Agustín de Rojas Villandrando El buen repúblico (1611), or also those addressed to the death of the King of France Enrique IV (assassinated on May 14, 1610) "This one who with the weapons of his steel", "When the fury of the wrathful Mars" or "The broken harness and the invincible sword".

The first of his exiles, of a rather insecure date (July 1605 to September 1607, or more probably from January 1608 to July 1611), took him, according to Juan Manuel Rozas, to France and Flanders. The second (1611-1615) took him to Italy, where he was between 1611 and 1615 with the Count of Lemos, appointed Viceroy of Naples.

In this Italian period he met the Mannerist poet Giambattista Marino and, at the Literary Academy of the Idle (or degli Oziosi) in Naples, also a friend of the previous Giovanni Battista Manso; he also read the great poems of the second period of Luis Góngora, while dealing with the lawsuit over the Correo Mayor in Naples. From this period are the sonnets «Marino, si es nombre el que tiene» or the one dedicated to the sepulcher of the apostle Saint Peter «This now dedicated to the first». Returning to Spain in 1615, all the creditors of his unreasonable and luxurious way of life fell together on him and he went through great economic hardships that forced him, on the same day of his grandmother's death (May 22, 1615) to sell the Office of the Mayor Post Office of the city of Valencia. On May 31, 1615, he established a concert with his creditors and in 1616 he also sold the offices of Correo de Murcia, Cartagena, Béjar, Medina de Rioseco, San Sebastián, Irún and Nápoles. In 1617 he would also sell the office of Correo Mayor from Medina de Rioseco and Cuenca in July; in August that of Guadalajara, Sigüenza and its bishopric, Logroño, Navarra and Soria; and in September that of the kingdoms of Galicia and the province of Bierzo. In April 1618 he will do the same with that of Aragon.

In literature, the years 1616 and 1617 are those of narrative mythological fables (the Fable of Phaethon, for example, inspired by an episode of the Metamorphoses of Ovid), and the last (1617-1618) those of the political satires against the ministers of Felipe III that earned him a third banishment from November 17, 1618 to 1621.

He had attacked in several satires the corruption achieved under the support of the Duke of Lerma and Rodrigo Calderón during the reign of Felipe III and they managed to get the king to banish him again from the Court, although this time to Andalusia (Rozas, for On the contrary, he thinks that he spent the three years in Alcalá de Henares). During this period of exile, the arrest and execution by hanging of Rodrigo Calderón, right-hand man of the Duke of Lerma, occurred. Likewise, the festivities in honor of San Isidro were celebrated on May 15, 1620, after having been beatified, in whose poetic jousts the count participated and obtained first prize, despite being in exile. Also from this period are the sonnets dedicated to the Duke of Alba on the death of his wife in 1619, or the "silva that the author made while outside the court" or the redondillas that begin "A la vista de Madrid". He returned shortly after the king's death, in 1621, favored as he was by the new favorite, the Count-Duke of Olivares, who obtained royal pardon from Philip IV. However, the ostentatious Count was still eaten up by debts. those dedicated to the canonizations of San Ignacio de Loyola and San Francisco Javier. It also premiered La Gloria de Niquea, a commissioned work to be performed before the monarchs in Aranjuez, about which there is a famous legend. And at the same time, the Council of Castilla opened a process with several accused of the heinous sin (homosexuality), a process in which the count himself could be involved.

He had numerous mistresses, with whom he sometimes came to blows publicly, as on the aforementioned occasion during the premiere of a comedy, and he did not stop before dangerous love affairs as with one of the king's courtesans, a certain Marfisa, perhaps Francisca de Tavara, a beautiful young Portuguese woman, lady of the queen and lover of the king. Legend also states that she premeditatedly set fire to the Aranjuez coliseum during the festivities to celebrate the anniversary of King Philip IV, when it was inaugurated before the queen, on April 8, 1622, one of his works, The glory of Niquea, inspired by an episode of the Amadís of Greece, to be able to save her in his arms, since he was in love her. There is also the legend that he appeared at a dance with a cape covered in gold reales, which alluded to his luck in the game, with the letters of the woven motto "They are my real loves", where The word royals hid a triple meaning that was very dangerous for the time; With this title and about this episode, in the XX century, Joaquín Dicenta will write a drama. Another legend is that of the origin of the expression "Chop very high", which is believed to be due to the skills as a picador of the count who, when praised by the queen, the king replied: "Chop well, but it stings very high", with an obvious double meaning, due to his dalliances with the queen. Narciso Alonso Cortés also discovered in the Simancas Archive a memorial that implicated Villamediana in a famous trial for sodomy that ended on December 5, 1622 with the burning of five young men, justicia that, according to the Noticias de Madrid, "he made a lot of noise at court", attributing the count's death to this cause, which others explain by his satires, by the squandering of the family fortune (which, in effect, caused him the economic problems already described) or by love affairs and adulteries in which the monarch himself could have been involved. Aware of his reckless and daring character, a gloomy pessimism appears in most of the count's compositions, who wrote those famous verses:

