3MAGALONI Colors between two worlds.pdf

Villa I Tatti The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies

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Florence

Colors Between Two Worlds T HE FL OR EN T I NE CODE X OF BER NA R DINO DE SA H AGÚN Acts of a conference at Villa I Tatti and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, 12 – 13 June 2008 Organized by Joseph Connors, Gerhard Wolf, Diana Magaloni, with Clara Bargellini, Diana Magaloni, and Alessandra Russo Edited by Louis A. Waldman

Villa I Tatti The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies

Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz Max-Planck-Institut

Contents

Villa I Tatti Publication of this volume has been made possible by The Myron and Sheila Gilmore Publication Fund at I Tatti The Robert Lehman Endowment Fund The Jean-François Malle Scholarly Programs and Publications Fund The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fund for Scholarly Programs and Publications The Barbara and Craig Smyth Fund for Scholarly Programs and Publications The Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Endowment Fund The Malcolm Wiener Fund for Scholarly Programs and Publications ISBN XXX XX XXX XXXX X

Joseph Connors and Gerhard Wolf Foreword

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Clara Bargellini The Colors of the Virgin of Guadalupe

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Ida Giovanna Rao Mediceo Palatino 218–220 of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana of Florence

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Diana Magaloni Kerpel Painters of the New World: The Process of Making the Florentine Codex

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Piero Baglioni, Rodorico Giorgi, Marcia Carolina Arroyo, David Chelazzi, Francesca Ridi and Diana Magaloni Kerpel On the Nature of the Pigments of the General History of the Things of New Spain: The Florentine Codex

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Berenice Alcántara Rojas In Nepapan Xochitl: The Power of Flowers in the Works of Sahagún*

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Salvador Reyes Equiguas Plants and Colors in the Florentine Codex

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Marina Garone Gravier Sahagún’s Codex and Book Design in the Indigenous Context

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Lia Markey “Istoria della terra chiamata la nuova spagna”: The History and Reception of Sahagún’s Codex at the Medici Court

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Sandra Zetina, Tatiana Falcón, Elsa Arroyo, and Jose Luis Ruvalcaba The Encoded Language of Herbs: Material Insights into the De la Cruz–Badiano Codex

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Elena Phipps Textile Colors and Colorants in the Andes

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Rocío Bruquetas Galán Local and Imported Colors: The Spanish Maritime Trade and the Pigment Supply in New Spain *

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Louisa C. Matthew The Pigment Trade in Europe during the Sixteenth Century

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Roland Krischel The Venetian Pigment Trade in the Sixteenth Century

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Thomas Cummins I Saw It with My Own Eyes: The Three Illustrated Manuscripts of Colonial Peru

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Gabriela Siracusano Colors and Cultures in the Andes

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Francesco Pellizzi Afterword “Colors Between Two Worlds: The Codice Fiorentino of Bernardino de Sahagùn”

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Bibliography

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Photo Credits

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Index

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The Colors of the Virgin of Guadalupe* CL A R A BA RGEL L I N I Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (unam)

In memory of Anne D’Harnoncourt For all its calm and gentle dignity, the Virgin of Guadalupe is a very active painting (fig. 1). Apart from its life as a miraculous object, it brings into focus basic questions about the making, qualities, and functions of painting in New Spain. A look at some aspects of its complex history and reception can offer important insights into the principal artistic concerns represented in the Florentine Codex created in 1576 –1577 by Bernardino de Sahagún and his Amerindian collaborators, and now in the Biblioteca Laurenziana.1 The Florentine Codex has been relatively little studied by art historians.2 Yet, as all the papers in this volume demonstrate in different ways, upon close examination it emerges as a visually unique and highly important work. The Guadalupe painting was produced at least a couple of decades before the codex, but for our purposes the two works can be thought of as objects created within the same Indochristian cultural context. Due in part to the painting’s Marian subject and the religious functions it fulfilled, the work came to play a very prominent role in the religious and social life of Mexico City, and later, of New Spain as a whole. Whereas the codex was

Fig. 1. Virgin of Guadalupe, sixteenth century, tempera and oil on cloth. Col. Insigne y Nacional Basílica de Santa María de Guadalupe, Mexico City, Mexico.

* Besides the organizers and participants of the symposium, I wish to thank Jeanette Peterson, and two colleagues who read and commented on this essay: Jorge Guadarrama and Stafford Poole. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. 1. Diana Magaloni has established these dates from internal evidence in the manuscript itself. See her essay in this volume. 2. See the essays in part IV of Klor de Alva, Nicholson, and Quiñones Keber, The Work of Bernardino de Sahagún, and contributions 6 –10 in Schwaller, Sahagún at 500.

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almost lost when the indigenous world of Mexico City collapsed around the end of the sixteenth century, the painted representation of the Virgin of Guadalupe made a new beginning. Within half a century, the image became the subject of learned devotional texts and was frequently reproduced by artists. The afterlife of the Virgin of Guadalupe raises questions that are central to many of the papers assembled for this volume: the identity and status of the artist, and the materials and methods of painting— especially in the ways these issues relate to the use of color. This essay considers these two themes in order to frame and introduce the presentations of the symposium, and also to suggest topics for future research and discussion. Today the original Mexican Guadalupe painting is located high up on the sanctuary wall of the new church built for it in the 1970s, very close to the site where the apparitions of the Virgin to a recently converted Amerindian named Juan Diego are said to have occurred in 1531. The documented history of the painting, however, begins only in 1555, the year when it was “shown” in a chapel on more or less the same site, the hill of Tepeyac, north of Mexico City.3 A famous controversy over the image, between Archbishop Alonso de Montúfar (in Mexico 1554 –1572) and the Franciscans, took place a year later.4 On 6 September 1556, Montúfar preached in favor of the Tepeyac image. The Virgin was allegedly performing miracles, her sanctuary was very popular, especially with Spanish colonists, and the archbishop favored its promotion. Two days later, on September 8 (the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin), the provincial of the Franciscan order in New Spain, Fray Francisco de Bustamante (in Mexico since 1542), delivered a sermon vehemently denouncing the archbishop’s promotion of the Virgin at Tepeyac as a miracle-working image, claiming that its cult was liable to have detrimental effects on the faith of the natives, whom the Franciscans had struggled hard and long to keep from practicing “idolatry.”

