Indigenous image theory
Barbara E MundyPliny the Elder's Natural History, which contains an account of the origins of painting, offered sixteenth-century European artists a gift as they struggled to advance the status of painting as an intellectual rather than a mechanical art. The Roman authority was also read by Indigenous intellectuals in New Spain; they described their autochthonous painting practice in an account written in the Nahuatl language to respond to Pliny. This article offers a new translation of their account and a careful analysis that draws on recent work by material scientists to construct an Indigenous ontology of the image, and gives a comparison to the Plinian ideal. Crucial to both accounts is the role of the shadow as it relates to the nature of representation.
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LOPES, Cristina M. G.(2020) PAINTING/MAKING; THE QUESTION OF MEANINGS AND VALUES. In JORGE, Vítor O. (coord.) - Modos de Fazer/Ways of Making. Porto: CITCEM, p. 315-321
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This work seeks to give some contributions related to my painting, the process of making as well as to my philosophical research. I try that my fields of inquiry, are not just products of complex historically contingent circumstances, but constructs of the ontological dimension of my paintings as a medium of individuation. Therefore I consider that thinking about the meanings and the values and going beyond a historically and philosophically interrelated conceptual dichotomies is important to increase critical awareness. The late 20 th century saw those dichotomies sometimes come under convergence, in fields as diverse as those closest to physical science, such as the philosophy of science, and human sciences which traditionally focused on societies that used to be characterized as lacking science and even history, such as anthropology (and prehistoric archaeology). Many factors have been involved, including the socio-cultural changes that have gradually challenged the predominant pictures of the world.
Visual Culture and Indigenous Agency in the Early Americas
Brill, 2021
This volume explores how visual arts functioned in the indigenous pre- and post-conquest New World as vehicles of social, religious, and political identity. Twelve scholars in the field of visual arts examine indigenous artistic expressions in the American continent from the pre-Hispanic age to the present. The contributions offer new interpretations of materials, objects, and techniques based on a critical analysis of historical and iconographic sources and argue that indigenous agency in the continent has been primarily conceived and expressed in visual forms in spite of the textual epistemology imposed since the conquest.
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A Cognitive Approach to the Earliest Art
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2011
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Indigenous image theory
BARBARA E. MUNDY
Abstract Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, which contains an account of the origins of painting, offered sixteenth-century
European artists a gift as they struggled to advance the status of painting as an intellectual rather than a mechanical art. The
Roman authority was also read by Indigenous intellectuals in New Spain; they described their autochthonous painting practice in
an account written in the Nahuatl language to respond to Pliny. This article offers a new translation of their account and a careful
analysis that draws on recent work by material scientists to construct an Indigenous ontology of the image, and gives a comparison
to the Plinian ideal. Crucial to both accounts is the role of the shadow as it relates to the nature of representation.
Keywords
Florentine Codex; Mexica painting; codices; New Spain; Pliny the Elder; Natural History; shadows
Introduction
What is the nature of the image? How does the image, as a
physical thing of human facture, correspond to the world?
What makes any one representation superior to another?
Q4 Such questions were widely discussed in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, and were afforded a widely available
and authoritative historiographic genealogy with the 1469
publication of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History in Venice. In
his work, Pliny seems not to confront such theoretical questions, but in his celebration of metalworkers, painters, and
sculptors of the past, his selection of the “inventors” and their
actions offers, in effect, the basis of a theory of the image and
its representational nature.
Central to his genealogy is the shadow, as Pliny asserted
that the origin of painting began with its outline:
all agree that it began with tracing an outline round a man’s
shadow and consequently that pictures were originally done
in this way, but the second stage when a more elaborate
method had been invented was done in a single color and
called monochrome, a method still in use at the present day.
[ … ] Ecphantus of Corinth is said to have been the first to
daub these drawings with a pigment made of powdered
earthenware. (35.5)1
In this same book, Pliny points to Philocles, an Egyptian,
and Cleanthes of Corinth, as the possible inventors of line
drawing, thereby setting down graphic practices as both fundamental and anterior to painting. Later, in part 11 of the
same book, he introduces tone, allowing that the art of painting “at last became developed in the invention of light and
shade” (35.11). And finally, painting reaches its apex—a stunningly precise visual mimesis—in book 36. It arrives in the
course of a contest between the master illusionists, Zeuxis and
Parrhasius, wherein Zeuxis’s painting of grapes was so close
to life that birds flew to it, expecting a sweet reward.
Parrhasius, however, was declared the winner after painting a
curtain so realistic that Zeuxis asked it to be pulled aside to
view the painting that it covered.
Pliny’s account is so attractive because it implicitly sets out
what image-making is, and what it is not, what its field of
operation is, and where the acceptable limits of artistic invention lie. First and foremost, as is clear in its evolutionary
stages, images are always tethered to the physical, known
world, and shadows bear witness to that inviolate connection.
As solid bodies block light, their actual real presence is registered by the shadow, that is, it is the shadow that reveals the
relationship between the image and the reality of its referent.
When the artist traces that outline, he or she is merely the
recorder of a physical reality, and as a result, the image is
never purely a flight of the creator’s imagination. But the
shadow—anchoring the image to the physical world—is not
an origin point without consequence or possibility: it robs the
figure of its third dimension and strips it of native color and
tone. These absences in turn offer and delimit the space for
artistic intervention. If we are to read in Pliny an ontology of
the image via its genesis, then it is clear that the image has a
predetermined beginning and end—the shadow is the necessary starting point, while the finishing point is the image’s
mimetic fidelity to visual appearances, as judged by its audience. As the art form of painting develops, in Pliny’s account,
the materials, such as the earthenware pigment of Ecphantus,
disappear, undetectable in the stunning illusion that the
painter uses them to produce. The ocular nature of the
image’s reception is offered without qualification, and
accepted without question.
Such an account of the image as an ocular phenomenon
and the spaces it leaves for the actions of the artist are part of
its ontology as it developed in the Mediterranean, later
spreading though Europe, and present today. In Pliny’s
genealogy, the earliest artists are the copyists of nature via the
shadow and later ones exercised a mental inventiveness to
achieve a full mimetic fidelity to nature, a compelling teleological narrative. The classical origins of the account offered
WORD & IMAGE, VOL. 0, NO. 0, 2023
https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2022.2160194
1
# 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
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early modern writers a gift as they struggled to advance the
status of painting as an intellectual rather than a mechanical
art.2 Pliny’s account has shaped the field of art history, particularly the imposition of a traditional limit on visual art, as
his emphasis on vision was amplified via the Enlightenment’s
idealist (as opposed to materialist) ocularity.3 In addition, it
draws attention to, if not delimits, the field of action for the
artist, who is called to direct his or her creative action in the
service of representing the natural world mimetically—with
mimesis’s goal to fool the eye so that the two-dimensional surface be mistaken for the three-dimensional world. Ocularity is
indispensable: the moment one touches the painted surface,
or attempts to smell the painted flower, bringing other senses
into play, the illusion dies.
Within a closed system, the ontology of the painted image
rarely opens itself to question. But when one image-ontology
is perceived from the viewpoint of another system, its boundaries and limits are shown in sharp relief, and it becomes possible to see what was earlier naturalized. Rarely, though, are
we given the opportunity for such cross-examination, because
too often the objects of inquiry are not commensurate. But in
the case of the sixteenth century, we have an extraordinary
reflection on the nature of the image created by bilingual
Indigenous intellectuals working within New Spain, in the city
of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, which had formerly been the Aztec
(or Mexica) capital. They were steeped in an autochthonous
image tradition that developed independently from that of
Europe; at the same time, their education made them aware
of alternate, imported ideas of image-making. Their account
of Indigenous image-making is valuable in and of itself, but
also offered them, and consequently us, a vantage point from
which to reflect upon Pliny and his legacy.
The text comes from the three-volume Historia general de las
cosas de Nueva Espa~na, also known as the Florentine Codex, a
book written by Indigenous intellectuals who worked under
the direction of a Spanish Franciscan, Bernardino de
Sahag
un, c.1575–77. Among their number were the tlahcuilohqueh (sing. tlahcuiloh), the painters (figure 1).4 The book was
written in parallel columns of Spanish and Nahuatl, the dominant language of Central Mexico, and several of its authors
were fluent in Latin, Spanish, and Nahuatl; the contributions
of the tlahcuilohqueh are visible in the abundant illustrations
that fill the volumes. These men were deeply aware of the
Mesoamerican tradition of image-making (the culture region
of present-day Mexico and Guatemala), a tradition that had
been fully autonomous up until the 1520s, when the Spanish
Invasion brought down the Aztec Empire and deposed the
rulers of the Mexica. At the same time, the group who created
the Florentine Codex also knew their Pliny, as well as
imported European artworks, as their education prepared
them to be bicultural.5 As we will see, the passage offers an
implicit critique of the European tradition—as its authors
2
BARBARA E. MUNDY
understood it, with its focus on representation as largely
optical experience—from the vantage point of a
Mesoamerican one.
In this essay I offer a new translation of the Nahuatl text,
which appears in volume 3, book 10, chapter 8, folio 18v,
focusing on key vocabulary to allow us an understanding of
what I think of as “Indigenous image theory.” Central to this
theory was the role of materials, and references to them saturate the passage, revealing their distinctive properties. While
other scholars have translated the passage, dominant interpretations have underscored the painters’ interactions with the
larger society, and the painter’s role in the creation of the
painted book, the most highly regarded of the painter’s productions.6 Drilling down into some of the metaphorical language and carefully analyzing some elements of Indigenous
paintings will allow us to see how the theory expressed in the
text manifests itself in the image, and to reach an end goal of
understanding painterly invention, as revealed in the spaces
between language and practice. To go beyond the visible
register also calls for a consideration of recent findings of
material scientists who have been analyzing extant paintings
held in collections in Europe, the United States, and Mexico.
This essay triangulates between three gravitation points to
reveal the nature of image-making and creative intervention:
a translation of a Nahuatl text about the painter and painting;
the research of material scientists into the material properties
of Mesoamerican images, and finally, a consideration at the
heart of both image-making traditions: the shadow.
Translation of the text
The important passage that describes a painter is included in
a chapter headed with the unprepossessing description of
“ways of gaining a livelihood,” which starts by discussing carpenters, stonecutters, and masons, before moving on to
scribes, singers, sages, and physicians. Unlike most of the
other occupations described in this section, where the writers
were drawing on second-hand knowledge, this one describes
the activities of many of the creators themselves. At the same
time, it is surprising in a book where the columns of text are
interspersed with images, sometimes three or more to a page,
frequently framed in black to create a visual delineation
between text and image, that this chapter devoted to painters
has no portraits of them. This absence is even more significant
in that the codex’s images do not just illustrate the text, but
also often provide independent or complementary information (it is more apt to call them “illuminations” rather than
“illustrations”).7 Instead, it is the graphic marks of alphabetic
letters that compose the portrait of the painter, a disjunction
that might have been less jarring to the work’s creators.
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Q5
Q1
Figure 1. Bernardino de Sahag
un and others (Mexico), The description of the tlahcuilo, Florentine Codex, bk. 10, ch. 8, c.1575–77. Ink and pigment on
European paper. 31.0 21.2 cm. Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Ms. Med. Palat. 220, vol. 3, f. 18v. By permission of the MiC; any further
reproduction by any means is prohibited.
