Barroco, emblemática e matemática: Sor Juan Inés de la cruz e Neptuno Alegórico

Abstract

The scientific reality of the 17th century in Nueva España is an arrow targeting the glimmer of the Baroque art produced in Mexico in the 1600s. In this cultural scene non religious books circulate as well as the ideas/theses/treatises of the men of science such as Nicolau Copérnico (1473-1543), Johannes Kepler (1574-1630), Atanasius Kircher (1601-1680), Juan Caramuel (1606 - 1682) and Sebastián Izquierdo (1601-1681).The 17th century’s baroque in America assimilates this scientific reality and reverberates its various forms of artistic representation by means of luxurious monuments in the form of experimental poetry. Neptuno Alegórico – the architectural laudatory, the prose, the emblematic description, the poetry, the prince’s mirror – is tuned into this neo-hispanic scientific-cultural discourse that overcomes utilitarian, geographical and temporal frontiers. In order to offer a reading of Neptuno Alegórico, this research is founded upon three investigative theoretical frameworks that observe the work in its varied forms of writing and aesthetics.The first of these grasps the baroque and its theories/researches from the earliest ones like in Heirich Wölfflin (1888) to the most contemporary like in José Antonio Maravall (1997), Severo Sarduy (1989), Eugênio d’Ors (1990), Gilles Deleuze (1991), Lezama Lima (1988), Walter Benjamin (1984) and Fernando Rodríguez de la Flor (2002) in order to locate them near the experimental-scientific baroque poetics of the erudite nun in the America of the Golden Century; the second line of theory aims at perceiving the emblematics in Neptuno Alegórico stemming from the ideas of Andrea Alciato (1531) and his contemporary revisiting by means of the studies by Mário Praz (1963) and again by Fernando Rodríguez de la Flor (1995), so as to achieve an emblematic reading of the artistic descriptions in the canvases/paintings/lienzos elaborated by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; last but not least a third framework that points to understanding the work Neptuno Alegórico as it nears the mathematical combinatory investigation of Sebastián Izquierdo (1659) inserting it in other contemporary scholarly works that deal with art and science.