Fray Francisco is reported as having identified the maker of the image as a native artist, whom he called “Marcos, indio pintor.” This brings us directly to the topic of the status of painters, particularly native painters. Although the 1556 documents cite Marcos as the author of the Virgin of Guadalupe only once by name, a painter (or painters) called Marcos turns up in several sixteenth-century documents. A Marcos Cipac, also known as Marcos Tlacuilol (the Náhuatl term for painter-scribe), who lived in the Indian barrio of San Juan Moyotlan in the southwestern part of Mexico City, is one of the thirty-six indigenous painters mentioned in the Anales de Juan Bautista, a collection of facts and commentaries, mostly produced between 1564 and 1569.5 Marcos Cipac declared in 1565 that he was fiftytwo years old.6 If this is correct, he would have been born in 1513, and would have been about forty-three at the time of the 1556 controversy. Three years before the dispute, in 1553, a Marcos Griego legalized ownership of a house he had just purchased in the barrio of Santa María Cuepopan, or Tlaquechiuhcan.7 In the document ratifying this transaction, Marcos Griego, who identified himself as a painter, presented his case to the Spanish official through an interpreter. He signed the agreement with his mark, a cross flanked by two lions, apparently in reference to the lion that is the symbol of the artist’s patron saint, Saint Mark. Griego declared himself to be fifty-five years old in a document of 1572; thus he would have been born around 1517, making him about thirty-nine at the time of the Montúfar and Bustamante sermons. Finally, we know of an individual called Marcos de Aquino, for whom no birth date is recorded. This third Marcos was cited as one of three famous indigenous artists in New Spain—comparable to Apelles, Michelangelo, or Berruguete— in Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s History, which was written between 1555 and 1568.8 Since Joaquín García Icazbalceta first proposed the theory in 1883, scholars have assumed that Marcos Cipac and Marcos de Aquino were one

3. Reyes García, ¿Cómo te confundes?, paragraph 56; the translation of the Náhuatl text is discussed on pp. 53–55. Favrot Peterson, in “Creating the Virgin of Guadalupe,” pp. 581–583, agrees with and expands Reyes García’s arguments. 4. O’Gorman, Destierro de sombras, pp. 81–107. The documents of the controversy, which are reports by witnesses of what Bustamente said, can be consulted in Torre Villar and Navarro de Anda, Testimonios históricos guadalupanos, pp. 36–72. They are also available at http://www.proyectoguadalupe.com/documentos/infor_1556.html (April 15, 2009).

5. Reyes García, ¿Cómo te confundes?, pp. 47–49, 205, believes he was one person, variously referred to as Marcos Cipac, Marcos Tlacuilol, or simply Marcos. 6. Ibid., paragraph 352. 7. Ángeles Jiménez, “Apeles y tlacuilos,” pp. 115–33. 8. Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera, vol. 1, p. 275, and vol. 2, p. 362. In referring to Berruguete, Díaz del Castillo likely meant Alonso, who had a more international—and recent—fame than his father, Pedro.

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and the same.9 The subsequent discovery of the other Marcos—Griego— complicated the situation by introducing a third surname, though it is still possible that all three names refer to the same individual.10 On the other hand, the Anales consistently connect Marcos Cipac with the barrio of San Juan, while Marcos Griego, at least in the year 1553, owned a house in the barrio of Santa María. I doubt that this discrepancy—in documents written while the individuals in question were alive—can be attributed simply to ignorance or confusion on the part of contemporaries. The Anales were compiled in Cipac’s barrio, San Juan, and that may explain why the text names no fewer than twenty painters from San Juan—more than those in any of the other three indigenous barrios of Mexico City. Only a single painter, cited simply as “Toribio,” is described as living in Santa María.11 If they were not in fact the same person, we can suppose that Marcos Cipac and Marcos Griego would have collaborated in one of the most important art commissions executed by Amerindian artists in Mexico City, the altarpiece for San José de los Naturales (finished by Christmas of 1564).12 Marcos Cipac is thought to have had an important role in the San José de los Naturales altarpiece, together with artists from all four barrios. In any case, the Marcos cited by Bustamante in 1556 as author of the Guadalupe painting probably studied with Fray Pedro de Gante at the Franciscan school for natives set up at San José de los Naturales, where he would have had access to European prints of compositions corresponding, like the Guadalupe, to the early phase of Immaculate Conception iconography.13 Other sixteenth-century paintings produced in indigenous contexts attest to the use of such European images as models. One example is the mural of the Assumption of the Virgin at the Franciscan monastery of San

9. García Icazbalceta, “Carta acerca del origen,” consulted in Torre Villar and Navarro de Anda, Testimonios históricos, p. 1107. 10. Ángeles Jiménez, in “Apeles y tlacuilos,” pp. 126–127, supposes so, and suggests a link between the surname Griego (Spanish for “Greek”) and a desire to recall the Greek Apelles. Griego, however, is also a Spanish surname, which complicates his identity. Favrot Peterson, in “Creating the Virgin of Guadalupe,” p. 590, believed Marcos Cipac was the same as Marcos Aquino; she did not know of Marcos Griego. 11. Reyes García, ¿Cómo te confundes?, p. 47. The Marcos Griego documents identify Pedro Cuautli, mentioned in the Anales, as also living in Santa Maria: Ángeles Jiménez, “Apeles y tlacuilos,” p. 129. 12. Reyes García, ¿Cómo te confundes?, paragraphs 327–29. 13. Numerous suggestions are cited by various authors. Some are compiled by Vargaslugo in Juan Correa, volume 4, part 1, pp. 267–271, and most recently by Favrot Peterson, in “Creating the Virgin of Guadalupe,” pp. 590–605.

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Fig. 2. Virgin of the Assumption, sixteenth century, wall painting. Upper cloister of the monastery of San Martín, Huaquechula, Puebla, Mexico.