WORD & IMAGE
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At the root of the noun tlahcuiloh is the verb ihcuiloa, which
means to make a graphic mark on a surface. In the
Mesoamerican tradition of pictography, there was no tension
between the graphic mark used to create an image and the
mark used to create a logograph: both were pictorial signs.
But the adoption of the Latin alphabet in the late 1530s
cleaved “word” from “image.” While the term tlahcuiloh was
sometimes used by intellectuals who deployed alphabetic
script, by the time the Florentine was composed in the 1570s,
such usage was uncommon in Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Instead,
indigenous professionals who had mastered the technology of
alphabetic script opted for the term escribano (a loan word
from Spanish meaning “scribe,” or “notary”).8 Reflecting this
schism, the passage devoted to the tlahcuiloh emphasizes painting, and the creation of the painted image.
The essay is structured as follows. The next section is a
general description of the practices specific to the tlahcuiloh;
the following section describes the actions of the good tlahcuiloh; the final section describes the actions of the bad one.
While others who have translated the passage before me, discussed below, have decided to smooth out infelicities in the
target language, I opt for a translation that is awkward in
English but closer to the Nahuatl semantic field that corresponds to the practice of painting, if not to the literary and
poetic value of the passage.
Tlahcuiloh: in tlahcuiloh, tlīlli, tlapalli, tlīlatl ialhuil; toltecatl
tlachīhchīuhqui
The painter-scribe: s/he who is the scribe, black ink, colored
dye, black ink-water are his/her cared-for-things. S/he is a
Toltec, an adorner/embellisher
Tlatecollaliani,
tlapallaliani
tlatecolaniani,
tlatlīlani,
tlīlpatlac,
tlapaltecini,
S/he is an orderer of things with charcoal, s/he is a
capturer of things from charcoal, s/he is taker of things from
black ink, s/he is a diluter of black ink, s/he is a grinder of
colored dye, s/he is an orderer of colored dye
In cualli tlahcuiloh: mihmati yolteotl, tlayolteohuiani, moyolnonotzani
The good painter-scribe: s/he is prudent, s/he is
circumspect, s/he divines things with the heart, mediates
with the heart,
Tlatlapalpohuani, tlatlapalaquiani,
tlaxayacatiani, tlatzontiani
tlacehuallotiani,
tlahcxitiani,
S/he is one who assigns colored dye to things, performs
colored dye insertions, provides things with shadows,
provides feet on things, provides faces on things, provides
hair on things
4
BARBARA E. MUNDY
Tlahcuiloa,
tlatlapalaquia,
tlaxochiihcuiloa, toltecati
tlacehuallotia,
xochitlahcuiloa,
S/he writes/paints things, s/he performs colored dye
insertions, s/he provide things with shadow, s/he paints
florally, s/he paints with flowers, s/he becomes a Toltec.
In ahmo cualli tlahcuiloh: iyolloquiquimil, tecualanih, texiuhtlatih,
tenencoh, tenenecoh
The bad painter-scribe: s/he has a wrapped up heart, s/he
angers people, s/he gets impatient with people, s/he is a
deceiver, s/he is a great deceiver
Tlatīcehua, tlatlapalmictia, tlatlayohuallotia,
tlaxolopihcachīhua, tlahciuhcachīhua, tlaīxtomahua
tlanenecuillalia,
S/he makes things pale, s/he colored dye-kills things, s/he
causes things to grow dark/obscure, s/he places things in a
twisted manner, s/he makes things foolishly, s/he makes
things in haste, s/he causes things to be absurd.9
Two aspects of the passage underscore the talent and the
social importance of the painter. The first is the use of the
term “Toltec” to name the painter. The Toltec lived in a previous epoch of civilization and were extraordinarily gifted
craftspeople. The use of the term here signals the antiquity of
the art of painting, as well as the high status accorded to its
practitioners.10 At the same time, the passage is clear that
painting is more than a mechanical act. On one level, the
insistence on the moral probity of painters can be connected
to the truth-value that was accorded to their creations, particularly religious manuscripts, as well as the wide range of
administrative documents necessary for the smooth functioning of a tributary empire, including genealogies, tribute registers, and cadastral records. At the same time, it alerts us to a
painter’s field of operation as existing beyond the visible—
were painting just the art of the visible, then even the talented
reprobate could be a good artist.
The text begins with a set of terms that includes in tlīlli in
tlapalli on the first line, which means “which is black ink,
which is colored dye.” One feature of the Nahuatl language is
the use of diphrases (difrasismos in Spanish) whereby a couplet
generates a metaphoric meaning. In tlīlli, in tlapalli is one such
couplet: an important sixteenth-century Spanish–Nahuatl dictionary attested to a phrase tlīlli tlapalli nictlalia (“to set down
black ink and colored dye”) as meaning “to offer a good
example.”11 In addition, it also served as a synecdoche for the
larger world of written/painted books. But in tlīlli, in tlapalli—
like the expression of a musical motif that repeats across a
composition, also speaks to the important role of the materials
that painters use. In the passage, these are identified as black
ink, charcoal, colored dyes, and flowers. In Nahuatl, a small
set of word stems can be combined and inflected in
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Table 1. Words derived from the four stems, tecolli, “charcoal,” tlīlli, “black ink,” tlapalli, “colored dye,” and xochitl, “flower.”
tecolli
tlīlli
tlapalli
xochitl
tlatecollaliani
tlatecolaniani
tlīlatl
tlatlīlani
tlīlpatlac
tlapaltecini
tlapallaliani
tlatlapalpohuani
tlatlapalaquiani
tlatlapalaquia
tlatlapalmictia
xochitlahcuiloa
tlaxochiihcuiloa
thousands, if not tens of thousands, of different ways (and
unlike Spanish, words are not gendered). In the passage, word
stems pertaining to these four materials are used repeatedly
(table 1). While much of the discussion of materials seems
straightforward, the text emphasizes some actions and these
merit explanation in relation to a painting practice:
“ordering,” “capturing,” and finally “killing.”
Translation hermeneutics: from tlamatinime to
tlahcuilohqueh
Bernardino de Sahag
un effected the first translation of this
text. His Spanish version appears alongside the Nahuatl text
in the volume, and it largely fails to capture the semantic
complexity of the Nahuatl. It reads:
El pintor, es su officio, saber usar de colores, y debuxar o se~nalar, las
imagines con carbon, o hazer buena mezcla de colores y sabellas muy
bien moler y mezclar. El buen pintor, tiene buena mano, y gracia en el
pintar, e considera muy bien lo que ha de pintar, y matiza muy bien la
pintura y sabe hazer las sombras, y los lexos, y pintar y follajes. El
mal pintor, es de malo y boto ingenio, y por esto es penojo y enojoso, y
no responde a la esperanza de que da la obra: ni da lustre en lo que
pinta y matiz mal, todo va con confuso, ni lleva compas, o proporcion
lo que pinta, por pintallo de priesa.
[The painter, it is his craft to know how to use
colors, and draw or lay out images with charcoal, or
make a good mix of colors, and know very well how to
grind and mix them. The good painter has a skilled
hand, and elegance in what he paints, and carefully
considers what he has to paint, and shades the paint
well, and knows how to make shadows and distances,
and paint and foliage. The bad painter is of evil and
dull mental capacity, and for this is disagreeable and
annoying, and does not meet the expectations for his
work; he adds no luster to what he paints, and shades
badly so that all is confused; he does not use a
compass, or make what he paints proportional because
he paints in haste.]12
s/he is an orderer of things with charcoal
s/he is a capturer of things from charcoal
black ink-water
s/he is taker of things from black ink
s/he is a diluter of black ink
s/he is a grinder of colored dye
s/he is an orderer of colored dye
s/he is one who assigns colored dye to things
s/he is one who performs colored-dye insertions
s/he performs colored-dye insertions
s/he colored-dye kills things
s/he paints florally
s/he paints with flowers
Notably, Sahag
un avoids the use of the term “Toltec,”
which conveys both the status and the antiquity of the profession. He offers no interpretation of in tlīlli in tlapalli as a metaphor, nor does he mention flowers. In the twentieth century,
scholars rectified the semantic flattening of Sahag
un’s translation. Key to restoring the text to its contextual richness was a
metaphorical reading of its terms, in particular glossing in tlīlli
in tlapalli as a synecdoche for written/painted books. The
German scholar Eduard Seler (1849–1922) emphasized this
point in his published interpretation of one of the surviving
pre-Hispanic books, the Codex Borgia, whose content is
entirely pictographic and concerns sacred ritual and myth. To
make the connection, Seler cited a passage also in the
Florentine Codex that describes the migrations of the Mexica
from desert site of origin, and describes the wise men, tlamatinime (sing: tlamatini). They carried with them in tlīlli, in tlapalli,
in amoxtli (amoxtli means “book”), the first two terms subsets of
the third.13 Not just anyone could read and interpret pictographic books, and the tlamatinime were the masters of bodies
of knowledge recorded within.14
By subsuming the couplet in tlīlli, in tlapalli into the larger
category of the sacred painted book, rather than, say, the category of all painting, Seler thus pulled into the foreground the
tlamatinime, the books’ interpreters, rather than the tlahcuilohqueh, their creators. His choice could have been determined
by his own activity: in the study of the Codex Borgia, Seler
functioned as a kind of modern-day tlamatini, drawing on the
Nahuatl language, his vast erudition drawn from other related
pre-Hispanic books, as well as knowledge of archeological
research to decode the meaning that was embedded in the
iconography of each of the rare codex’s pages. In focusing on
the iconography, that is, the abstract meanings of the pictography shared across sacred texts, Seler was engaging in the
kind of decipherment of meaning that other anthropologists
across the world had been undertaking since the seventeenth
century. Seler’s choices had enduring effects and the centrality
of iconographic research is still dominant in studies of
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Mesoamerican
manuscripts,
particularly
among
anthropologists.
The favoring of the ideational, rather than the material, of
the tlamatinime over the tlahcuilohqueh, and the conflation of in
tilli in tlapalli with the book (amoxtli) also marks the work of the
scholar of pre-Hispanic Mexico Miguel Leon-Portilla (1926–
2019). In his seminal Filosophia nahuatl, he describes the tlamatinime as the owners of writing: in tlīlli in tlapalli as it was set
down in books (codices), which in turn “preserved important
philosophical ideas.”15 If the tlamatinime offered a genealogy
for Seler and his role as a modern-day interpreter of the codices, they served an even more important role for LeonPortilla, who was among a group of nationalist historians
intent on revalorizing Mexico’s unique Indigenous past. This
meant endowing that past with an ancient and autochthonous
philosophical tradition, existing before the arrival of
Europeans to the Americas, akin to that of the Classical
world.
Focusing on the tlamatinime and his relationship to the
painted book in Filosophia nahuatl, Leon-Portilla whittled down
the passage about the painter and deemphasized the materials
of painting.
