“My original, a woman”

Whether or not, as some believe, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was an amateur painter herself, the baroque poet practiced the art of portraiture throughout her written works. Even when she does not engage specifically artistic or aesthetic subjects, Sor Juana is a visual, one could say, empirical, writer with a keen interest in how sight shapes knowledge and experience. Emilie Bergmann has established her investments in contemporary optics and color theory (“Optics”). But beyond the desire to apprehend and relate/to the world by means of vision and representation, several of Sor Juana’s poems (e.g., décimas 61, 102, 103, 126, 127, and especially 89) lament the false and seductive nature of portraits in general and painted women in particular.