Clarimundo and Clarinda: the strength of loving by image

Abstract

 The Chronicle of Emperor Clarimundo, by João de Barros (1496-1570), completes 500 years duly hailed by critics, for various reasons, ranging from the author's young age when composing it, to the Prophecy of Fanimor that integrates it or the chronological priority among the so-called «Portuguese books of chivalry». To these just recognitions we must add what matters to any reader, even a non-specialized one: the indisputable excellence of the text that sprang from the fertile inventiveness of Barros, supported by the Arthurian tradition and, closer, by Amadis de Gaula. The dizzying sequence of episodes, typical of the novelistic model, remains faithful to the predictions of the exordium, seductively taken up from the most diverse angles. In one of them, decisive, Clarimundo falls in love with Clarinda once and for all, when he contemplates her image portrayed on a «távoa» (a small wooden tablet). The expedient, with broad intrinsic and extrinsic implications, is inserted in the core of classical and medieval, pagan and Christian iconography, as I propose to examine in this article