The good painter: a Toltec [artist] of the black and red ink,
creator of things with black ink; the good painter:
understanding God in his heart, who divines things with his
heart, who discusses with his own heart. He knows colors,
he applies them, he shadows. He draws feet, faces, outlines
the shadows, achieves a perfect finish, as if he were a Toltec,
he paints the colors of all the flowers.16
Leon-Portilla gestures, both in the translation and his introduction of it, to the social role of the painter as a transmitter
of sacred knowledge, particularly in the lines “understanding
God in his heart, who divines things with his heart, who discusses with his own heart.” In addition, he interprets the passage to emphasize the painter’s mastery of codes that will
make his or her images recognizable to a public (“he draws
feet, faces [ … ] he paints the colors of all the flowers”). While
the focus on the painter served to introduce this important figure to a broad public, the translation also responded to certain exigencies of its moment: in this work, first published in
1956, Leon-Portilla omits the section on the bad painter to
celebrate better the positive intellectual achievements from
Mexico’s ancient past. But in doing so, he also dulled the contrasts that throw into high relief the meaning of painting practice and its departure from a purely ocular art, as we will see
below. In this and other works by him written during his long
career, he frequently deployed the opening couplet (in tlīlli in
tlapalli), and he narrowed down the meaning of tlapalli, which
can refer to all colors, to one: red. For him, the couplet came
to serve as a reliable synecdoche for the world of books and
6
BARBARA E. MUNDY
learning and as shorthand for otherworldly knowledge. The
unintentional result was to underscore the products of the
painter—and the realm of his or her creative action—as intellectual achievements, rather than material and technical
ones.17 Leon-Portilla’s painter, then, was an unwitting creation of the Enlightenment’s re-inscription of Renaissance
theory, whose emphasis on painting as an intellectual practice,
rather than a mechanical one, underwrites the discipline of
art history.
While never exploring the physical appearance of ink and
pigment on the manuscript page, Leon-Portilla did open the
door to the idea that colors, particularly tlīlli and tlapalli, could
have more than representational and ocular value—that is,
they might be used to signify something beyond the black and
colored surfaces of objects. His rationale for understanding
tlapalli as simply red seems to derive from the frequent juxtaposition of black and red in Nahuatl mythology, which
“signifies the representation and the knowledge of things that
are difficult to understand that pertain to other worlds.”18
Despite his focus on the social world of the painter and his
capacities to create meaningful representations, Leon-Portilla
never expressed much interest in exploring the connection
between textual accounts and the physical evidence of the
manuscript page. Indeed, shifting from the ideational to the
material, which corresponded to painting’s intellectual side
and its base physical one, would have demoted the artist from
a thinker to a craft worker. Nor did Seler, whose iconographic
approach depended on textual accounts and whose use of line
drawings—a form of visual exposition made necessary by the
technological limitations of his time—ultimately served to
sever representations from their material contexts and distanced them from the hand of the creator.
The text and painting practices
In restoring painting as a material practice, one would
seem to run the risk of simply inverting the dichotomy of
mind/body, intellectual/mechanical, that is, simply imposing
a Classical/European framework on an autonomous
American practice, but reversing its hierarchies, without really
addressing the relationship between representation and material practice. A breakthrough in understanding that relation^egota
ship came in the work of the art historian D
urdica S
Tomac (1946–2020). Having studied with Leon-Portilla as
an undergraduate, her doctoral studies in France allowed her
to undertake a close examination of the Codex Borbonicus, a
rare pictographic manuscript produced in the Valley of
Mexico c.1525–30 and held by the Bibliotheque de
l’Assemblee nationale (figure 2).19 Because of its early date,
^egota) that parts of the
some scholars argued (among them S
Borbonicus were pre-Hispanic, created by artists with no
exposure to a non-autochthonous tradition. While it is now
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Figure 2. Anon. creators (Nahua, Valley of Mexico), Pre-Hispanic rituals, Codex Borbonicus, f. 26, c.1530–40. Ink and pigment on amatl (fig-bark) paper.
Reproduced courtesy: Bibliotheque de l’Assemblee nationale, Paris, France.
accepted to be post-Contact, it cleaves closely to earlier traditions. Its three sections comprise a calendrical section of eighteen pages, each devoted to a trecena, a “week” of thirteen days,
a second short section on the origins of the calendar, and then
a third section depicting some of the feasts of the veintenas, the
twenty-day “month.” While the US art historian Donald
Robertson (1919–84) earlier posited that the even black
“frame line” was a diagnostic feature of a pre-Hispanic paint^egota went further in her exploration of the
ing tradition, S
relation between material practices and representational
ends.20 She discussed the role of the carefully applied black
line, that is, tlīlli, in defining forms, and even more importantly, in providing a frame for the color fill. To her, the framing line was more than just the figure’s outline, that is, it had
a conceptual rather than merely representational value, as
important feature of Mexica aesthetics. She connected it to
the visual “frames” found in Mexica sculpture, such as the
raised borders around a central image field in stone boxes. As
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she argued, the frame—be it the carefully applied black line of
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the pigment or the defined frame around the image on a sculp732
ture—played a key role in “defining it [i.e. the representation]
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as a totality, as an independent and autonomous entity.”21
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Her work, grounded in a close examination of materials
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and the painted surface and emphasizing the role of the black
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line, brought scholars one step closer to a reassessment of the
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couplet in tlīlli, in tlapalli as part of a new hermeneutic that
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was centered on the tlahcuilohqueh and their engagement with
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materials, rather than tlamatinime and the iconographies of the
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sacred book. This would be followed by other scholars. Based
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on a suggestion by Berenice Alcantara Rojas, a scholar of the
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Nahuatl language, the art historian Diana Magaloni argued,
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as part of her analysis of the materials used in a sixteenth-cen744
tury manuscript map from the Valley of Mexico, that:
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a key to unlock the past world of the tlacuiloque is provided
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by the term that they used to refer to their painted creations,
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in tlīlli in tlapalli, a couplet characteristic of Nahuatl rhetoric,
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which
translates as “the black ink, the colored pigments.”
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The couplet brings to the fore the essential importance of
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the materials used for painting, those inks and pigments that
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constituted the tla[h]cuilo[h]que[h]’s palette.22
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Magaloni has had a longstanding interest in materials, stem755
ming from her early training was as a conservator of pre756
Hispanic murals, and her work has been instrumental in a kind
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of intellectual repatriation—retrieving the field of in tlīlli in tla758
palli from the possession of the tlamatinime, where it was con759
strued as abstract knowledge and restoring it to the world of
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the tlahcuilohqueh, where it is regrounded in the material world.
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Text and image reunited
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A close-up of a detail from the Codex Borbonicus reveals the
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ligature between the couplet in tlīlli, in tlapalli found in the
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Florentine text and the painted image (figure 3). The figure
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shows a stalk of maize growing from a green field. Its stalk is a
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deep red, as is the maize cob on the left, which boasts yellow
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silks outlined in red. The plume-like tassels at the top are yel769
low, as is the cob on the right, its pink silks, also outlined in
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red, hanging over the edge of the platform-like field. This fig771
ure is created by the application of a careful black line (the
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tlīlli of the couplet), and then this outlined figure has colored
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dye (the tlapalli) applied or inserted within its boundary frame.
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775 Q9 The sequence–outline, then colored dye, is carefully observed
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in this and other manuscripts. It is visible in the red cob at the
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left and in the stalk, where the black outlines have red pig778
ment on top of them, and they appear different from the
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darker black outlines of the green leaves, where the painter
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more carefully observed the black boundary line. In numerous
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other instances in the work, the pigment is visible over the
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black frameline.
8
BARBARA E. MUNDY
Figure 3. Detail of figure 2: a maize plant with red and yellow cobs, yellow and pink silks, and a tassel of four twisted strands at top.
This figure also reveals the nature of the pairing tlatlapalpohuani, tlatlapalaquiani, found in the passage (“S/he is one
who assigns colored dye to things, performs colored dye
insertions”)—once the painter “assigned” the color, he or she
then “inserted” color into this defining boundary. But such
assignment was not arbitrary—tlatlapalpohuani combines tlapalli
with the verb pohua, “to count as, or to pertain to” to convey
not only the idea of “assignment” but also a kind of belonging
to, as if the colors have an inalienable relationship to the
entity defined by the black line. Figure 3 from the Codex
Borbonicus shows as much. The patterns seen in this image—
the deep red stalk of the maize, the red and yellow cobs, the
yellow and pink silks, are largely conventional rather than
entirely naturalistic. Similar color patterning appears in a later
manuscript, the Beinecke Map, a single large sheet of amatl
(fig-bark) paper, whose surface is dominated by a map of the
rectilinear fields of individual smallholders, most of them identified by a head with a pictographic name (figure 4). Irrigated
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Figure 4. Anon. creators (Nahua, Mexico City), The Beinecke Map, c.1564–80. Ink and pigment on amatl (fig-bark) paper. 72.5 177.5 cm. Reproduced
courtesy: Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Figure 5. Detail of figure 4 (rotated by ninety degrees counterclockwise):
conventionally rendered maize plants with red stalks, yellow cobs with
red silks, and a tassel of two twisted strands at top.
plots to the right of the map feature stalks of maize, and these,
too, have conventional coloring: the yellow cob featuring red
silks, and the stalk red as well (figure 5). Unlike the
Borbonicus, the Beinecke painter did not use green pigment,
and used a closely related blue instead, but it is clear that the
same set of representation conventions guided both.
The Florentine passage also discusses another black pigment, tecolli, or charcoal: “S/he is an orderer of things with
charcoal [tlatecollaliani], s/he is a capturer of things from
charcoal [tlatecolaniani].” Another indigenous manuscript,
the Codex Mendoza, provides abundant evidence of the use
of charcoal (as opposed to inked) lines for preliminary
drawing. The Mendoza was made sometime in the mid1540s by a group of highly skilled tlahcuilohqueh working in
Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Employed by a European patron,
they created a three-part book comprising an account of the
conquests of the Mexica rulers, an account of the tribute
delivered to the Valley of Mexico by vassal states, and a
description of the occupations and lifeways of members of
Mexica society. While a Spanish speaker contributed the
book’s alphabetic text, the rest of the content is rendered in
pictographic script that shows the mastery of its painters.
Figure 6 shows folio 2r, a full-page image that begins the
historical chronical. Figure 7, a detail of the lower right corner, reveals that a delicate line, which appears to be charcoal without any binder, was laid down first, as the artist
was lightly sketching out the placement of the figures on the
page. The charcoal sketch is followed on the page, as it is in
the passage, by the application of an enduring and visually
dense black ink, and then, finally, colored pigment. So
beyond in tlīlli, in tlapalli, the Florentine passage pays particular attention to specific materials and the concrete processes of image-making.
Much of this can be seen with the naked eye, but magnification shows more correspondence of the text to image. For
instance, the use of the descriptor tlapaltecini to describe the
painter, brings together tlapalli with teci (“to grind”). For dried
pigments, painters would have had to judge the specific levels
of granularity that allowed a pigment to reach its peak coloristic qualities before mixing it with a binder. A microphotograph of the Beinecke Map, prepared with traditional
pigments, shows a visibly granular surface of a patch of blue
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Figure 6. Anon. creators (Nahua, Mexico City), Codex Mendoza, f. 2r, c.1542–45. Ink and pigment on European paper. 21 32 cm. Courtesy: Bodleian
Libraries, Ms. Arch. Selden A. 1.
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Figure 8. Detail of figure 4: microphotograph showing Maya blue pigment, where individual pigment granules are visible.
