ABSTRACT
The Kircherian collection acquainted audiences with uncertainty and exposed the fallibility of their senses even as it displayed a universe that was difficult, perhaps impossible to understand completely. These same principles also shaped a series of important natural philosophical texts written by Kircher over more than twenty years. These works presented their audiences with images and descriptions of phenomena that encouraged a movement between the exercise of the eyes and the exercise of the mind in a fashion that resembles nothing so much as a kind of meditation. Niccolò Cabeo had juxtaposed image and text so as to foster a many-layered understanding of the magnet, doing so within the self-conscious confines of the neo-Aristotelian textbook. Kircher, by contrast, labored under no such confines in his own texts, which were exuberantly syncretic attempts to connect together any number of disparate things: Nature and Art, seen and unseen, known and unknown. While his museum in the Collegio Romano used spectacle and artifice to expose the hidden foundations of nature, in these works Kircher depended upon images and emblems to accomplish the same goal.