Martín Huaquechula, with the revealing detail of the single angel beneath the Virgin’s feet (fig. 2). The same iconography, with the same single angel, appears on sixteenth-century featherwork miters, including the one mentioned in the 1571 inventory of Ferdinando I de’ Medici (Museo degli Argenti, Florence).14 In technical terms, the three works discussed above embody three different relationships between indigenous and European artistic traditions. Even though the painter of the Virgin of Guadalupe was Amerindian, the work is painted on cloth, a technique with European precedents. The Medici miter is an example of native artists adapting a traditional native technique, featherwork, to Christian liturgical use. Mural painting, on the other hand, was a technique with a long tradition both in Mesoamerica and in Europe. Thus at Huaquechula, although the site and iconography are Christian, the hand could be either European or Amerindian, and the materials are probably a mixture of the two.

14. Discussed by Russo in The Arts in Latin America, pp. 164–165.

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These same three works serve as starting points from which to consider important questions about the topic of color. Featherwork and mural painting can be considered two extremes in the handling and viewing of color. Justly equated by Europeans with mosaics, but more intricate than even the most minute mosaic work, feather painting involves colors that are brilliant yet subtle, constantly changing as the viewer handles the object or changes position. A feather mosaic can be brown and flat at one moment and pulsating with fluorescent colors the next, offering one of the most exciting viewing experiences imaginable. Little wonder, then, that the feather mosaics became prized export items. Furthermore, the bearers of these colors, the feathers, evoke the flight and song of birds, ever beautiful and yet ever changing, recalling that the confluence of permanence and evanescence in art, and life, is one of the basic concerns of Mesoamerican thought. Wall painting was another matter. At Franciscan sites, in particular, most of the murals that have survived are nearly monochromatic, and were intended to be seen from a distance. Some use of color did exist, however, such as at Huaquechula, but we know little about the pigments used, since there are as yet few technical studies. It bears remembering that the Franciscans in Europe in the sixteenth century also favored monochromatic decorations, as in the frescoes by Dono Doni (1505–1575) in the cloister of Pope Sixtus V next to the basilica of San Francesco at Assisi.15 As for the painting on cloth of the Virgin of Guadalupe, its alleged miraculous origin has prevented its being examined thoroughly with modern means.16 Only the 1982 report by conservator José Sol Rosales and the 1996 commentary by Jorge Raúl Guadarrama Guevara, former director of the Museum of the Basilica of Guadalupe, have been published.17 Rosales and Guevara were permitted very little time to investigate the object and had to rely on rather superficial observations, so their conclusions are uncertain. However, Rosales saw four different types of tempera painting, one of which he believed to be aguazo, a technique that involved applying pigment to a damp cloth surface and resulted in the color

passing to the back of the support.18 As for the pigments, he posited that, with the exception of cochineal in the tunic, they are of mineral origin. Guadarrama commented on the similarity of the palette to that of preHispanic painting and also noted the employment of aguazo.19 Both men insisted on the need for further technical studies. Yet, even though there are gaps in our knowledge about it, the Virgin of Guadalupe is a work of extraordinary importance as the only painting on cloth to have survived from the sixteenth century in more or less original condition. At first, of course, the painting was not unique. Indeed, one of the main points made by Fray Francisco Bustamante in his conflict with the archbishop was that there was nothing unusual about the Guadalupe painting, since there were others like it.20 It is easy to believe that this would have been the case in 1556, because there were many Amerindian painters in Mexico City then. By the same reasoning, we can infer that the painting’s author was probably not considered a very important figure during his own time. Bustamente mentions “Marcos indio pintor” only once by name; elsewhere he refers to the painting’s creator simply as “un indio.” Intentionally or not, Bustamante’s text might have implied to the archbishop that such a painting could hardly be performing miracles, since its author was merely “un indio”—a message that his Spanish audience was probably disposed to accept. In other words, shortly after painting the Guadalupe, Marcos had already begun to disappear from written history. Even during Marcos’s lifetime, major changes were taking place in Mexico City that would obliterate his world, and that of other contemporary indigenous painters, forever. Epidemics decimated the native population. Those who survived in Mexico City suffered enormously over the following decades from changes in the tribute structure and the organization of work.21 More and more painters were arriving from Europe. In 1557, the year following the sermon that mentions Marcos, ordinances based on Spanish precedents were promulgated:22 “Indians” could be members of

15. Doni began work there in 1564: Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, L’immagine di San Francesco, pp. 176–178. 16. See Favrot Peterson, “Creating the Virgin of Guadalupe,” pp. 573–577, for an account of the examinations carried out so far. 17. Ojeda Llanes, La tilma guadalupana, pp. 212–219.

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18. Ojeda Llanes, La tilma guadalupana, pp. 212–214. 19. Ibid., pp. 232–234. 20. Torre Villar and Navarro de Anda, Testimonios históricos, p. 66. 21. These are central concerns in Reyes García, ¿Cómo te confundes?. 22. On the sixteenth-century guild, still a much understudied topic, see Toussaint, Pintura colonial, chap. 5; Ruiz Gomar, pp. 205–211. Mues Orts, La libertad del pincel, pp. 185–203.

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the guild, if they were properly examined by European professionals. The archbishop was intent on controlling the friars and implementing reforms in accordance with the Council of Trent then in session,23 and it is not difficult to see in the new guild a mechanism designed to bring natives into line with European practices, and to limit their ability to compete for commissions. It was in this atmosphere of tragedy and repression that the Florentine Codex was made and spirited off to Europe. Nevertheless, the painting of the Guadalupe was preserved, and with it there survived some memory of its creation by a native painter. How was the Virgin of Guadalupe preserved? In part, it was a case of rehabilitation after the Council of Trent’s reaffirmation of devotion to Mary and of the devotional value of images generally. Like many other depictions of Mary that were venerated in Europe, the Guadalupe painting was preserved precisely because, by the late sixteenth century, it was a work of great age: In addition to its status as a miracle-working image, it was a relic of an irretrievable past. The notion of the image as being imbued with a venerable antiquity was probably first evoked between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and it soon became a commonplace. Indeed, the fact that the painting had survived so many years was continually cited as proof of its miraculous nature. The 1606 copy of the painting by the Basque artist Baltasar de Echave Orio, now in a private collection (fig. 3), proves that the story told about the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe had changed by the early seventeenth century, thereby ensuring the survival of the original painting. The Echave picture represents the image of the Virgin, but it is not a copy of the original painting. Mary is in the same position and has the same attributes, but she is not in the sky among clouds. She is on a piece of cloth that is clearly distinguished from the canvas on which it is painted. By 1606, then, the status of the image had changed: it was no longer simply a painting that performed miracles, but one whose creation, ostensibly without the aid of human hands, was itself a miracle.24 The parallel