Know, for I can no longer

up or down

at least I can have

lost to Fortune the fear

The perpetrators of the crime were never found; the moment chosen was when he was in a car with the Count of Haro on Calle Mayor in Madrid; The motive was, perhaps, to avoid the scandal of the process for the heinous sin, for which the crime would have gone unpunished and silence was ordered about it. But the fact caused a sensation, and all the famous poets were ready to write epics in verse about the count, beginning with his friend Luis de Góngora, who attributed the order to the king, continuing with Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, who accused him of being a curse. and ending with Francisco de Quevedo, who, despite being his enemy, wrote "that he asks for certain revenge / a salvation in doubt". The process for the heinous sin opened by the Council of Castilla has not been located. The Noticias de Madrid reports the death at the stake of a buffoon named Mendocilla, who was followed by a servant of the count of Villamediana and another servant of the count, a mulatto slave i> and "Don Gaspar de Terrazas", page of the Duke of Alba. Some others, according to the documentation provided by Alonso Cortés, fled, among them a Silvestre Nata Adorno, His Majesty's horse courier, who had marched to Naples with the Duke of Alba, who on September 20, 1623 requested that he be transferred "of his guilt and sentence" in the aforementioned lawsuit. His instructor's response is the one that directly involves Villamediana. In it, Mr. Fernando Ramírez Fariña requested new instructions from the Council, to which he warned that

the guilt of Silvestre Adorno and [...] the signs against him ay are born of what is provaded against the Count of Villamediana, and His M.^d He commanded him to be already Count Dead and not to let him keep secret of what sinned against him in the process, and if he gives the fault of thee it is raça that benga in it much of the Count.

The poet and playwright Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza painted his character in two tenths, or spinels, at his death:

You know it was Don Juan / given to the game and pleasures; / love him the women / for discreet and for galan. / Brave as Roldan / and more purple than brave... / more polished than Medoro / and in the dress without second, / caused astonishment to the world / their embroidered costumes of gold... / Very diestro in rejoining, / very friend of reñir, / very ganoso to serve, / very unlearned in giving. / Such fame came to reach / throughout the entire court, / that there was neither inside nor out / great that contrasted him, / woman that did not worship him, / man that did not fear him

In the XIX century, the murder inspired several historical romances of the Duke of Rivas and also some romantic drama, such as The dead also take revenge by Patricio de la Escosura (1838), the novel by Ceferino Suárez Bravo The scepter and the dagger (1851) and some short stories as well as a history painting by Manuel Castellano in 1868, now in the Museo del Prado. In the XX century, it is worth noting the drama in verse by Joaquín Dicenta Alonso Son mis amores reales (1925), which won the prize of the Royal Spanish Academy, and several novels: Tell us: who killed the Count? by Nestor Luján, Cap and Sword by Fernando Fernán Gómez (2001) and The Flanders Painter by Rosa Ribas (2006).

After his death, his positions passed to his cousin Íñigo Vélez de Guevara y Tassis, Count of Oñate, son of Pedro Vélez de Guevara and María de Tassis.

Literary work

Two successive poetic phases can be mentioned in the work of Don Juan de Tassis: the Petrarchan, which spans from his first poems until his return from his trip to Italy (1599-1615), and the culterana, from 1615 until his death in 1622. Rozas made it clear how these two poetic periods are divided into four large groups:

• Lovely Poetry of Petrarquista Court (1599-1610)
• Aesthetic Poetry of Gongorino and Marinist Cutting (1611-1615)
• Mythological fables of ovidian inspiration and style of Marine Giambatista and Góngora (1616-1617)
• Living poetry with a double aspect: moral poetry and satirical poems (1618-1621).

