Speaking to Silent Ladies: Images of Beauty and Politics in Poetic Portraits of Women from Petrarch to Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

In sonnets 77 and 78 of the Rime sparse (1372), Francesco Petrarca writes to the painted portrait of his beloved Laura, painted by his friend Simone Martini, whom the poet came to know in Avignon. ¹ In the first, Petrarch delights in the portrait’s resemblance to Laura’s celestial beauty, suggesting that the painter must have been divinely inspired. ² In the second, however, Petrarch becomes disillusioned when the painted image fails to respond to his tender appeals. ³ Those who are familiar with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s poetic portraits, and especially the ones that are addressed to paintings of her friend and patron, the Condesa de Paredes (or Lísida), will recognize a similar disappointment to Petrarch’s in the colonial Mexican nun’s work. As Sor Juana laments in redondilla 89 and décimas 103, Lísida’s portrait is convincingly real at its surface (and indeed, it is capable of “destroying” the poet with its beauty), yet it is absent of real feeling: “Pues es rigor, si se advierte, / que, en tu copia singular, / estés capaz de matar e incapaz de condolerte,” Sor Juana complains in 89; and she wonders in 103,

Toco, por ver si escondido lo viviente en ti parece: ¿posible es, que de él carece quien roba todo el sentido? ⁴

Petrarch and Sor Juana may be separated by two continents and more than three hundred years of history, but their coinciding disappointment with painted portraits of the beloved suggests that they are similarly affected by the power of images to reveal the vicissitudes of identity and desire. As the portraits fail to respond, the poets are forced, like Narcissus, to face the beloved as a self-creation, or as a reflection of inner visions and longings.

From an historical standpoint, Petrarch and Sor Juana’s encounter with a painted portrait illuminates an overarching problem for both poets, and makes their comparison compelling: the dissonance between an internal image of the beloved and an external one in the portrait poems may be interpreted as the poet’s weighing of his or her individuality with conflicting external forms. Both Petrarch and Sor Juana can be characterized as poised between two worlds. Petrarch struggled to make the paradigms of antiquity resonate in the present, yet he was also deeply drawn to the local traditions of Avignon, particularly Provençal poetry, as María Rosa Menocal has pointed out in her book Shards of Love. ⁵ Sor Juana’s worlds, meanwhile, included the broader sphere of the Spanish empire, whose authority was embodied in the colonial political structures she lived within and the models of Spanish poetry she emulated, and the local realm, where she found inspiration in her own circumstance as a creole, woman poet and nun. Sor Juana’s incorporation of personal and local conventions—her female subjectivity, creole motifs, and the vernaculars of her community—into Spanish literary models reveals her various allegiances to these worlds. ⁶

The expression of cultural and intellectual identity for both Petrarch and Sor Juana, then, often involved a complex negotiation with a variety of images—past and present, classical and contemporary, imperial and regional. As I will show in this article, their contemplations of painted portraits of women transpose these negotiations of identity onto a literal plane, where “speeches” or poems to images of the beloved become the attempt to make contact with shifting, enigmatic images of the self. Petrarch’s appreciation of the impossibility of representing ideal beauty in the portrait of Laura is a metaphor for his own inability to draw an ideal literary “portrait” of the lady—and is thus analogous to his recognition of the inability of resurrecting another ideal image, or that of Rome, in his text, which is one of his central philosophical preoccupations. In Sor Juana’s poetic portraits, meanwhile, the vicereine’s “beauty” and corresponding “silence” become a vehicle for the creole Mexican poet’s reflection upon political models not as fixed...