23. Toussaint, Pintura colonial, chap. 5. 24. The painting was first published by Ortíz Vaquero, Imágenes guadalupanas, pp. 29–30. All the scholars who have written about it since have recognized its quality and outstanding importance for the history of the Guadalupe painting: Vargaslugo, Juan Correa, vol. 4, part 1, p. 271; Cuadriello, “La propagación,” p. 258, “Atribución disputada,” p. 239, and in Cuadriello et al., El divino pintor, pp. 185–187; Bargellini, “Originality and Invention,” pp. 85–86.

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Fig. 3. Baltasar de Echave Orio, Virgin of Guadalupe, 1606, oil on canvas. Private collection, Mexico City, Mexico.

between Echave’s depiction and the story of Veronica’s veil is unmistakable, and this painting demonstrates that the artist understood very well what the issues were. He rendered the Virgin’s figure carefully, smoothly, with clear outlines and details, and most importantly, he distinguished her precisely defined form from the piece of rough cloth on which it appears. In other words, through his handling of paint he distanced the heavenly figure from the earthly cloth and made clear that the Virgin of Guadalupe was not, like many others, a miraculously discovered painting, but rather a unique and miraculously made painting. To better understand the process by which the original Guadalupe image became a relic embodying the actual presence of the Virgin, it is helpful to compare it to Echave’s painting in terms of color. As already mentioned, we know little about the actual pigments of the original, and

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the same is true of the Echave copy, which is relatively inaccessible. Of course, both the original and copy would have looked different in 1606. Nevertheless, we know that in contrast to the original, which is in tempera, Echave’s painting is in oil, and the hues and overall tonalities are significantly different in the two paintings, especially the blues. It is as if Echave had been given the commission not only to include the miracle story but also to renew the old image, while preserving its original gravity and general ancient appearance, which was “of the style or language of the Indians,” as the painter Miguel Cabrera would write in 1756.25 Significantly, there appears to have been a change of mind among the Franciscans in regard to the image. The Echave painting is probably identical with a “portrait and copy of the miraculous one” painted by “Balthazar de Chavez” and described in 1697 as being in the church of San Francisco in Mexico City.26 The friars of San Francisco and the patrons of Echave’s painting seem to have wanted a painting that appropriated the original image venerated at Tepeyac, while at the same time elevating it by association with a history of its miraculous origins, and yet partly modernizing its appearance through the use of contemporary European materials and techniques. The process recalls the numerous images, especially of the Virgin, that were being reframed, renewed, and copied in Europe around this same time. Most important among them was the icon of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, the Salus Populi Romani, an image especially venerated by the Jesuits, who sent four copies of the icon to New Spain in 1576 for their newly established colleges there (fig. 4).27 For the Franciscans in Mexico City, it may have been significant that before his death in 1590 Pope Sixtus V, himself a Franciscan, had expressed his intention of building a new chapel for the Roman icon28 (a project carried out by Pope Paul V in the early seventeenth century). True to form, the copies of the Santa Maria Maggiore painting commissioned by the Jesuits soon acquired miraculous status, and this may have inspired the Franciscans of Mexico City to emulate their success by reinventing the Virgin of Guadalupe as a

Fig. 4. Anonymous Italian, (retouched 20th century), Salus Populi Romani, c. 1575, oil on canvas. Jesuit Archive, Mexico City, Mexico.

25. Cabrera, Maravilla, p. 29. 26. Vetancurt, Chronica, p. 36, paragraph 50: “retrato, y copia de la milagrosa.” 27. Florencia and Oviedo, Zodiaco Mariano (1995), pp. 144–146. 28. Ostrow, Art and Spirituality, pp. 127–128. The shift in Franciscan reception of the Guadalupe painting did not go unnoticed in the seventeenth century: see the comments by Florencia, Estrella, chap. XII.

divinely created image. In any case, with the disappearance of much of the native population of Mexico City by the end of the century, the hesitations the friars had expressed about the Virgin of Guadalupe in 1556 also seem to have vanished. The very preservation of the first painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, seen within the indigenous tradition in which writing and painting were

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one, meant that the memory of its creation could not be totally lost.29 Yet the story of the image’s miraculous apparition erased whatever knowledge might have been left concerning the precise identity of its original creator, the Amerindian painter Marcos. Similarly, the story of the miraculous apparition, as it developed in the early seventeenth century, assigned a less visible role to the “Indian”; instead of an active painter, we are presented with a humble and passive seer, Juan Diego. Though holy and admirable, the Indian who has the vision of the Virgin is cast by the legend as an obedient vehicle for a providential event meant to comfort and uplift him. Historians tend to think that this story had some basis in native oral traditions, probably from the period of the making of the Florentine Codex or slightly later.30 I would add that it is not surprising that such a passive, receptive, and needy role be assigned to an Amerindian— and be assumed by Amerindians as well—during the frightful, traumatic period of the late sixteenth century, when the ancient native world was vanishing. Many scholars agree that the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe, as it is commonly told, was first put into writing in 1648 by Miguel Sánchez,31 and the first known representation of the actual narrative in painting, signed and dated in 1656, is by José Juárez (fig. 5).32 Juárez’s painting is preserved in Ágreda (Soria), Spain, at the convent whose abbess was Sor María de Jesús (1602–1665), a mystic and author who was deeply influential in New Spain, especially among the Franciscans, for her interest in the conversion of indigenous peoples.33 The central image is enhanced by a painted frame and complemented by four episodes of the narrative telling how the Virgin appeared to Juan Diego (upper left),

29. Hill Boone, Stories in Red and Black, pp. 245–249, for a summary of indigenous ideas about the recording of history in painted images. 30. For example: Noguez, Documentos guadalupanos, pp. 185–190; Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe, p. 220. Florencia made an eloquent apology for the value of tradition as well as nontextual sources, including indigenous “hieroglyphs,” in establishing the truth of the Guadalupe story: Estrella, fols. 43, 99. See also Brading, Mexican Phoenix, pp. 88–95, who discusses the possible relationship of the tradition to the College of the Santa Cruz at Tlatelolco. 31. Sánchez, Imagen de la Virgen, consulted in Torre Villar and Navarro de Anda, Testimonios históricos, pp. 152–281. For a cogent and recent discussion, see Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe, chap. 7. 32. Sigaut Valenzuela, José Juárez, pp. 208–214; Favrot Peterson, Painting a New World, pp. 154–159. 33. Donahue, “Mary of Ágreda,” pp. 291–314; and recently, Fernández Gracia, Iconografía de Sor María de Ágreda, pp. 110–11.

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Fig. 5. José Juárez, Virgin of Guadalupe with Apparitions, 1656, oil on canvas. Convent of M. M. Concepcionistas, Ágreda, Soria, Spain.

then instructed him to pick flowers nearby (upper right), and to go to the bishop to tell him of her desire for a church to be built at Tepeyac (lower left). On opening his cloak (or tilma) before the bishop, the flowers fell to the ground, revealing the image of the Virgin as she had appeared to him (lower right). The inscriptions included in Juárez’s 1656 painting were evidently considered necessary in a work meant for a Spanish public unfamiliar with the story. The full apparition narrative, as expounded in writing and in painting for audiences in New Spain, included as one of its central concerns the problem of how exactly the original painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe had been made. It was not sufficient to say that it was a miracle and to show the events in sequence, as in the paintings sent to Spain. Miguel Sánchez, who was a learned cleric, presented the story as an allegory of the salvation of New Spain, prefigured in the Immaculate Conception and revealed in the apparition of the Woman of the Apocalypse. Theology aside, he also made generous use of the vocabulary found in texts about painting, detailing the ways in which he himself “became the

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devout painter of this image in writing of her.”34 In recounting the story, he placed emphasis on the discussion of the mechanisms of the painting’s production. He is eloquent on the role of the flowers—he refers to them as “relics”—that the Virgin took from Juan Diego and gave back to him with her own hands.35 When the Indian opened his cloak, the bishop saw in it “a sacred grove, a miraculous spring season, an oasis of roses, lilies, carnations, irises, broom, jasmine, and violets, and all of them, falling from the cloth, left on it the painting of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God.”36 His closing paragraphs insist on and expand metaphorically upon the flowers that produced her lasting presence, and whose sweet odors chased away demons.37 The importance and variety of the flowers was a theme taken up by many authors, such as Francisco de Florencia, who insisted on the Virgin’s handling of a variety of flowers: “She took them with her two hands as if to register them, and having sanctified them by the precious contact, she put them back and composed them in the cloak.”38 Becerra Tanco, who mentions only roses, assigns the creation of the image to the moment when the flowers passed from Mary’s hands to the cloak.39 The importance of the flowers was also emphasized in painted representations of the story. Juan Correa (1646–1716), who became famous for his copies of the Guadalupe, was obviously familiar with the idea that the flowers were the source of the colors for the painting. In a 1667 version of the story (fig. 6),40 he is careful to include flowers of various colors, especially in the final scene, where the blooms that have fallen to the ground correspond exactly to the hues of the apparition on the Virgin’s mantle: these three primary colors (red, blue, and yellow) were generally recognized among seventeenth-century painters as the source from which all the others

could be created. As shown by Correa, it was by her handling of the flowers and returning them to Juan Diego’s cloak, as we see at the lower right, that Mary made contact with the cloth. Correa further emphasizes the flowers, varied in hue and kind, by depicting them as strewn upon the earth by angels. Nearly forty years later, in 1704, Correa insisted more than ever on the flowers in a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe with the four apparition episodes (fig. 7).41 In this version, the flowers surround all the narrative scenes, seeming almost to smother the angels that fly among them. One might suggest that all these floral displays are due to the introduction into New Spain of Flemish paintings of sacred scenes and personages within flower garlands. Elaborate and exquisite works such as those painted by Rubens and Brueghel 42 did not reach the New World, so far as we know, yet the genre was familiar to painters in New Spain, who reproduced it.43 Indeed, in Correa’s 1704 version, the flowers function as framing devices, and European tulips can be seen among them. In this case, it is reasonable to recall Flemish models. By contrast, this was not the case in Correa’s earlier painting. In 1667, he did not include large tulips or any other flower that would have been familiar only in Europe. Nor are the flowers used to frame anything. They are an integral part of the narrative, a narrative with roots, I suggest, in Amerindian sixteenthcentury painting practices and ideas, in which the making of pigments and dyes with flowers and plants was the norm, and in which flowers were an integral part of relating to the divine.44 Dyes, in particular, are mentioned in Francisco de Florencia’s account of the 1666 examination of the original Guadalupe painting, during which the Jesuit author claims to have begun a discussion among those who were examining the painting about which plants had produced the large spots of color that looked like “the juice squeezed from various flowers and their leaves” visible on the back of the painting.45

34. Sánchez, Imagen de la Virgen Maria, p. 197: “Yo me constituí pintor devoto de aquesta santa imagen escribiéndola.” 35. Ibid., p. 187: “reliquias en flores.” Mary’s touch converts the flowers into relics of herself. 36. Ibid., p. 190: “Una santa floresta, una primavera milagrosa, un vergel abreviado de rosas, azucenas, claveles, lirios, retamas, jazmines y violetas, y que todas cayendo de la manta dejaron pintada en ella a María Virgen Madre de Dios.” 37. Ibid., p. 259. 38. Florencia, Estrella, fol. 13v.: “Ella las tomó con sus dos manos como que las registraba y aviéndolas santificado con el precioso contacto dellas, las volvió a poner y componer en la tilma.” 39. Becerra Tanco, Origen milagroso, consulted in Torre Villar and Navarro de Anda, Testimonios históricos, p. 319. 40. Favrot Peterson, in Los Siglos de Oro, pp. 306–309.

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41. Ibid. 42. Woollett and van Suchtelen, Rubens and Brueghel, pp. 116–121. 43. A relatively early example is a Saint Joseph and Child within a garland of circa 1700, though repainted and thus difficult to assess: Cuadriello, Catálogo, vol. 1, p. 273, number 20. One should remember the relationship of this genre to Counter-Reformation ideas, as discussed by Jones, Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana. 44. See, especially, the essays by Alcántara and Magaloni in this volume. 45. Florencia, Estrella, fols. 139v–140r: “unos manchones de colores como del jugo exprimido de varias flores, y hojas dellas.”

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Fig. 7. Juan Correa, Virgin of Guadalupe with Apparitions, 1704, oil on canvas. Parish of San Nicolás de Bari and Santa María la Blanca, Seville, Spain.

Fig. 6. Juan Correa, Apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe, 1667, oil on canvas. Museo Nacional Colegio de San Gregorio, Valladolid, Spain.

Other representations of the scene confirm that painters were conscious of the fundamental importance of the flowers in the making of the image. In two eighteenth-century paintings, one signed by and the other attributed to José de Ibarra (figs. 8, 9), we see two versions of the miracle of the apparition presented. In both, Juan Diego is shown

standing and looking out at the viewer while opening his cloak, allowing the flowers to fall and reveal the image. One version corresponds to the most common textual form of the story, which emphasizes the variety of flowers in order to elicit wonder, as well as to evoke the various colors of the Virgin’s image (as Juan Correa had done in his early paintings). The other version, instead, shows only roses in the cloak, an element that had been common in European paintings of the Virgin since the Middle Ages. In both variants of the Guadalupe narrative, the flowers accompanying the vision are associated with transcendence. The roses signify the flowering of grace, but the immanence of the colors of the varied flowers in the image itself, and their essential contribution to its formation and existence, call to mind the actual making of the original image within a painting tradition that included indigenous practices and materials.

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Fig. 8. José de Ibarra, Juan Diego Opening His Cloak with Flowers, 1743, oil on canvas. Metropolitan Cathedral, Mexico City, Mexico. Fig. 9. José de Ibarra(?), Juan Diego Opening His Cloak with Roses, c. 1743, oil on canvas. Museo Regional de Querétaro, Querétaro, Mexico.

Though the paintings of Guadalupe that we have just been discussing were made by well-known criollo and casta46 artists working in Mexico City in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as we have seen, their practice conserved an element of ancient painting traditions: the association of flowers with pigments, dyes, and colors. Recent documentary discoveries indicate that something else from the indigenous past survived far into the seventeenth century: a strong association between native painters and the depiction of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Even though the individual Amerindian painter Marcos may have been forgotten, some notion of the indigenous role in the original making of the image remained.

46. Criollos were Spaniards born in New Spain. Castas were individuals of mixed blood.

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When the Italian Jesuit Juan Bautista Zappa sought to acquire a copy of the painting after his arrival in New Spain in 1675, he was told to go to the sanctuary of Guadalupe and look for the “Indian painter who possessed the gift for painting the Virgin of Guadalupe.”47 The account relates that when the Indian who had this gift died, the native painters gathered at the church of Guadalupe. They all confessed and took communion and then painted the Virgin as best they could. They then decided among themselves who had made the most faithful copy and had thus received the gift.48 In Zappa’s time, the native painter with the gift was Luis de Tejeda, and his copies were said to be more miraculous than any others. This tradition was also reported by Francisco de Florencia in 1688. Although the latter made no specific mention of an individual “gift,” he wrote that it was believed that the copies of the Virgin of Guadalupe “that are less imperfect and most accurate are all by Indian painters.... And it is an established opinion in Mexico City that only Indian painters have felicity and talent in copying this holy image.” He adds that he himself took three copies to Europe in 1668, and in mentioning the very busy painter who made them (who, as we now know, was Tejeda), notes that the artist’s father had also been a worthy maker of the replicas.49 Thus, the tradition of the Indians possessing the gift may well go back to the sixteenth century, dovetailing with the erasure of the painter Marcos, whose individual identity was apparently transformed into a collective role. Another episode of the Guadalupe story with important implications for the history of art centers on the text entitled Maravilla americana and on its author, Miguel Cabrera, the best-known painter of the mideighteenth century in Mexico City. It is the only original treatise on “the art of painting”—a phrase used on its title page—to have been produced in New Spain, and it should not surprise us that the text focuses on the painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the “wonder and conjunction of rare wonders” of the New World. Cabrera himself made images of the 47. Vargaslugo, “El indio que tenía el ‘don ... ,’ ” pp. 203–215. 48. Ibid., p. 205. 49. Florencia, Estrella, fol. 99–99 v.: “... y las que hay menos imperfectas y cabales, todas son pinceles de Indios. Quando yo salí de México para Europa, había uno que por famoso copiador, en todo el año no pintaba sino imágenes deste santuario.... Yo llevé tres de la medida de la original.... Su padre de este mismo fue también insigne trasuntador de aquesta imágenes.... Y ya es asentada opinión en México, que solos pintores indios tienen felicidad y acierto en copiar esta santa imagen.”

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Guadalupe, in which, like earlier painters, he expressed the theme of God’s authorship of the work. This was, of course, a topic that elevated the painting profession to the greatest of heights.50 In Cabrera’s version of God painting the Virgin, the pigments on the palette are represented by flowers. The emphasis on the flowers in these works from the middle and later eighteenth century may be related to the indigenous origins of the Guadalupe image. One such painting of the narrative, in particular, attributed to Joaquín Villegas (born 1713 and still active in 1753), gives Juan Diego an unusually prominent role (fig. 10).51 He provides the flowers that make the miraculous apparition possible, but instead of looking at the Virgin he turns his gaze toward Christ, with whom he is identified by visual means and by the two speech-scrolls that attribute to both of them verses from the Song of Songs. Jesus addresses the Virgin in words traditionally associated with the Immaculate Conception: “Ecce tu pulchra es, amica mea.…” 52 (Canticles [Song of Songs], 1:15). Juan Diego’s scroll, placed below the figure of Christ in a form reminiscent of a footstool, declares, “Flores apparuerunt in terra nostra”53 (Canticles, 2:12). In other words, Juan Diego is presented as an essential actor in the creation of the miraculous image, implying by extension that he is a part of the story of salvation. A framed verse inscription, which Juan Diego holds up with his left hand, reinforces the message, mentioning the flowers that God the Father is using to paint the Virgin, and going on to say that the “Indian” had provided the canvas.54 The emphasis on the presence of the indigenous figure found in this and other eighteenth-century paintings can perhaps be understood within the context of the controversies surrounding the establishment of the College of Canons at the Guadalupe sanctuary, which took place in 1751

50. See Cuadriello, “Atribución disputada,” p. 241, and his treatment of this idea within a discussion of the relationships between these paintings and contemporary sermons in El Divino Pintor, pp. 189–191. See also Bargellini,“Originality and Invention.” 51. Cuadriello, Catálogo, pp. 169–173; Divino pintor, pp. 175–178. 52. “Behold thou art fair, O my love, .… ” (Douay-Rheims Bible translation, Canticles [Song of Songs] 1:15). 53. “The flowers have appeared in our land, .…” (Douay-Rheims Bible, Canticles 2:12). 54. The inscription reads, “Dios qual Pintor soberano gastar quiso lindas flores, y a María con mil primores copió, como de su mano: Lienso ministró el Indiano de tosco humilde sayal en su capa y sin igual se veé con tanta hermosura, que indica ser tal pintura Obra sobre Natural.”

Fig. 10. Joaquín Villegas(?), God the Father Painting the Virgin of Guadalupe, c. 1750, oil on canvas. Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City.

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(but had been under consideration since 1709).55 In a formal statement opposing the college and directed to the archbishop on 12 May 1750, the indigenous authorities claimed the miraculous image for themselves, stating that it was “due to us, because it appeared for the benefit of our nation.” 56 The struggle against the establishment of the college, though ultimately unsuccessful, managed at least to provide formal protection for the right of the Amerindians to continue their ceremonies and devotions involving the image without hindrance. My final observation returns to the comparison between the colors found in the original Guadalupe painting and those employed in its many replicas. Making allowances for the problems of reproduction, one general disparity exists between the original Guadalupe and all the later versions: The mantle in the original is blue-green, and in the later paintings it is decidedly blue. Cabrera is the only colonial author—indeed, the only author, as far as I know—who has written about this discrepancy. In two of the eight sections of his text, he refers explicitly to the color of the mantle. In section seven, he refutes all the objections he has heard about the original painting, including the claim that the mantle was originally blue but had faded to a greenish hue. Since, as we have seen, its survival and “miraculous incorruption” (milagrosa incorrupción) were frequently adduced as proof of the image’s divine origins, as Cabrera notes at the beginning of his text, the author insists that the blue-green must be the original color: a painting made by God does not change color. In the meticulous description of the Guadalupe painting he provides in section eight, he says of the mantle, “Its color is not blue, as it has been painted [in the copies]; rather it is of a color that is not perfectly green or blue, but of an agreeable medium between these two colors.”57 Cabrera refers to the mystery of the composition of this blue-green and of the other colors of the original Guadalupe in his introduction. He notes that he is unable

to “specify the material makeup of any of the colors or tell how they were made” because this knowledge is reserved to God alone.58 In this more secular age, I wish I could be more informative on this point than Miguel Cabrera. In fact, I wish I could state that the bluegreen color is the famous Maya blue, which is one of the most renowned of Mesoamerican pigments. However, as already mentioned, the materials of the Guadalupe painting have not been properly studied. Whatever its physical makeup, however, it is notable that the hue of the mantle looks a great deal like a color in the only other painting on cloth from a sixteenthcentury indigenous context to have survived in Mexico: the Assumption of the Virgin in the Franciscan church at Tecaxic, near Toluca, west of Mexico City. The Assumption is considered to be somewhat later than the Guadalupe,59 and the figure of the Virgin has been severely repainted. Behind glass, in its shrine, it is also very difficult to photograph, but it is reportedly in tempera. Despite the damage the painting has suffered, some of the original hues are still visible in the lower section; they resemble those in the Guadalupe painting, including the blue-green. In conclusion, I would like to recall that the Italian Renaissance, which is the broad art historical framework for the creation of the Virgin of Guadalupe as well as the Florentine Codex, set standards not only for art production in the early modern period, but also for the study of art practically down to our day. On the one hand, the established criteria and canons made it difficult, until the still fairly recent past, to see qualities outside their European limits. On the other, however, a profound new understanding has been permeating art historical investigations: the notion that art is a fundamental human activity and that the basis for approaching it, therefore, cannot be culturally limited. The symposium that generated this volume and the contributions included here are the result of the conviction that we can learn a great deal and renew our vision by looking more widely, as well as more carefully. This is probably the best tribute we can pay to the extraordinary Amerindian artists of the Florentine Codex and their contemporaries.

55. López Sarrelangue, Una villa mexicana, pp. 83–108. 56. “... nos toca por haberse aparecido para el remedio de nuestra nación”: Sandoval Villegas, “La devoción y culto de los indios a la Señora del Tepeyac,” in Sigaut et al., Guadalupe arte y liturgia, vol. 1, p. 169. 57. Cabrera, Maravilla americana, p. 25: “Su color no es azul, como se ha pintado; sino de un color, que ni bien es perfectamente verde, ni azul, sino un agradable medio entre estos dos colores.”

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58. Ibid., unnumbered page before the first section of text: “especificar cual sea la materia de los colores que la componen; porque aunque son semejantes a los nuestros, el saber a punto fijo si son o no o en el modo que están practicados o se hizo esta pintura, lo juzgo reservado al Autor de tanta maravilla.” 59. Rodríguez Parra, Nuestra Señora, p. 46.