Materials and concrete processes
Figure 7. Detail of figure 6: underdrawing in charcoal, with black ink
and blue pigment overlay.
that offers visible evidence of the grinding process undertaking
by the painter (figure 8).
In sum, when we move away from the outward-oriented
hermeneutic frame deployed by Seler, Leon-Portilla, and
others, which emphasized the connections to the world of
books and knowledge, and highlighted the painter’s social
function, we can see how much of the passage deals with very
concrete processes and materials. Woven through the
Florentine passage are four terms that seem to offer a basic
inventory of the essential materials used in painting: tlīlli,
tecolli, tlapalli, and xochitl, that is, black ink, charcoal, colored
dye, and flowers. Moving beyond the visible surface, and
turning to the work of conservation professionals and laboratory scientists on manuscripts, what can scientific analysis—
which brings us into realms of knowledge not visible to the
human eye—offer to the passage’s discussion of materials?
And can a materially inflected interpretation shed light on
one of the more enigmatic phrases of the passage: “s/he colored dye-kills things”?
While the passage on the painter revolves around four materials, another section of the Florentine Codex offers a more
ample catalogue of colors, and describes the kinds of flowers
and other plant materials, that is, organic materials, along
with a few minerals, that were used for pigments.23 In the
past two decades, the work of material scientists has attested
to the widespread use of these inventories, frequently confirming information that the Florentine laid out nearly five hundred years ago. Research teams based in Mexico,24 Italy,25
Canada,26 France,27 the Netherlands,28 and the United
States29 have spearheaded groundbreaking work on the materials of sixteenth-century Indigenous manuscripts, some of
them from the Valley of Mexico, where the Florentine Codex
was written. Some research involved sampling, which,
although minimally destructive, still results in some loss of the
original material, but is the most precise. Fortunately, noninvasive photographic techniques are quite illuminating.
Ultraviolet (UV) and infrared (IR) photography can reveal differences between materials used in the same painting, so that,
for instance, when two areas of a blue color look similar under
visible light, but different under UV or IR, they are probably
produced by different materials. IR light, since it is outside of
the color spectrum, will make paintings look grey to the
human eye. With false-color infrared (FCIR), a color is
assigned to a certain set of wavelengths produced by exposure
to infrared light; in FCIR photographs of a painting using
indigo, an important dyestuff in the Americas, the zones of
indigo-based pigment will appear pink. Over the last decade,
researchers have been refining the use of surface-enhanced
Raman spectroscopy (SERS), a non-destructive technique
that uses waves outside the visible spectrum to refract off molecules in a sample. Molecules have distinctive spectra, like the
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fingerprints of an individual, so finding the SERS spectrum of
chromophores, the color-producing molecule, can lead to
identification of the chromophore molecule in pigment. The
findings of research scientists related to the important categories, tlīlli, tecolli, tlapalli, and xochitl, add another dimension to
understanding the activities of the painter, and lead us to
understand better the wide semantic field of pigments that
reached beyond chromatic value.
Tlīlli is in all known cases a pigment created from carbon,
with a chemical signature that clearly distinguishes it from
iron-gall inks commonly used in Europe. For instance, in
2009, a team of scholars was allowed to sample the Beinecke
Map, made perhaps a decade before the Florentine was written. The laboratory analysis of Richard Newman and
Michele Derrick confirmed the use of materials noted in the
Florentine’s description of the painter,30 and further, their
analysis showed that the black lines that defined the figures
were almost exclusively carbon, corresponding to tlīlli. The
faint guidelines, visible in figure 7, that I identify as tecolli have
not been sampled, to the best of my knowledge, but may also
be carbon based. A common byproduct of burning wood, carbon (sometimes called lampblack) pigment is widely available
and chemically stable, so it does not change color, nor does it
interact with substrates, as can the corrosive iron gall.
Although carbon can derive from bones (boneblack), none of
the analysis of traditional black pigments has revealed the
presence of bones. Granular and powdery in its natural state,
lampblack needs to be mixed with a binder to control its
application. These binders—probably organic ones—have
been tricky to identify, but when used to create lines, they
result in a slightly glossy and elevated line rising from the surface of the substrate.
Tlapalli, is a semantically capacious term often used for
dyes and pigments in general, and the most important of all
of them was clearly a red dye, nocheztli, derived from cochineal; it is this pigment that begins the Florentine Codex’s catalogue of colors. This was produced by a scale insect
(Dactylopius coccus) that lives on the nopal cactus, unlike another
available red, which was an earth pigment, derived from
hematite. Scientists have detected its presence widely on
manuscripts, including ones made before the Spanish
Invasion, such as the Codex Fejervary-Mayer and the Codex
Cospi.31 And the use of cochineal persisted in works with a
post-1520 date: the Codex Mendoza, the Beinecke Map, and
the Cruz-Badianus Herbal.32 An indicator of cochineal, as
discussed by Newman and Derrick, is carminic acid, which
produces a distinct spectrum.33 While other dyes were used in
painting, nocheztli was the most important member of the class
of tlapalli.
The third element highlighted in the Florentine passage is
xochitl, “flower.” For a long time organic colorants, such as
those derived from the petals of flowers, prepared so that they
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yield up their characteristic chromophore molecules, have
been very difficult to detect in a laboratory; for instance, they
yield none of the easy-to-detect spectra of metals. And many
of the chromophores that have been most attractive to
painters over time can offer intense color in very small
amounts, making them difficult to detect experimentally. But
slowly scientists have been establishing the spectra of the
plants used as dyes, aided by SERS, and are finding that several of them were flowers. By 2012, a team led by E.
Casanova-Gonzalez homed in on colorants known from historical sources, a number of them produced from plants
rather than specifically flowers (such as muitle, or mohuitl
[Jacobina spicigera] and zacatlalli [Cuscuta americana]; one
chromophore-producing flower, the Mexican marigold, or
cempohualxochitl (Tagetes erecta) was so common and its main
chromophore, quercetagetin, so well known that it was omitted from their study.34 More recently, in 2019, a team comprised of many of the same members, and led by M. A.
Garcia Bucio, was able to use SERS to produce spectra for
the principal Mexican organic yellow colorants.35 Still elusive
are the dyes produced by blue flowers.36 Because artists do
not work with pure chromophores but with pigments, their
spectra of laboratory-produced pigment will not necessarily
match with real-world spectra. Nonetheless, scientific work on
Mexican dyestuffs suggests that in the not-too-distant future
researchers will be able to corroborate firmly what the writers
of the Florentine Codex well knew: many pigments are
derived from flowers.
The selection (tlīlli, tlapalli, tecolli, xochitl) named in the
Florentine text on the painter is highly limited catalogue. Its
brevity is markedly different from the catalogue of colors in
book 11 that offers a longer list of color-producing substances,
many of which could be considered members of the broader
categories of xochitl and tlapalli. It includes goethite, or yellow
ochre (identified as tecozahuitl), an earth pigment naturally
occurring in clay soils, a pigment base that has been confirmed by research scientists.37 By turning to a larger body of
evidence—beyond the material composition of the pigments—we can better discern the complex Indigenous ideologies that lay behind some of the choices made in the passage,
not only to reach a better understanding of representational
codes but also to take up their challenge of the assumption,
set out by Pliny, that painting is simply an optical practice.
Black line
In the Florentine passage, five terms have the roots of tlīlli,
“black ink” and tecolli, “charcoal” (table 1). The role of black
ink, particularly when used as defining line, has received less
attention in recent scholarship, which has focused on colored
pigment. But we have seen its aesthetic importance in defining
the image as an autonomous field, setting it off from the
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substrate. In traditional manuscripts, one of the few instances
where black is not used as the defining outline appears in
images of footprints. Used to mark roads or signal the progress of a narrative, footprints are visual metaphors for passage. In the Beinecke Map, for example, footprints are set
upon an ochre-colored band at the right of the manuscript to
mark a road (figure 9). While conventional—rendered as a
hooked form with five small dots to register the impress of
toes—footprints are also entirely personal, and can be used to
distinguish the work of one artist from another.38 As a direct
mark of the body onto a surface, footprints emphasize that
painting is also an embodied practice, depending on intrinsic
qualities of the artist.
Carbon, the source of tlīlli and tecolli, sets these pigments
apart. Unlike tlapalli and xochitl, which required careful cultivation, or other pigments such as Maya blue that were the products of long-distance trade,39 the vegetal charcoal that was
processed into pigment was more widely available, perhaps
produced at the local hearth, where wood was the primary
fuel.40 In fact, the Florentine tells us that the carbon used in
pigment was from the smoke of pine pitchwood, most likely
captured from ceramic pots, which would build up a thick layer
on their exteriors as they were set over the fire for cooking.41
The origins of carbon that was the base of black pigment—the
byproduct of burning, and produced at the hearth—would
have been understood by a wide public, for whom the fabrication of exotic pigments such as Maya blue may have been
inscrutable.42 In addition, the location of its creation, the
household hearth, had important metaphysical dimensions.
Looking to a creation history recorded in the sixteenth century, Molly Bassett and Jeanette Peterson have posited that
black, along with red, are the two colors of creation. In the creation narrative recorded in the Florentine Codex, at the beginning of creation, the world was dark, without a sun, and so the
deities gathered at the site of Teotihuacan to create one. After
a failed attempt by another, the deity Nanahuatzin performed
self-sacrifice by hurling himself into a bonfire; out of the black
ashy fire pit, his body was transformed into a red orb, emerging
as the new sun, and this juxtaposition of black with red henceforth recalled world origin.43 Women would repeat this sacred
narrative on a daily basis, a mythic reenactment typical across
Mesoamerica, when at daybreak they coaxed a spark from the
banked ashes in the household hearth to light the fire needed
to warm the house and cook the food. Alfredo Lopez Austin
points out a further connection between the heat of the hearth
and the sun in describing how neonates were carefully warmed
by the fire following their birth in order to establish their tonalli,
a life energy that manifested itself as the heat of the human person, ultimately deriving from the sun itself.44
While tlīlli and tecolli both derived from carbon, visible evidence points to a semantic difference between tlīlli, used as an
Figure 9. Detail of figure 4: footprints marking the road on the left-hand edge.
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Figure 10. Detail of figure 4: don Diego Huanitzin.
opaque black line, and tecolli, applied as a semi-transparent
wash. The passage describes the artist as tlahcxitiani,
tlaxayacatiani, tlatzontiani (provid[ing] feet on things, provid[ing]
faces on things, provid[ing] hair on things). A detail from the
Beinecke Map shows a highly conventional representation of
don Diego Huanitzin, a ruler who held the important post of
gobernador (governor) in Mexico-Tenochtitlan (figure 10). His
seat, his turquoise miter, and his name glyph, attached to his
head with a thin black line, are all symbols that establish his
given name and his office. These elements of his identity are
ones accrued over time, and they contrast the triad of his
hair, his face, and his feet, all of them outlined clearly with
black line. His feet peep out from under his robe, his face is
clear in profile, and his black hair is rendered with carefully
articulated parallel lines. The triad is the “inalienable” facets
of his person, and hair is particularly important in protecting
the head from losing its life-giving tonalli, as well as serving as
a carrier of one’s tonalli.45 Black line (tlīlli) is here used to limn
the elements comprising the life-forces of the body. Tecolli,
used also as an opaque wash for Huanitzin’s hair, has an
ambiguous function.