A first collection of his Obras appeared in Zaragoza in 1629. It includes poems with a mythological theme (Fable of Phaeton, a long poem from around 1617 composed in real octaves of which Vicente Mariner translated two hundred twenty-eight into Latin in hexameters: Fable of Apollo and Daphne, Fable of Venus and Adonis) which reflect a clear influence from Góngora; the comedy La gloria de Niquea (1622), based on the Amadís of Greece, and more than two hundred sonnets, epigrams and roundels of love, satirical, religious and patriotic themes, in which he cultivates a particular conceptism, while reserving his also original culteranismo for the poems in major art. A second edition were the Works of don Juan de Tarsis Count of Villamediana, and his Majesty's greatest mail. Collected by Dionisio Hipólito de los Valles. Madrid, by María de Quiñones at the expense of Pedro Coello, 1635.

Villamediana knew he was condemned to die young and this fatalistic feeling appears in his poetry, expressed through the Ovidian myth of Phaethon, in which it is also possible to observe a certain oedipal complex with respect to his father.

His favorite poetic themes are silence, disappointment, recklessness, the myth of Phaethon and all those related to fire. He is especially introspective in the roundups and tends to accumulate personal pronouns as a sign of unbalanced narcissism. His poetic language, essentially culterano, introduces new cultisms that do not appear in the works of Luis de Góngora, who was a friend of his. He especially wrote sonnets on various moral, love and especially satirical themes; Some of the best are those dedicated to his banishment, such as "Silencio, en tu sepulcro deposito...", which has gone on to all the anthologies of baroque poetry:

Silence, in your tomb

bow voice, blind pen and sad hand,

for my pain not to sing in vain

to the wind given and in the sand written.

Tomb and death of oblivion requested,

Although of warnings more than of years cano,

where today more than reason I stand,

And in time I'll give him as much as I take off.

I will limit desires and hopes,

and in the orb of a clear disappointment

margins I will put briefs to my life,

so they don't beat me up.

of those who seek my damage

and caused such a prosperous escape.

He also dedicated some efforts to the free or paraphrastic translation of two authors: the Italian Gianbattista Marino and the Portuguese Camoens. From the first he translated the 552 verses of the Fable of Europe , which became 732 plus 58 of the dedication. From the second four or five sonnets. The life and work of Juan de Tassis has been investigated among other authors by Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, the first in recent times to try to find an explanation for the causes of the murder, Emilio Cotarelo, Narciso Alonso Cortés, Juan Manuel Rozas and Luis Rosales who dedicated his admission speech to the Royal Spanish Academy (Passion and Death of the Count of Villamediana, Madrid, 1964) to "vindicate the memory of the Count of Villamediana" in the face of accusations of homosexuality that arose from the contributions of Hartzenbusch, the documentation presented by Alonso Cortés and the analysis of Gregorio Marañón in his Don Juan, a claim that he presented, said Rosales (1964, p. 6), "in the same hearing and before the same court where he was convicted in the first instance; where he was unjustly convicted, as I will try to prove ».

Editions of Villamediana's works

• Villamediana, Juan de Tassis and Peralta, Cancionero de Mendez Britto: Unpublished Poetry of the Count of Villamediana. Edit, study and notes by Juan Manuel Rozas. Madrid: Higher Council for Scientific Research, 1965.
• Villamediana, Juan de Tassis and Peralta, Letters. Madrid: Editions Escorial, 1943.
• Villamediana, Juan de Tassis and Peralta, Works. Editing, introduction and notes by Juan Manuel Rozas. Madrid: Castalia, 1969.
• Villamediana, Juan de Tassis and Peralta, Works, facsimile of the first edition of 1629, prologue of Felipe B. Pedraza Jiménez. Aranjuez: Ara Iovis, 1986.
• Villamediana, Juan de Tassis and Peralta, Full printed poetry. Edition of José Francisco Ruiz Casanova. Madrid: Chair, 1990.
• Villamediana, Juan de Tassis and Peralta, Complete unprecedented poetry. Ed. José Francisco Ruiz Casanova. Madrid: Chair, 1994.
• Villamediana, Juan de Tassis and Peralta, Poetry. Ed. Ma T. Ruestes, Barcelona, Planeta, 1992.