Kircher’s “tiny book on magnetism, Nature’s Magnetic Kingdom [Magneticum naturae regnum], is dedicated to Alejandro Fabiani, a Mexican priest of Genoese ancestry. Its small size may have been designed for easy shipment to the Americas, but it is worth noting that Kircher’s large books also made their way to the New World. For example, portraits of the brilliant and talented Mexican nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, show her in her library, posed before a collection in which Kircher’s works enjoy pride of place.”

Furthermore, “El caso de Kircher es extremo pero no único. La mezcla entre las creencias e ideas del neoplatonismo hermético, la alquimia, la Cabala y las nociones de la nueva ciencia fue una característica general del siglo XVII. Pocos espíritus fueron inmunes a la fascinación de Mercurio Trismegisto y los jeroglíficos egipcios.” (Octavio Paz, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, o, las trampas de la fe 238)

The concept of la mezcla was central to the Baroque mindset around the globe. Throughout the 17th century, Kircherian-style philosophical hybrids dominated the arts & sciences of Old and New worlds alike.

During this period there were at least sixteen convents in Mexico City. San Jerómino had about fifty nuns, each with approximately five “maids,” who might be girls sent to the convent by their families for education, or Indian slaves. The building itself was imposing: two stories, roughly 120 yards on each side, with a central garden and courtyard. Thus, each “cell” had two floors, and many were very nicely equipped. Sor Juana had frequent visitors from the Court and elsewhere, for her reputation was widespread. And these guests brought gifts: scientific devices, musical scores and instruments, works of art, jewels, and books ... Indeed, her “cell” had almost become a laboratory and workshop; it was certainly a fabulous study and library and an important salon in the intellectual and cultural life of New Spain.

And like the other nuns of San Jerómino, Sor Juana had her own personal servant — a mulatto slave-girl, given to her by her mother, whom Juana brought with her to the convent of Santa Paula. (Trueblood 1988, p. 5)

Who to the life an exact Piece would make,
Must not from others Work a Copy take;
     No, not from Rubens or Vandike;
Much less content himself to make it like
Th’ Idæas and the Images which ly
In his own Fancy, or his Memory.
    No, he before his sight must place
     The Natural and Living Face;
     The real Object must command
Each Judgment of his Eye, and Motion of his Hand.

While Cowley raised the usual hard questions about truth, life, and artificial memory, another poet, Richard Flecknoe, emphasized the interplay between visual and verbal imagination

Betwixt Poetry & Painting there is neer relation, Poetry being but a speaking Picture, as Painting a silent Poem....

in the preface to his 1656 The Diarium, or Journall Divided into 12 Jornadas in Burlesque Rhime, or Drolling Verse.
     Indeed, throughout the early modern period, picture and poetry were thought of as intimately related. The celebrated sieur de Chambray, Roland Fréart, was merely stating a commonplace when he described the picture as mute Poesie and the poem as vocal Painting. In fact, the roots of baroque visual rhetoric trace back to Horace (Ars poetica) via Erasmus, who reinterpreted ancient commonplaces with his statement

The picture speaks though it is mute.

For Sor Juana, also known as the Tenth Muse,

Portraiture takes a graver, more disquieting turn — one congenial to the baroque sensibility — when the illusion of life which it creates is seen as emblematic of the deceitful hollowness of the actual world. From the pulpit and in the confessional Sor Juana must have been frequently exposed to reminders of the Dies irae, and for all her fascination with the phenomena of the human and material world there were surely moments when such admonitions touched a sensitive spot. So, at least, one may account for the chilling power of poem 27, in which she passes the lesson on to the beholder of a portrait of herself. The sonnet strikes one today as providing a grim hint of the vulnerability that will lead to her ultimate capitulation [i.e., the silence to which the last 2 years of her life belong].

I give the full text of Sor Juana’s poem 27 (as numbered in Trueblood’s A Sor Juana Anthology, p. 95) below.

Este, que ves, engaño colorido,

que del arte ostentando los primores,

con falsos silogismos de colores

es cauteloso engaño del sentido;

     éste, en quien la lisonja ha pretendido

excusar de los años los horrores,

y venciendo del tiempo los rigores

triunfar de la vejez y del olvido,

     es un vano artificio del cuidado,

es una flor al viento delicada,

es un resguardo inútil para el hado:

     es una necia diligencia errada,

es un afán caduco y, bien mirado,

es cadáver, es polvo, es sombra, es nada.

     These lying pigments facing you,

with every charm brush can supply

set up false premises of color

to lead astray the unwary eye.

     Here, against ghastly tolls of time,

bland flattery has staked a claim,

defying the power of passing years

to wipe out memory and name.

     And here, in this hollow artifice —

frail blossom hanging on the wind,

vain pleading in a foolish cause,

     poor shield against what fate has wrought —

all efforts fall and in the end

a body goes to dust, to shade, to nought.

• a summary biography of Sor Juana in the Editor’s Introduction for LIB. CAT. NO. JUA1691

• a bilingual transcription of Sor Juana’s “filosofías de cocina” [philosophies of the kitchen], excerpted from Respuesta de la poetisa a la muy ilustre Sor Filotea de la Cruz, in the LIBRARY

• further discussion of Sor Juana’s book-lined closet, compared with the portraiture and famous closet of the duchess of Newcastle, in the GALLERY exhibit, Portraits of Melancholy

• the introductory webessay on Margaret Cavendish in the PLAYERS section, which again pairs Sor Juana and Mad Madge on the subject of writing and philosophizing as an honorable “disease of wit”

• an IN BRIEF topic on baroque-era “Philosophies of the Kitchen”

• a transcription of Abraham Cowley’s poem To the Royal Society (1667) in the LIBRARY and an IN BRIEF topic on Cowley’s he-philosophy

• a GALLERY exhibit on female symbolism in Kircher’s Ars Magna Sciendi, with discussion of Sor Juana’s fashioning as the Tenth Muse

• a GALLERY exhibit on Kircher’s ars combinatoria (in Ars Magna Sciendi), with discussion of Sor Juana’s own epistemological model