Don Quixote and Images

The first known images of the knight-errant, his squire and other characters in the novel date from 1614. Everything seems to indicate that these images, attributed to Andreas Bretschneider, are related to another of the early uses of Cervantes' imaginings to illustrate and inspire the parades, pantomimes and gags of Baroque festivals. As a matter of fact, James Iffland speaks of a veritable "iconosphere" in which the novel has been immersed from the very moment of its first appearance in 1605.  
Especial attention is due to the illustrations that have accompanied the successive editions of Don Quixote from very early on, and which have already been the subject of a rigorous family of studies. But this outstanding chapter of book illustrations, so splendidly depicted in the 1780 edition of the Royal Academy of Spanish (RAE), is only one of the sources for what was soon to become a veritable cascade of imagery. Thus there is a continuous succession of albums of prints, panels, frescoes, tiles, murals, tapestries, Gobelins tapestries, ceramics, caricatures, commercial posters, playing cards, advertising cartoons, satirical cartoons, cigar box labels, broadsheets, comic strips, pocket calendars, stamps, stickers, cut-outs, cartoons, oil paintings and drawings, photographs, magic lantern shows, films, etc. 
The plasticity of the illustrations of Cervantes' works explains the attention paid by illustrators, engravers, painters and even publicists, and this outstanding characteristic, together with the extraordinary dynamism of its narrative syntax, also explains the wealth of film adaptations of Don Quixote.  The project "Cataloguing the universal film heritage", based on the life and works of this writer from Alcalá, had no less than 339 entries at the start of this century, of which 202 were films and 110, TV productions.