Juan de Tassis y Peralta, 2nd Conde de Villamediana
Juan de Tassis y Peralta, 2nd Conde de Villamediana (* 1582 in Lisbon , † August 21, 1622 in Madrid ) was a Spanish poet . He led an adventurous and dissolute life, was a colorful personality of the Spanish Baroque and was murdered at the age of only 40. In his homeland he is known simply as the Conde de Villamediana .
life and work
Juan de Tassis y Peralta was born in Lisbon in 1582 as the son of the respected diplomat Juan de Tassis y Acuña, 1st Conde de Villamediana , King Philip III. 1603 was to confer the title of Count, and María de Peralta Muñatones was born. His grandfather Raimundo de Tassis (approx. 1515–1579) was a son of Johann Baptista von Taxis .
Educated at the court of Philip II , Juan de Tassis received an excellent education from the humanists Luis Tribaldos de Toledo and Bartolomé Jiménez Patón . The latter later (1621) dedicated the work Mercurius Trimegistus to his pupil . Thanks to his two teachers, Peralta had excellent literary training and a thorough knowledge of the classics. So he was able to write poems himself in excellent humanistic Latin. He attended university, but did not pursue any studies there.
When King Philip III. In 1599 he went to the Kingdom of Valencia to celebrate his wedding with Margaret of Austria , Tassis accompanied him and distinguished himself in such a way that the king accepted him as a courtier in the palace. Here he met the noble Magdalena de Guzmán y Mendoza , who, as the widow of Martín Cortés de Monroy , Marqués del Valle de Guajaca ( Oaxaca ), and future tutor of the queen's son, had an influential position at the court. Despite the age difference, they had a relationship that ultimately ended badly. According to an anonymous sonnet widespread in Madrid, they did not always get along well, but rather had a kind of love-hate relationship; Doña Magdalena slapped him in the face while a comedy was being performed in front of the entire audience.
Tassis was sent to Valladolid , where he lived for five years. After he had to experience several rejections during his marriage plans, he finally married Ana de Mendoza y de la Cerda, a descendant of the Marquis de Santillana in 1601 . He had several children from his wife, but they were all stillborns. After his father's death in 1607 he received his count and the post of Correo Mayor del Rey , with which he became the holder of the postal monopoly exercised by members of the von Thurn und Taxis family .
Due to his challenging, daring and charming character, the Conde de Villamediana quickly acquired the reputation of a bon vivant or dandy. He valued luxury, was a passionate gambler, led an extravagant sex life and was considered a feared opponent by many. However, he had to go into exile twice because of his excesses, since he had driven important nobles into ruin and relentlessly denounced the vices of numerous Spanish grandees in biting satires .
Villamediana spent her first exile with the Count of Lemos, who was appointed Viceroy of Naples , from 1611 to 1617 in Italy. Here he worked as a soldier and also met the Italian poet Giambattista Marino . After his return to Spain he criticized in sharp-tongued satires those in the last years of Philip III's reign. corruption flourished under the Duque de Lerma and Rodrigo Calderón . These achieved that the king sent Villamediana again in 1618 into exile, which the easy-going count spent this time in Andalusia . His wife died around 1618.
After the death of Philip III. (March 31, 1621) Villamediana returned to the Spanish court and was chamberlain to Élisabeth de Bourbon , the young wife of King Philip IV. Feeling secure in his current position, he again wrote numerous hurtful epigrams. He had many mistresses in whose arms he sometimes appeared in public, for example on the occasion of the premiere of a comedy. He also entered into more dangerous affairs, for example with a courtesan of the king, a Marfisa, who was perhaps Doña Francisca de Tavara, a beautiful young Portuguese woman, the queen's maid and lover of the king. According to a popular legend, he also deliberately set fire to the theater of Aranjuez on May 15, 1622 , when his masquerade La Gloria de Niquea , composed to celebrate Philip IV's birthday, was staged in front of the court for the queen he was in love with be able to carry out and thus save. According to another legend, he appeared at a ball in a cape covered with gold reals , which was marked "Son mis amores reales". Villamediana played with the threefold meaning of the word "real", which was very dangerous in this era. The Spanish poet Joaquín Dicenta wrote a drama in 1925 after this episode with the same title as the above-mentioned inscription.
Villamediana, facing an inquisition trial for sodomy , ignored a warning from the confessor of Baltasar de Zúñiga , the prime minister's uncle, that his life was in danger. On the evening of the same day, August 21, 1622, the only 40-year-old Count was stabbed to death on his way back from the Royal Palace in a Madrid street, Calle Mayor, while getting out of a carriage belonging to Luis de Haro . He was buried in the vault of the great chapel of the St. Augustine monastery in Valladolid. The murder remained unsolved, as no major effort was made in this regard. The instigator of the crime was perhaps King Philip IV, who could have been jealous of Villamediana because of his supposed love for the queen, or the leading minister Gaspar de Guzmán, Conde de Olivares , whose motive might be the precautionary elimination of a serious competitor for the highest political power would be sought. After his death, the title of Count of Villamediana passed to his cousin Íñigo Vélez de Guevara, Conde de Oñate .
Villamediana's works were first published in Zaragoza in 1629 . The gifted satirist also wrote cultist poetry in the style of his teacher and friend Luis de Góngora . His early love poetry shows Italian influences brought to Spain by Juan Boscán Almogávar and Garcilaso de la Vega . Much of his later work, however, is devoted to political satire. In his play La Gloria de Niquea , written in 1622 and based on an episode of the chivalric novel Amadís de Grecia published in 1530, the influence of Góngoras is also reflected. Villamediana also wrote poems of mythological content.
Work editions
- Villamediana, Juan de Tassis y Peralta, Cancionero de Mendez Britto: poesías inéditas del Conde de Villamediana . Edition with a study and notes by Juan Manuel Rozas. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cintíficas, 1965.
- Villamediana, Juan de Tassis y Peralta, Cartas . Madrid: Ediciones Escorial, 1943.
- Villamediana, Juan de Tassis y Peralta, Obras . Edition with foreword and comments by Juan Manuel Rozas. Madrid: Castalia, 1969.
- Villamediana, Juan de Tassis y Peralta, Poesía impresa completa . Edition by José Francisco Ruiz Casanova. Madrid: Cátedra, 1990.
- Villamediana, Juan de Tassis y Peralta, Poesía inédita completa . Edition by Francisco Ruiz Casanova. Madrid: Cátedra, 1994.
- Villamediana, Juan de Tassis y Peralta, Poesía , ed.Mª T. Ruestes, Barcelona, Planeta, 1992
literature
- Lidia Gutiérrez Arranz: El universo mitológico en la Fábulas de Villamediana. Guía de lectura . Kassel: Reichenberger, 2001 (Spanish).
- Isabel Pérez Cuenca y Mariano de la Campa: Reconstrucción biográfica del Conde de Villamediana. 1996 (Spanish).
- Villamediana, Juan de Tassis y Peralta . In: Gero von Wilpert (Ed.): Lexikon der Weltliteratur , 3rd edition, Stuttgart 1988, Vol. 1, ISBN 3-520-80703-3 , p. 1579 (short lexicon article).
- Luis Rosales: Pasión y muerte del conde de Villamediana . Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1964 (Spanish).
- Narciso Alonso Cortés: La muerte del conde de Villamediana . Valladolid, Imprenta del Colegio Santiago, 1928 (Spanish).
- James Fitzmaurice-Kelly : Villamediana, count de . In: Encyclopædia Britannica , 11th edition, 1910-1911, Vol. 28, p. 73 ( online ).
- Emilio Cotarelo y Mori: El conde de Villamediana, estudio biográfico-crítico con varias poesías inéditas del mismo . Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1886 (Spanish).
Remarks
- ↑ Horst Weich: Rhetoric of Silence. Gender order and variation in the love poetry of the Conde de Villamediana. In: Mark Föcking, Bernhard Huss (Ed.): Varietas and ordo , 2003, ISBN 3-515-08258-1 , pp. 195f. ( Excerpt online ).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Villamediana, Juan de Tassis y Peralta, 2nd Conde de |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Spanish poet |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1582 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Lisbon |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 21, 1622 |
| Place of death | Madrid |