On the fields rendered on the Beinecke Map, the names of
smallholders appear within the plots of lands that they tended,
and their hieroglyphic names, attached to heads, are set at the
midpoint of the vertical axis of each plot (figure 11). As can
be seen, its painters used a careful black line to distinguish the
profile, and rendered the owner’s black hair—that container
of tonalli—with the controlled application of parallel black
lines. The painters updated the map over time, and to record
the death of a smallholder and reassignment of his or her
plot, they inserted the head and name of the new owner, off
axis. They also marked the death of the original owner—
which the Nahuas believed resulted in the loss of tonalli, perceptible by the absence of body heat—in a conventional way,
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Figure 11. Detail of figure 4: a darkened face (below) and living smallholder (above). In front of the dead figure is a plant, growing horizontally
(not shown); the animal face to the right is a name glyph of the dead
man; and the pot above the living smallholder is his name glyph.
by painting over the face with semi-opaque wash of black pigment.46 Analysis revealed this deadening face paint also to be
carbon.47 While linked to the presence of tonalli, probably
because of its genesis within the generative hearth, carbon’s
meaning seems to have varied dependent on its application.
Applied as a line, its aesthetic value in defining a figure’s
autonomous form is clear, but it also could convey the presence of tonalli, as with the hair. When applied subsequently as
a monochromatic wash (tecolli), it conveyed its departure.
The use of a carbon pigment to mask the dead in the
Beinecke Map contrasts with the use of another carbon-based
dark pigment in the Codex Mendoza (figure 12). On this
manuscript, a pigment covers the bodies of figures identified
as living priests, powerful men whom the Mexica conceived
as having a surfeit of tonalli. Visual inspection reveals that the
color is quite different from the “deading” carbon on the
Beinecke Map: it is actually a complex dark purple, built from
a carbon base with an admixture of other chromophores,
almost certainly including cochineal. In other words, the
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Figure 12. Anon. creators (Nahua, Mexico City), Activities of Indigenous priests, Codex Mendoza, f. 63r, c.1542–45. Ink and pigment on European
paper. 21 32 cm. Courtesy: Bodleian Libraries, Ms. Arch. Selden A. 1.
“black” skin of priests is actually a highly saturated color. The
contrast of the two figures, the dead man and the living priest,
as well as the visually incommensurate manner of representing the dead (where pallor is most evident) suggests another
reason why carbon pigments were so important: they seem to
have been considered appropriate vehicle to mark presences
and fluctuations of tonalli, that is, a haptic rather than a visual
phenomenon.
Red
If black line marks the ground zero of creation, both cosmic
and painterly, red, derived from nocheztli, cochineal, is the
second most important color. Bassett and Peterson note their
linkage in the cosmic history cited above, where the red sun
rises from the black ash, like sparks stirred from embers. In
the process of manuscript painting, lines of black and red are
also paired, but their order is reversed. Microphotographs of
the Beinecke Map show the presence of three pale red lines—
which Newman and Derrick showed to share the spectrum of
carminic acid, one of the distinctive elements in nocheztli or
cochineal dye—that cross the manuscript to serve as guidelines, dividing it into four registers (figure 13).48 These may
not have been intended to be completely visible, as they overlaid the black lines to represent the division between the fields
of the smallholders, and the black pigment’s characteristic
density, if not its surface gloss, is visible in the photograph in
figure 13. Another large map, created in the same region as
the Beinecke Map, the Plano Parcial de la Ciudad de Mexico,
shows pale red lines used as preliminary guidelines, although
these have not been tested for cochineal.
Figure 13. Detail of figure 4: a red guideline over a lampblack line.
If tlīlli was associated with the creative forces of the hearth,
nocheztli had a slightly different semantic field, signaled by its
meaning, “cactus-fruit blood,” and revealed in an image in
the Florentine Codex that accompanies the discussion of colors in book 11 (figure 14). It contains a narrative sequence,
and at the top of the left image, a man in a short tunic gathers
outsize cochineal bugs that have infested the cactus pictured
in the background, their native habitat. In the left foreground,
the bugs on the ground ooze their nocheztli, which runs into a
square pan in the foreground. The image omits the subsequent preparation of this dyestuff as a lake (that is, the dye
would be combined with a binder to create a dry precipitate),
instead choosing to emphasize its nature as a type of blood.
Its use is shown on the right-hand side, where the painter sits
with a sheet of stiff paper in front of him, as he divides it into
four parts with three guidelines, similar to the guidelines of
the Beinecke Map.
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represented as well as what is used to represent it. Put in semiotic terms, the sign and the signifier are united, and the
“conventional” nature of representation—like that described
in Pliny—is brought to the edge of collapse.
The color of flowers
Figure 14. Bernardino de Sahag
un and others (Mexico), Portrait of the
scribe with nocheztli (cochineal), Florentine Codex, bk. 11, ch. 11,
c.1575–77. Detail. Ink and pigment on European paper. 31.0 21.2 cm.
Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Ms. Med. Palat. 220, vol. 3,
f. 216v. By permission of the MiC; any further reproduction by any
means is prohibited.
Blood (eztli) was another vital force as it coursed through
the veins of the body, and modern Nahuatl speakers believe it
to be the carrier of tonalli.49 Itself conceived of as the blood of
a plant, nocheztli was used represent human blood in a late sixteenth-century manuscript by a group of Indigenous painters
that illustrated the history of their community, Tlaxcala,
known as the Descripcion de la provincia de Tlaxcala (figure 15).50
The manuscript is almost entirely created in black line, and a
few of its pages feature a selective use of brilliant red, whose
distinctive color leads me to believe that it is cochineal. On
one page, it is used around the heart cavities of two sacrificial
victims to represent the blood that carried the offering of
tonalli. The conscious and selective use of this (presumably
nocheztli) pigment for blood suggests that the team of painters
who worked on the manuscript wanted to underscore the
homology between one kind of blood and another.
^egota noted a related connection between tlapalli and
S
human vitality existing in linguistic metaphor: “in Nahuatl, as
in Spanish, the metaphor ‘to have color’ refers to an alreadyformed man, one with character and strength”; losing control
of color was akin to being sapped of strength.51 Thus, when
we connect the couplet tlīlli tlapalli to its material base, we see
the expanse of the semantic field that the Florentine authors
wanted their readers to know, with black line presenting the
material byproduct of the sun’s creation, and nocheztli-based
red, that of blood, carrier of life’s vital energy. Carbon and
nocheztli, then, seem not to re-present visual phenomena, but
to co-present it—that is, red “blood” is what is being
16
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A consensus is emerging among scholars that colored pigment, as applied to the manuscript surface, could also connote
more than visual appearances of the things represented.52
Evidence that pigment should express the vital forces of the
thing represented, rather than merely its visual appearance, is
attested in the Codex Borgia, a religious manuscript painted
before the Invasion, perhaps from the Puebla–Tlaxcala
region. A detail from one of its pages shows two deer, set side
by side in areas defined by a red frameline (figure 16). The
one on the left is a living deer at the moment of it sacrifice,
shown by a large arrow piercing its body, releasing a corona
of blood, and with it, the animal’s animating tonalli. On the
right is the same, or a similar, deer, now dead, decorated with
jewels and feathers. Not only are its eyes closed, a sign of
death, but also the vibrant orange-brown pigment that
marked its living form has disappeared. It is difficult to tell
from extant photography if the dead deer is covered with
white pigment, or if the artist has simply allowed the white
stucco manuscript ground to serve as the deer’s “color.”
Irrespective of the material, the whiteness of the deer corresponds to its loss of vitality; for this reason, Mictlantecuhtli,
the deity of the underword, is also pictured as white in the
same manuscript. Magaloni holds that this conception
endured well beyond the Spanish Invasion, and has argued
that the pigments applied to the manuscript page were imagined as being a kind of skin of the entity represented and that
the relative intensity of the pigment used in the representation
was indexical to the vitality of the target and points to an
image of Mexica ruler Moteuczoma, who is pictured dead in
the Florentine Codex, and is painted largely in greyscale: “like
a sun without strength, his colors are dark and weak.”53
That a particular quality of a pigment, in this case, its saturation, could be used by the tlahcuilohqueh to convey the ontological status of the thing represented is a powerful and
provocative idea. It points to a radical difference between
color, as part of a Mesoamerican worldview, and its role in
sixteenth-century European art-making, particularly painting,
where color had a dual function: adding to the verisimilitude
of a representation and carrying a symbolic value. The
Florentine passage cues another idea: the meaning of colored
pigments comes not only from their chromatic range, but also
from their material base. Certainly, Mesoamerican creators of
pigments carefully selected and processed plants and flowers
for their chromophore molecules, as the research cited above
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Figure 15. Diego Mu~
noz Camargo and others, Sacrifice of victims in Tlaxcala, where red blood flows from the chest cavities, from Descripcion de la ciudad
y provincia de Tlaxcala, f. 239r, c.1585. Ink and pigment on European paper. Circa 31 22 cm. Reproduced courtesy: University of Glasgow Archives &
Special Collections, MS Hunter 242 (U.3.15).
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Figure 16. Anon. creators (Central Mexico), Two deer, Codex Borgia, pre-1520, p. 22. Detail. Pigment on parchment paper. Reproduced courtesy:
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reveals. Elodie
Dupey Garcıa has argued that because the
the reasons for Mexica imperial expansion. Why feathers?
1851
Both Alessandra Russo and Jill Leslie Furst have argued that
artists of the pre-Hispanic codices sought brilliance and lumi1852
feathers could be an indicator of a person’s tonalli.56 Worn or
nosity in their pigments, they were driven to seek a wide var1853
carried by the sacrificial victim, feathers could be used to
iety of organic dyes that were characterized by their clarity (as
1854
transfer the tonalli to another entity following the victim’s sacopposed to opacity) and their luminosity.54 She points out
1855
rifice, acting almost like a battery, capable of storing and then
that while earth materials were mostly employed in mural
1856
discharging the energetic force of tonalli. The natural luminospainting, manuscript painters opted for pigments made from
1857
ity of feathers, produced by their iridescence, was an indicator
plants and flowers. The specific use of flowers as a material
1858
of this “charge” of tonalli that they carried.57 By extension,
base, just as with black and red, connected them to a broader
1859
then, luminous pigment might also be considered an expressemantic field, emphasized by the Florentine writers in the
1860
sion of the inner force of the tonalli of a figure. Again, this
paired terms, xochitlahcuiloa, tlaxochiihcuiloa, “s/he paints flor1861
presents a radical departure from a European theory of the
ally, s/he paints with flowers.” The grammatical construction
1862
image, where the representation is a separate thing from the
of the second term points to pigment material, but the first of
1863
thing represented, the outcome of a centuries-long process of
the two links the act of painting with an entry into the
1864
separating representational images from sacred icons. Instead,
“Flowery World,” a paradisiacal, otherworldly zone for the
1865
feathers and pigment can be understood as co-presenting, or
Nahua that was characterized by multi-sensorial experiences
1866
even manifesting, the entities that they would otherwise be
and by “flowery speech,” an elevated style of discourse mas1867
understood to be "representing.”
tered by tlamatinime.55
1868
In many respects, the ideas that scholars are developing
1869
1870
about the meaning of luminous flower-based pigments are
Good painting versus bad painting, haptic painting
1871
unfolding in tandem with ideas about luminous feathers, a
material widely used in Mesoamerican art and performance.
The nature of the painter’s work, particularly the role Q12 1872
1873
Like flower-based pigments, feathers were the products, if not
assigned to pigments is brought into sharper relief when we
1874
look at the parallel sets of terms that writers of the Florentine
the goal, of long-distance trade, and may have been one of
18
BARBARA E. MUNDY
1875
1876
1877
1878
1879
1880
1881
1882
1883
1884
1885
1886
1887
1888
1889
1890
1891
1892
1893
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1899
1900
1901
1902
1903
1904
1905
1906
1907
1908
1909
1910
1911
1912
1913
1914
1915
1916
1917
1918
1919
1920
1921
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
1927
1928
Good painter
assigns colored dye to things
performs insertions of colored dye
provides things with shade (cehual-)
1929
Ahmo cualli tlahcuiloh
tlatīcehua
tlatlapalmictia
tlatlayohuallotia
1930
Bad painter
makes things pale (tīc, from tīza)
colored dye-kills things
causes things to grow dark/obscure (yohua)
1931
1932
1933
Huanitzin from the Beinecke Map, whose figure trails no 1934
set up in their comparison between the “good painter” and
shadow (figure 10). Another way to interpret cehual, however, 1935
the “bad painter” (table 2). Comparing the first set of terms in
is to understand that it derives from the word cetl meaning 1936
the two paragraphs about the good and the bad, we can see
“cold,” a term closely related to tonalli. The figure’s “shade” is 1937
that a set of internal oppositions emerges. The first activity of
a place where the sun’s warmth (rather than the sun’s light), is 1938
the good painter is to serve as a tlatlapalpohuani, and to assign
(pohua) colored dye correctly meant to operate within a field
absent. The distinction is important, because cehualli, much 1939
proper to it; as we have seen, most such appropriate colored
like tonalli, is as much as a temperature term as it is an optical 1940
dyes had an admixture of chromophores derived from organic
one. If the good painter knew how to apply pigments that 1941
dyes, that is, once-living plants and vibrant flowers. In conwere conceived of as tonalli-filled, or warm, then he or she also 1942
trast, in describing bad painters as tlatīcehua, those who “make
understood how to modulate the register of “tonalli/heat” 1943
thing pale,” the Florentine writers use tīc, a morpheme
through the application of “cehualli/coolness.” In other words, 1944
derived from tīza “chalk,” or “white earth.” While tīza was
it seems that the good painter had the ability to grant warmth 1945
one of the materials of painting, it was often a secondary one,
and animacy to the image through tonalli-rich pigment, but 1946
used as a support for organic dyes. But more importantly,
the good painter equally has the ability to control or modify 1947
1948
“white earth,” especially calcium sulphate, is also one of the
that warm nature though the application of “cooling” shade.
While the counterexample of the bad painter, who 1949
main ingredients for the gesso ground found in many manu1950
58
tlatlayohuallotia, “causes things to grow dark/obscure,” might
scripts. As I understand this opposition, while the “good”
1951
strike us as quite insignificant, delving into its etymology
painter provides appropriate colors to the image, many of
1952
reveals that yohualli means night or darkness (from yohua, “for
them flowers, the “bad” painter violates the norms of the
1953
night to fall”) and is a more strictly optical term. In opting for
practice. He or she “makes pale” via the application of chalk,
1954
a negative term that corresponds strongly to a visual register,
which robs color of some of its desired luminosity or causes
1955
the Florentine writers put an emphasis on the fact that tonalli
the interpenetration of figure and ground, which strips the
1956
and cehualli are haptically perceived, suggesting that the good
image of its autonomy. Similarly, as seen in the oppositions
1957
painter conveys the nature of things that exists beyond the vislaid out in table 2, tlatlapalaquiani, that is, the proper insertion
1958
ible, and extends beyond vision, into the haptic realm.
of luminous colors within the frame line, is contrasted to
1959
The role of the painter in registering non-visible qualities of 1960
tlatlapalmictia, “to colored-dye kill something,” because in failfigures via pigment can be illustrated by a discovery that 1961
ing to properly register the proper color, the bad painter
Magaloni made during her study of the Beinecke Map (figure Q13
“kills” the figure. It is this term, tlatlapalmictia, that most dir1962
17).59 The map shows a band of blue water running parallel 1963
ectly conveys that properly painted figures possessed some
to its top edge, separated from another band of earth above 1964
kind of animacy by virtue of their materials. In this respect,
it, which appears grey to the eye. This grey is visibly equiva- 1965
the third activity of the good painter, tlacehuallotiani, merits furlent to another grey area on the map that represents a road. 1966
ther reflection. Many translators have (not incorrectly) interPhotographs taken under false-color infrared light, as well as 1967
preted the included word root cehual- as “shadow.” But given
Newman and Derrick’s pigment analysis, found that the grey 1968
that the rest of the passage describes visible techniques, such
of the water-adjacent land contained a significant amount of 1969
as the insertion of colored dyes, “provided with shadows” is
Maya blue, a pigment made by combining indigo dye with 1970
less easy to relate to a Mesoamerican painted tradition as
water that was rich with palygorskite clay, and evaporating 1971
painted objects do not include shadows. In the images of deer
the liquid to yield a stable blue precipitate. If we are to under- 1972
in the pre-Hispanic Codex Borgia, where the solid frameline
stand the pigments as conveying only visible values, then 1973
sets off their autonomous figures from the background field,
using a precious blue to create visible grey seems like a waste 1974
the painted images are not treated as analogues to the threeof a valuable pigment during a period of considerable mater- 1975
dimensional objects in space, but rather as autonomous figures whose tonalli, or lack thereof, is made visible via the pigial scarcity. But if we are to understand the nature of the 1976
mented surface (figure 16). This pattern is seen in postwater-saturated land of the littoral as being haptically different 1977
Conquest manuscripts as well, as in the figure of don Diego
from the packed earth of the (presumably dry) road, then the 1978
Table 2. Comparison of the terms used to describe the good and bad painter.
Cualli tlahcuiloh
tlatlapalpohuani
tlatlapalaquiani
tlacehuallotiani
WORD & IMAGE
19
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026
2027
2028
2029
2030
Figure 17. Detail of figure 4: an orange-yellow earthen berm as a band
at top, a grey littoral in the middle, and a water canal at bottom.
pigment seems to be to convey this difference, underscoring
that pigments were vehicles for things perceived through
touch as well as through sight.
The Codex Mendoza reveals how such touch might operate. In an image of Mexica priests (figure 12), the rightmost
in the row is shown as looking up at the night sky, which
appears as a great semicircular pendant, studded with symbols
for eyes, as stars were understood to be the eyes of the sky.
From the priest's own face, a small eye symbol emerges, heading upward to touch the sky. As with other cultures, the
Mexica here show sight to be extromissive—in other words,
one “sees” things when the touch possible to the eye occurs,
in the same way that one “feels” something when touch possible to the hand happens. Understood in this way, the
painted image was “felt” by the eye, which perceived it both
visibly and haptically.
Pliny and the Florentine Codex
Both in descriptions and visual examples, we have seen some
of the characteristics of Mesoamerican image-making. Set
down first, black line defined the figure, setting it off sharply
from the ground, which on pre-Hispanic manuscripts is simply the slightly luminous gesso surface set upon the substrate
(be it hide or paper). Figures are not illusionistic representations of bodies in space, but rather two-dimensional manifestations of entities, their strong outline conveying the essential
autonomy of the figure. The luminous and brilliant color set
20
BARBARA E. MUNDY
within these strong frame lines was meant to convey not only
the optical values of the thing represented, the relative “heat”
or cool of the figure, as determined by its tonalli or inner heat.
Color was not the only element that expanded painting
beyond optical phenomena and allowed it to enter into the
haptic register. “Shadow,” in this context, was not related to
an illusionistic two-dimensional rendering of a three-dimensional body in space, but rather the appropriate saturation
and tone of pigment, which the skilled painter knew how to
assign properly.
The Florentine writers, however, were not working in a
vacuum, and one of the books that had the greatest influence
on them was Pliny’s Natural History. Inventories of the monastery where the Florentine Codex was produced, made in
1572–82, record that a copy of Pliny was to be found on the
library shelves.60 While today we do not know what edition of
Pliny might have been in the Tlatelolco monastery, the
nearby monastery library of Texcoco held a heavily used
1548 Latin edition from Lyon.61 Printed in two columns on
large sheets of folio paper, it bears no small physical resemblance to the Florentine Codex itself. A handwritten date on
the last page suggests that it was in that library in 1560, and
furthermore, it bears the signature of Fray Miguel Navarro, a
Franciscan who collaborated with Sahag
un. It is highly likely,
therefore, that the Florentine creators had access to it.
Seen from the standpoint of an indigenous tradition of
painting, the centrality of the shadow to Pliny’s account of
creation of the image would have been both familiar and foreign. Pliny establishes the shadow as nature’s antecedent to
the cultural act of two-dimensional representation. He compounds its importance by writing that the origin of sculpture
also derives from shadows—occurring when the daughter of
the potter Butades, dreading the departure of her lover,
traced the outline of his profile cast by the light of a lamp on
a wall. Her father then used the shadow’s outline to model
the young man’s face (35.43). In both passages, then, the
shadow serves to link representation, be it in two or three
dimensions, to “real” nature—the unnamed man of the origin
of painting, and the lover of Butades’s daughter of the origin
of sculpture—“while the man is alive,” writes Victor Stoichiīa,
“his black shadow is an externalization of his being.”62 But as
Stoichiīa also notes, Pliny’s shadows are cast at night, and
made by virtue of the upheld lamp: “a nocturnal shadow is
removed from the natural order of time; it halts the flow of
progress.”63 Such a notion of representation—grounded in a
two-dimensional visible abstraction of the figure as provided
by the shadow, removed from the flow of time—is also a limited one. Light sources, particularly solar ones, are always
changing, and living figures are always moving, when painters
set down the shadow of a figure, they are representing the figure as it exists within an instant of time. The presence of the
shadow not only confirms a set of conventions used to convey
2031
2032
2033
2034
2035
2036
2037
2038
2039
2040
2041
2042
2043
2044
2045
2046
2047
2048
2049
2050
2051
2052
2053
2054
2055
2056
2057
2058
2059
2060
2061
2062
2063
2064
2065
2066
2067
2068
2069
2070
2071
2072
2073
2074
2075
2076
2077
2078
2079
2080
2081
2082
verisimilitude (the painted shadows mimic the real shadows
2083
cast by the real volumetric figure), it also marks the distance
2084
of representation from living reality.
2085
Working within the library of Tlatelolco, and against the
2086
2087 Q14 intellectual backdrop it provided, the writers of the
Florentine, like Pliny, start out by establishing painting’s
2088
genealogy in the very first line of the passage, but it is an
2089
autochthonous one. It begins not in a mechanical act of trac2090
ing a natural form, but with the mythic Toltecs, artisans and
2091
artificers par excellence, who conveyed an understanding of
2092
the world, often existing beyond the visible surface, in the
2093
2094 Q15 objects they made. Like Pliny, who writes of “powdered earth2095
enware” and includes a section on pigments, they write of the
2096
role of materials in the composition of the representation, but
2097
their account toggles between the black line that defines the
2098
figure’s autonomy, and vibrant colored pigment, often made
2099
from flowers, plants, and insects, or other once-living substan2100
ces. But it is in the account of the shadow that the Florentine
2101
writers measure the distance between the painters they knew
2102
and those mentioned by Pliny: the Classical image-makers
2103
needed to trace the shadow provided by nature to establish
2104
the fidelity of the representation, and by extension, their own
2105
authority as nature’s copyists. The skilled painters who are
2106 Q16 described by the writers of the Florentine, by contrast, were
2107
themselves able to perceive essential truths (such as the degree
2108
of tonalli) that existed beyond merely the visible, and to render
2109
this through the proper application of “warm” or “cool” col2110
ored dye. The painter’s application of appropriate color gave
2111
these autonomous figures actual, not just metaphoric, vitality.
2112
2113
Conclusions
2114
The close attention I have paid to the text of the Florentine
2115
Codex in this essay is a small effort to redress the relative
2116
ignorance about an important Indigenous painting tradition.
2117
While the Nahuatl text we have so carefully parsed may have
2118
taken its compressed and poetic form in the 1570s, the trad2119
ition that it represents predated the arrival of Pliny to the
2120
monastic complex of Tlatelolco, and probably predates Pliny
2121
himself. But the arrival of Pliny to New Spain may have
2122
opened up a new horizon of possibility for Nahuatl-speaking
2123
intellectuals to reflect on their painting tradition, allowing
2124
them to set it not only against past indigenous achievements,
2125
like those of the Toltecs mentioned in the text, but also to use
2126
it to critique a tradition that existed across the Atlantic. Their
2127
2128
act of translation—of practice into words, of Nahuatl into
2129
Spanish, as happens in the adjacent text, occasioned a
2130
rethinking of their own subjectivity in relation to a much
2131
wider field of practice, like the very descriptions that they
2132
could encounter in Pliny’s text.
2133
In conveying both visible and haptic qualities of figures,
2134
Indigenous painters offered a very different notion of
2135
2136
2137
2138
2139
2140
2141
2142
2143
2144
2145
2146
2147
2148
2149
2150
2151
2152
2153
2154
2155
2156
2157
2158
2159
2160
2161
NOTES
Q3
2162
1– Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, trans. and ed. John Bostock and
H. T. Riley (London: Taylor & Francis, 1855), bk. 35, pt. 5; digitized
2163
version in the Perseus Library (Boston, Tufts and Leipzig, University of
2164
http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0978.
Leipzig);
2165
phi001.perseus-eng1:35.5 (accessed on January 24, 2022).
2166
2– Sarah Blake McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian
2167
Renaissance: The Legacy of the “Natural History” (New Haven and London:
2168
Yale University Press, 2013).
3– For a rapprochement with Pliny’s materialism, see Verity Platt, “Of
2169
Sponges and Stones: Matter and Ornament in Roman Painting,” in
2170
Ornament and Figure in Graeco-Roman Art: Rethinking Visual Ontologies in
2171
Classical Antiquity, ed. Nikolaus Dietrich and Michael Squire (Berlin: De
2172
Gruyter, 2018), 241–78.
2173
4– Bernardino de Sahag
un et al., Historia general de las cosas de Nueva
2174
Espa~na [Florentine Codex], 3 vols, c.1575–77, Florence, Biblioteca
Medicea Laurenziana. For an online version of the Florentine Codex,
2175
see https://www.loc.gov/item/2021667837/. For an entry into the Q17
2176
vast scholarship on the Florentine Codex, see Jeanette Favrot Peterson
2177
and Kevin Terraciano, The Florentine Codex: An Encyclopedia of the Nahua
2178
World in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019).
2179
5– The influence of Pliny’s Natural History on the Florentine Codex has
2180
been discussed frequently, beginning with Angel
Marıa Garibay, Historia
de la literatura nahuatl, 2 vols (Mexico City: Ed. Porrua, 1954), 2: 69–74;
2181
and, most recently, by Elizabeth Hill Boone, Descendants of Aztec
2182
Pictography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021), 31, 33, 181, 192,
2183
193. Diana Magaloni Kerpel discusses the influence of Pliny on the self2184
conception of the Florentine painters in Diana Magaloni Kerpel, The
2185
Colors of the New World: Artists, Materials, and the Creation of the Florentine
2186
Codex (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2014), 19–25.
representation. Unlike Pliny’s tales of the shadow, which
rooted representation in the visible mimesis of objects whose
reality existed outside of the sphere of representation, Nahua
painters created autonomous images, and signaled their
autonomy by the line that delineated the figure and set it
apart from the field. But such a concept of the painted figure
that served as a kind of co-presentation of essences and
refused to exist in a safely reserved field of representation—
like the shadow cast on the wall—was not only a radically different concept; it was a dangerous one in the Catholic context
of New Spain, where friars policed the distinction between
image and idol, sign and signifier. Pliny’s account, and his
shadows, offered a new way of thinking about the image, but
it was also a markedly impoverished one, hemmed in by ocularity and a reduced role for the painter’s powers of perception. It is no small irony that at the same time painters in
Renaissance Europe aspired to an elevated status as original
thinkers and intellectuals, their counterparts in New Spain
were most celebrated in Spanish sources when they produced
“faithful copies” of European works.64 As a condition of their
colonization, they were thus called upon to erase from their
minds an alternate genealogy, and corresponding potential for
the image, preserved within the text of the Florentine Codex.
WORD & IMAGE
21
2187
2188
2189
2190
2191
2192
2193
2194
2195
2196
2197
2198
2199
2200
2201
2202
2203
2204
2205
2206
2207
2208
2209
2210
2211
2212
2213
2214
2215
2216
2217
2218
2219
2220
2221Q19
2222
2223
2224Q20
2225
2226
2227
2228
2229
2230
2231
2232
2233
2234
2235
2236
2237
2238
6– The standard transcription of the Nahuatl and translation into
English is Bernardino de Sahag
un, General History of the Things of New
Spain: Florentine Codex, trans. Arthur J. O Anderson and Charles E.
Dibble, 13 vols. Monographs of the School of American Research 14
(Santa Fe: School of American Research, and Salt Lake City: University
of Utah, 1950–82). For a more recent Spanish translation of the
passage about the painter, see Miguel Le
on-Portilla, La tinta negra y roja:
Antologıa de poesıa nahuatl (Mexico City: Cırculo de Lectores/Galaxia
Gutenberg, Ed. Era, El Colegio Nacional, 2008), 150–51.
7– Images of painters at work are, however, found in other sections of
the work. See discussion of the Florentine artists “portraits” by
Magaloni, Colors of the New World, 27–30; and Jeanette Favrot Peterson,
“The Florentine Codex Imagery and the Colonial Tlacuilo,” in The
Work of Bernardino de Sahagun: Pioneer Ethnographer of Sixteenth-Century Aztec
Mexico, ed. J. Jorge Klor de Alva, H. B. Nicholson, and Eloise Qui~
nones
Keber (Albany: Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, SUNY, University
at Albany, 1988), 273–93. The agency of the artists is dealt with by
Jeanette Peterson, “Images in Translation: A Codex ‘Muy Historiadao,’”
in The Florentine Codex: An Encyclopedia of the Nahua World in Sixteenth-Century
Mexico, ed. Jeanette Favrot Peterson and Kevin Terraciano (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2019), 21–36.
8– Barbara E. Mundy, “The Emergence of Alphabetic Writing:
Tlahcuiloh and Escribano in Sixteenth-Century Mexico,” The Americas
77, no. 3 (2020): 361–407.
9– Florentine Codex, bk. 10, ch. 8, f. 18v.
10– Ibid., bk. 10, ch. 29; Sahag
un, General History, 11: 165–70; Miguel
Leon-Portilla, La filosofıa nahuatl, 3rd ed. (Mexico City: Universidad
Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones Hist
oricas,
1966), 148–51; Jeanette Favrot Peterson, “In iollotli, in tultecaiotl: ‘The
Heart, the Artisanship’ of the Pre- and Post-conquest Nahuas in
Mexico,” in Terms: Proceedings of the 34th World Congress of Art History
(2016), ed. Shao Dazhen, Fan Di’an, and LaoZhu, 3 vols (Beijing:
Commercial Press, 2019), 1: 150–60.
11– Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana
y castellana (Mexico City: Antonio de Spinosa, 1571), f. 147v.
12– Florentine Codex, bk. 10, ch. 8, f. 18v; translation from the
Spanish mine.
13– Ibid., bk. 10, ch. 29; Sahag
un, General History, 11: 191.
14– Eduard Seler, Comentarios al Codice Borgia, trans. Mariana Frenk, 3
vols (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econ
omica, 1963), 1: 72.
15– Leon-Portilla, Filosofıa nahuatl, 66.
16– Ibid., 267.
17– Leon-Portilla, Tinta negra y roja, 150–51; for the couplet, see
Elizabeth Hill Boone, Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs
and Mixtecs (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000).
18– Leon-Portilla, Filosofıa nahuatl, 67.
^egota Tomac, Valores plasticas del arte mexica. Estudios de
19– D
urdica S
arte y estetica 22 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Aut
onoma de
Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas, 1995).
20– Donald Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial
Period: The Metropolitan Schools, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, [1959] 1994).
^egota, Valores plasticas, 102.
21– S
22– Diana Magaloni Kerpel, “The Traces of the Creative Process:
Pictorial Materials and Techniques in the Beinecke Map,” in Painting a
Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City: Land, Writing, and Native Rule, ed.
Mary Ellen Miller and Barbara E. Mundy (New Haven and London:
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University/Yale
University Press, 2012), 75–90, at 76.
23– Florentine Codex, bk. 11, ch. 11; Sahag
un, General History, 12:
239–45.
22
BARBARA E. MUNDY
24– Recent work includes: M. A. Garcia-Bucio et al., “Raman and
Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy for the Analysis of Mexican
Yellow Dyestuff,” Journal of Raman Spectroscopy 50, no. 10 (2019): 1546–
54; S. Zetina and Jose Luis Ruvalcaba Sil, “Material Study of the Codex
Columbino,” in Science and Art: The Painted Surface, ed. A. Sgamellotti, B.
G. Brunetti, and C. Miliani (Cambridge: Royal Society of Chemistry,
2014); Sandra Zetina Oca~
na et al., “Non Destructive In Situ Study of
Mexican Codices: Methodology and First Results of Materials Analysis
for the Colombino and Azoy
u C
odices,” in Proceedings of the 37th
International Symposium on Archaeometry (Siena: Turbanti-Memmi/Springer,
2011), xlv, 349–54; and Sandra Zetina et al., “Painting Syncretism: A
Non-Destructive Analysis of the Badiano Codex,” in 9th International
Conference on NDT of Art, Jerusalem, Israel, 2008; http://www.ndt. Q18
net/article/art2008/papers/167Zetina.pdf/.
