Honorato juan-medalla

The left image shows a profile portrait of the bearded scholar Honoratus Joannius in a circular frame with a Latin inscription. To the right, the reverse of the medal features an allegorical female figure standing beside a tree and an altar inscribed with the words 'SPE FI NIS'. The engraving is set within a page of Latin text from a 17th-century treatise on political archetypes.

Published in Athanasius Kircher's 'Principis Christiani Archetypon Politicum' (1672), this work applies Kircher's interest in symbolic and archetypal representations to the sphere of political virtue. It celebrates Honorato Juan, the tutor to Prince Carlos of Spain, as a model of the learned advisor within the Christian Neoplatonic tradition of the 'ideal prince'.