Museo
Thyssen ­–Bornemisza
A WALK THROUGH THE HISTORY OF ART
quixote.
The Museo Thyssen as a
Mirror of Don Quixote
quixote.
The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza as a Mirror of Don Quixote is a
tour designed to provide a number of windows on the world
created by Miguel de Cervantes in his famous novel. Through
a selection of works from the Permanent Collection, visitors
are given an insight into the most salient episodes of the
ingenious knight’s adventures and the boundless imagination
that leads him to see giants where there are only windmills, the
idealised beauty of Dulcinea and Sancho Panza’s loyalty and
good judgement. There is no direct link between the paintings
and the passages of the novel, but many of the literary motifs
found in the novel can be reinterpreted through the history
of these paintings. This tour has been made possible by the
collaboration of the council of Alcalá de Henares.
Opening image
Georges Michel Landscape with Mill
Oil on canvas, 40 × 52.2 cm
Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection on loan
at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Back cover
Kurt Schwitters Merzbild 1A (The Psychiatrist), 1919.
Oil, assemblage and collage of various objects on canvas.
48,5 × 38,5 cm. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
For further information 
www.museothyssen.org | www.turismoalcala.es | 
www.400cervantes.ayto-alcaladehenares.es
ALONSO QUIJANO BOOKS AS A PARALLEL REALITY
Ferdinand Hodler
The Reader, ca. 1885
His fancy grew full of what he used to read about in his books [...]
and it so possessed his mind [...] that to him no history of the world
had more reality in it.
Don Quixote and this reader have in common their age, white
hair and bony hands. But their greatest similarity lies in their
engrossment in reading, as if the world changed with each word.
Indeed, this is how the famous novel begins – with an elderly man
called Alonso Quijano going mad from devouring hundreds of
chivalric novels.
Oil on canvas, 31 × 38 cm. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
DULCINEA DEL TOBOSO IDEAL BEAUTY
Domenico Ghirlandaio
Portrait of Giovanna degli Albizzi
Tornabuoni, 1489–90
For her hairs are gold, her forehead Elysian fields, her eyebrows
rainbows, her eyes suns, her cheeks roses, her lips coral, her teeth
pearls, her neck alabaster, her bosom marble, her hands ivory,
her fairness snow […].
Don Quixote feels that a knight without a lady love is like a
“tree without leaves” or a “body without a soul”. As he has no lady,
he invents Dulcinea, his “queen”, whose beauty is “superhuman”.
Cervantes may have drawn inspiration from portraits like this
one to give his character an appearance based on the beauty ideal
which the Italian Quatroccento borrowed from classical Antiquity.
Mixed media on panel, 77 × 49 cm. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
SANCHO PANZA FAITHFUL FRIEND AND SQUIRE
Giuseppe Maria Crespi
Peasants with Donkeys, ca. 1709
Sancho rode on his ass like a patriarch, with his alforjas and bota,
and longing to see himself soon governor of the island his master had
promised him.
In chapter 7 of Part One, Sancho Panza leaves his wife and
children to serve Don Quixote as a squire, mounted on a donkey.
The eccentric knight convinces the labourer with promises of
adventures, excitement and even the possibility of becoming the
governor of an island. Sancho Panza lives in the real world – that
which is portrayed by genre painters – but believes him because
he too has dreams and hopes of achieving a better life.
Oil on copper, 39,4 × 31,1 cm. Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
on loan to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
ICONIC EPISODES CAVALRY SOLDIERS
August Macke
Hussars on a Sortie, 1913
Come back, Señor Don Quixote; I vow to God they are sheep and
ewes you are charging! Come back! Unlucky the father that begot me!
What madness is this! Sancho warns his master that there are only two flocks of sheep
ahead of them and not two armies about to engage in battle.
But Don Quixote, who never hesitates, joins Pentapolin to
fight against the powerful Alifanfaron. The speed, frenzy and
fragmentation characteristic of the Italian futurist movement
also describe the battle as it is seen by the gentleman of La
Mancha mounted on Rocinante.
Oil on canvas, 37,5 × 56,1 cm. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
ICONIC EPISODES FIGHTING WITH GIANTS
Paul Klee
Rotating House, 1921
‘The fear thou art in, Sancho’, said Don Quixote, ‘prevents thee
from seeing or hearing correctly, for one of the effects of fear is to
derange the senses and make things appear different from what
they are.’
The episode of the fight with the windmills is an act as reckless
as it is naïve, as Don Quixote mistakes them for giants. His
boundless imagination fuelled by chivalric novels transforms
reality into an extraordinary world. This form of relating to
his surroundings strongly recalls that of children, and is also
visible in the primitive childish schemata Paul Klee reproduces
in his works.
Oil and pencil on cotton cheesecloth mounted on paper, 37,7 × 52,2 cm.
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
DREAM AND REALITY
Yves Tanguy
Time and Again, 1942
And then, turning to Sancho, he said, ‘Forgive me, my friend, that
I led thee to seem as mad as myself, making thee fall into the same
error I myself fell into, that there were and still are knights-errant
in the world.’
Almost at the end of the novel, Don Quixote is defeated by the
Knight of the White Moon in a famous setting, the Barceloneta
beach. Tanguy’s fanciful and unsettling Surrealist painting prompts
us to imagine the duel with the vast, endless and horizonless
Mediterranean sea as a backdrop. Following his defeat, the
ingenious gentleman returned home and, at death’s door, finally
came to his senses as if he had just awoken from an eternal dream.
Oil on canvas, 100 × 81 cm. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza