SOURCE: Folkenflik, Vivian. “Vision and Truth: Baroque Art Metaphors in Guzmán de Alfarache.” Modern Language Notes 88, no. 2 (March 1973): 347-55.

In the following essay, Folkenflik discusses Alemán's references to painting in Guzmán de Alfarache, many of which show the author's insistence that the visual world is an illusion.

Towards the end of his description of his Italian travels, the narrator of Guzmán de Alfarache has occasion to lament that nowadays men judge only according to what they see:

Cuando fueres alquimia, eso que reluciere de ti, eso será venerado. Ya no se juzgan almas ni más de aquello que ven los ojos.

(IV, 92¹)

Anyone who has read this far in Mateo Alemán's massive picaresque novel will agree. Social reality is so completely founded on what can be seen that most of the inhabitants of Guzmán's world pay little attention to anything else...