25– Recent work includes: Davide Domenici et al., “Coloring Materials,
Technological Practices, and Painting Traditions. Cultural and Historical
Implications of Non-Destructive Chemical Analyses of Pre-Hispanic
Mesoamerican Codices,” in Painting the Skin. Studies on the Pigments Applied on
Bodies and Codices in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, ed. Elodie
Dupey Garcıa
and Marıa Luisa Vazquez de Agredos
Pascual (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 2019), 129–43; Davide Domenici et al., “The Colours of
Indigenous Memory: Non-Invasive Analyses of Pre-Hispanic
Mesoamerican Codices,” in Sgamellotti et al., Science and Art, 94–119; R.
Giorgi, D. Chelazzi, and Diana Magaloni Kerpel, “Unveiling the Artistic
Technique of the Florentine Codex: When the Old World and the New
World Met,” in Sgamellotti et al., Science and Art, 147–69.
26– Kate Helwig et al., “Examination and Analysis of Samples from the
Lienzo of Tlapiltepec for Royal Ontario Museum Toronto, Ontario,
Canada.”
Unpublished
manuscript,
Canadian
Conservation
Institute/Institut canadien de conservation, April 12, 2013.
27– Fabien Pottier et al., “Macroscopic Reflectance Spectral Imaging to
Reveal Multiple and Complementary Types of Information for the NonInvasive Study of an Entire Polychromatic Manuscript,” Journal of
Cultural Heritage 35 (January–February 2019): 1–15.
28– Recent work includes Ludo Snijders, Tim Zaman, and David Howell,
“Using Hyperspectral Imaging to Reveal a Hidden Precolonial Mesoamerican
Codex,” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 9 (2016): 143–49.
29– Miller and Mundy, Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City.
30– Richard Newman and Michele Derrick, “Analytical Report of the
Pigments and Binding Materials Used on the Beinecke Map,” in Miller
and Mundy, Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City, 91–100.
31– David Buti, Davide Domenici, Chiara Grazia, Johanna
Ostapkowicz, S. Watts, Aldo Romani, Federica Presciutti, Brunetto
Giovanni Brunetti, Antonio Sgamellotti, and Costanza Miliani, “Further
Insight into the Mesoamerican Paint Technology: Unveiling the Colour
Palette of Pre-Columbian Codex Fejervary-Mayer by means of NonInvasive Analyses,” Archaeometry 60 no. 4 (2018): 797–814; Costanza
Miliani et al., “Colouring Materials of Pre-Columbian Codices: NonInvasive In Situ Spectroscopic Analysis of the Codex Cospi,” Journal of
Archaeological Science 39, no. 3 (2012): 672–79.
32– Newman and Derrick, “Analytical Report,” 95–96; Zetina et al.,
“Painting Syncretism”; Sandra Zetina Oca~
na et al., “Herbs’ Encoded
Language: Material Insights in the De La Cruz Badiano Codex,” in Colors
between Two Worlds: The Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagun, ed. Gerhard
Wolf, Joseph Connors, and Louis A Waldman (Florence: Villa I Tatti,
2012), 221–55; Chiara Grazia et al., “Exploring the Materiality of
Mesoamerican Manuscripts by Non-Invasive Spectroscopic Methods:
Codex Laud, Bodley, Selden, Mendoza and Selden Roll at the Bodleian
Library,” in Mesoamerican Manuscripts: New Scientific Approaches and Interpretations,
ed. Maarten Jansen, Virginia Llad
o-Buisan, and Ludo Snijders. The Early
Americas: History and Culture 8 (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 134–59.
33– Newman and Derrick, “Analytical Report,” 95–96.
2239
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2319 Q22
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2327
2328
2329
2330
2331
2332
2333
2334
2335
2336
2337
2338
2339
2340
2341
2342
34– E. Casanova-Gonzalez et al., “Surface-Enhanced Raman
Spectroscopy Spectra of Mexican Dyestuffs,” Journal of Raman Spectroscopy
43 (2012): 1551–59.
35– M. A. Garcia-Bucio et al., “Raman and Surface-Enhanced Raman
Spectroscopy for the Analysis of Mexican Yellow Dyestuff,” Journal of
Raman Spectroscopy 50, no. 10 (2019): 1546–54.
36– Casanova-Gonzalez
et
al.,
“Surface-Enhanced
Raman
Spectroscopy,” 155, were unable to identify the exact source of a blue
pigment called matlalli in the sources, suggesting that it might come from
guaiacum coulteri, commelina celestis, cissus sicyoides, or calliandra gracilis.
37– Grazia et al., “Exploring the Materiality”; Newman and Derrick,
“Analytical Report.” Tecozahuitl appears in Sahag
un, General History, 12: 242.
38– Mundy, “Emergence of Alphabetic Writing.”
39– Leonardo Lopez Lujan, Giacomo Chiari, Alfredo L
opez Austin,
and Fernando Carrizosa, “Lınea y color en Tenochtitlan: Escultura
policromada y pintura mural en el recinto sagrado de la capital
Mexica,” Estudios de cultura nahuatl 36 (2005): 15–45.
40– None of the studies cited above has found evidence of boneblack,
which derives from animal bones.
41– Sahag
un, General History, 12: 242.
42– On the pan-Mesoamerican importance of the hearth, see Karl
Taube, “The Jade Hearth: Centrality, Rulership, and the Classic Maya
Temple,” in Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture, ed. S.
Houston (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and
Collection, 1998), 427–78.
43– Jeanette Favrot Peterson and Molly H. Bassett, “Coloring the Sacred
in 16th-Century Central Mexico,” in The Materiality of Color: The Production,
Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800, ed. Andrea
Feeser and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 290–327.
44– Alfredo Lopez Austin, Cuerpo humano e ideologia: Las concepciones de los
antiguos nahuas, 2 vols (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Aut
onoma de
Mexico, 1984), 1: 230.
45– Jill Leslie McKeever Furst, The Natural History of the Soul in Ancient
Mexico (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995); L
opez
Austin, Cuerpo humano e ideologia, 1: 241–43.
46– The same use of black to indicate death is found in other codices,
such as Codex Vergara, 1539. Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France;
https://www.loc.gov/item/2021668120/.
47– Newman and Derrick, “Analytical Report,” 99, sample 53.
48– Ibid., 95–96; Magaloni Kerpel, “Traces of the Creative Process,”
82. The same use of red guidelines is found on the Plano Parcial de la
Ciudad de Mexico.
49– Lopez Austin, Cuerpo humano e ideologia, 234.
50– Diego Mu~
noz Camargo, Descripcion de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala,
Glasgow University Library, Special Collections, MS Hunter 242 (U.3.15).
^egota, Valores plasticas, 120.
51– S
52– Elodie
Dupey Garcıa, “Making and Using Colors in the
Manufacture of Nahua Codices: Aesthetic Standards, Symbolic
Purposes,” in Painting the Skin: Pigments on Bodies and Codices in Pre
Columbian Mesoamerica, ed. Elodie
Dupey Garcıa and Marıa Luisa
Vazquez de Agredos
Pascual (Tucson: University of Arizona Press and
Mexico City: Universidad Nacional de Antropologıa, Instituto de
Investigaciones Esteticas, 2018), 186–205.
53– Magaloni Kerpel, Colors of the New World, 42.
54– Elodie
Dupey Garcıa, “The Materiality of Color in the Body
Ornamentation of Aztec Gods,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 65–66
(2015): 72–88; Elodie
Dupey Garcıa, “El color en los c
odices
prehispanicos Mexico central: Identificaci
on material, cualidad plastica y
valor estetico,” Revista espa~nola de antropologıa americana 45, no. 1 (2015):
149–66, at 158.
55– Dupey Garcıa, “Making and Using Colors,” 186–205; Davide
Domenici, “The Flowery Matter of Chant: The Use of Organic Colors
in Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican Codex Painting,” in Flower Worlds:
2343
Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest, ed.
2344
Michael D. Mathiowetz and Andrew D. Turner (Tucson: University of
2345
Arizona Press, 2021), 266–82.
2346
56– Furst, Natural History of the Soul; Alessandra Russo, “Plumes of
2347
Sacrifice: Transformations in Sixteenth-Century Mexican Feather Art,”
Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 42 (2002): 226–50.
2348
57– Allison Caplan, “The Living Feather: Tonalli in Nahua
2349
Featherwork Production,” Ethnohistory 67, no. 3 (2020): 383–406;
2350
Roberto Martınez Gonzalez, “El tonalli y el calor vital: algunas
2351
presiones,” Anales de Antropologia 40, no. ii (2006): 117–51.
2352
58– Davide Domenici et al., “Non-Invasive Chemical Characterization
2353
of Painting Materials of Mesoamerican Codices Borgia (Borg. Mess. 1)
2354
and Vaticanus B (Vat. Lat. 3773) of the Biblioteca Apostolica
Vaticana,” Miscellanea Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae 25 (2019): 201–28.
2355
59– Magaloni Kerpel, “Traces of the Creative Process,” 87.
2356
60– The inventories are found in “C
odice Tlatelolco” and were
2357
published in Joaquın Garcıa Icazbalceta, ed., Codice Mendieta: Documentos
2358
franciscanos: siglos XVI y XVII, 2 vols (Mexico: Imprenta de Francisco
2359
Diaz de Leon, 1892; facs. ed. Guadalajara: Avi~
na Levy, 1971), 2: 241–
2360
71; and discussed by W. Michael Mathes, The America’s First Academic
Library: Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco (Sacramento: California State Library
2361
Foundation, 1985); they list “Gayo Plinius” (p. 255) and “Plini Segundi
2362
ystoria naturalis” (p. 260). Boone, Descendants of Aztec Pictography, 49, also
2363
discusses the contents of the library.
2364
61– Pliny the Elder, Naturalis historia [Secundi Historiae mundi libri triginta
2365
septem] (Lyon: Godefridi et Marcelli Beringorurum Fratrum, 1548); now
2366
part of the Sutro collection at California State Library, Vault [f.]
2367
PA6611 .A2 1548, copy 1.
62– Victor Stoichiīa, A Short History of the Shadow, trans. Anne-Marie
2368
Glasheen (London: Reaktion, 1997), 19.
2369
63– Ibid., 20.
2370
64– Motolinıa (Toribio de Benavente), Historia de los indios de la Nueva
2371
Espa~na, ed. Edmundo O’Gorman. Colecci
on “Sepan cuantos” 129
2372
(Mexico City: Ed. Porr
ua, 1969), bk. 3, ch. 12.
Q21
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Translation work was carried out in the context of John
Sullivan’s advanced Nahuatl class in the spring of 2021.
Participants included Claudia Brittenham, Savannah
Esquivel, Jose Estrada, Allison Caplan, Mai Mitani, Kristi
Peterson, and Veronica Rodrıguez Hernandez; the final version of the translation and any errors in it are my own.
This article was developed out of talks, “Pen, Paper, Ink:
The Materiality of Nahua Writing,” presented at The
Mesoamerican Worldview and Intellectual Tradition
Working Group at the University of Illinois, Chicago, on
February 22, 2021; I am grateful to Andrew Finegold and
Emmanuel Ortega for the invitation and the productive conversation. Another talk presented at Tulane University, titled
“Tlīlli, Tlapalli, Tlahcuiloh: Indigenous Image Theory,”
allowed me to refine some of the ideas presented within.
Deepest gratitude to Claudia Brittenham for her careful
reading of the manuscript and thoughtful comments, as well
as to the anonymous journal reviewers.
WORD & IMAGE
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