Mediceo Palatino 218–220 of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana of Florence IDA GIOVA N NA R AO Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana

Writing about Sahagún’s manuscript in the Biblioteca Laurenziana (Fig. 1), Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, director of the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia de México, stated, “… le codex mérite bien qu’on s’en occupe: mais ce sujet a été déja si étudié que je crains de répéter ce que d’autres et moi même nous en avons dit.”1 That was in 1896. Today, over a century later, I have even more reason to worry about sounding repetitious, for Sahagún’s manuscript has been much studied in the intervening years and the published results are well known. However, methods of describing manuscripts have progressed in the meantime. They are now much more in-depth, above all from the codicological point of view—codicology being a very recent discipline, dating back no further than the 1950s—and this has convinced me that the time is right to propose a new analysis of the codex. Furthermore, even the most careful and dedicated eyes risk missing something when examining these unique, inexhaustible testimonies of our culture. No manuscripts, not even those seen over and over again, are safe from this chance. My intention here is to provide a description of the manuscript’s structure, both external and internal, substantially following the guidelines of the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico delle Biblioteche Italiane e per

Fig. 1. Front cover, Med. Palat. 220.

1. Del Paso y Troncoso, “Études,” 1896, p. 171; the article was subsequently translated into Spanish in Anales del Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía, vol. IV, 1926, pp. 316–320.

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le Informazioni Bibliografiche. I shall add a brief comment, focusing specifically on the elements that are entirely new or that need to be rectified.2 FLORENCE, BIBLIOTECA MEDICEA LAURENZIANA, MED. PALAT. 218–220 Paper, 308–310 × 210–212 mm, saec. XVI (1576–1577). n u m ber of fol io s : Med. Palat. 218, IV, 353, III'; Med. Palat. 219, II, 375, II'; Med. Palat. 220, IV, 495. Blank folios: Med. Palat. 218, IIr–IVr, 241v–242v, I'r–II'v, III'v; Med. Palat. 219, Iv–IIv, 220r–222v, I'r–v, II'v; Med. Palat. 220, Iv–IVv, 151v, 494v–495r. Excised folios: Med. Palat. 218, between fols. IV–1, 12–13, 330–331; Med. Palat. 219, between fols. 6–7, 371–372; Med. Palat. 220, between fols. 84–85, 371–372, 409–410. fol i at ion : The most recent numbering (which is used here) is in ink in the lower right margin on the recto. The original system, also in ink and sometimes rewritten, appears in the upper right margin on the recto; it starts anew at the beginning of each of the twelve books and consistently omits folio numbers for leaves containing argumenta, prologues, and summaries of the books, as well as for leaves that are blank. Occasionally visible in the upper right margin is another foliation for purpose of verification; this is owing to Angelo Maria Bandini (1726–1803), prefect of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. wat er m a r k s : two types,3 with variations; similar to Briquet 5691 (“Croix latine”) (Likhatscheff 1564), Pélerin 7582 (Milan, 1570),4 with the second type predominating (fig. 2).

2. Cf. Norme per la descrizione uniforme, ed. Ceccopieri and Menna. I have chosen to omit the general bibliography on the manuscript because of its overwhelming length, which is due to the manuscript’s fame as a veritable national treasure, in both text and illustrations, of the Nahua culture and language. Suffice it to cite the numerous contributions by Miguel Léon-Portilla, for which see the bibliography in this volume. In any case, listing the publications would not serve the purpose here because they would still need to be sorted and merged. Therefore, in the section of the description treating manuscript and printed data, reference is made only to the publications about the manuscript’s cataloguing and publishing history, with my observations on their soundness. 3. Dibble, “Watermarks,” pp. 25–28, refers to three watermarks, all datable to around 1570. After carefully checking in all three volumes, however, I was unable to find the third watermark. 4. Cf. Briquet, Les filigranes dès leur apparition, 1985, vol. II, pp. 335, 415.

Fig. 2. (Left) BML, Med. Palat. 218, fol. 241: “Croix latine” watermark (Right) BML, Med. Palat. 219, fol. II: “Pélerin” watermark c ol l at ion : impossible to determine because of the extremely tight sewing.5 c at ch wor d s : hardly any instances, probably because of the presence of the precise, original foliation. l ayou t a n d dec or at ion : The writing, below the top line, is arranged in two columns. (The left, in Spanish, is a loose translation of that in the right column, in Náhuatl.) Lines of justification and intercolumniation are in brown; there are no through lines. Written space: 308 × 210 = 26[247]35 × 23[80(10)80]17 mm (Med. Palat. 219, fol. 249r). The number of written lines ranges from 29 to 51. The three volumes, copied by various hands, exhibit some autograph entries by the author.6 Other hands have made marginal or interlinear corrections in minuscules ranging in size from 2 to 4 mm with only a few cursive features

5. Unfortunately, I do not think that even checking the position of the watermarks would produce useful results, since they do not appear to be distributed methodically. 6. Cf. Med. Palat. 218, book IV, fol. 328r, for his signature (“fray b[er]nardi[n]o de sahagun”). At least two other interlinear notes by Bernardino appear on Med. Palat. 219, book VII, fol. 234r, and Med. Palat. 220, book X, fol. 72v.

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(ct and st ligatures, macrons signifying missing nasals);7 the ductus of this script suggests a possible date of circa fifty years earlier, since it is the crystallization of a type of writing from the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Titles are in brown ink, as are the initials (10–15 mm), the simplest outlined only, and those that are more important filled in. A total of 2,468 images in pen and ink and in color, interspersed throughout the text, document the narration in both columns, even though nearly all are situated in the left column.8 e x l i br is : two different stamps. One, oval, is of the Palatine Lorenese library: 35 × 30 mm, decorated at the sides with two wings and surmounted by two crowns, with the legend “Bibl(iotheca) Caes(area) Med(icea) Palat(ina)”; stamped sometime between 1745 and 1765, i.e., after the Medici grand-ducal nucleus joined that of the Lorenese at the time of Francesco Stefano di Lorena, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1737–1765).9 Found in Med. Palat. 218, fols. 1r, 353v; Med. Palat. 219, fols. 1r, 375v; Med. Palat. 220, fols. 1r, 494r. The other stamp is that of the R(eale) Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana with the Sabaudian coat of arms of a cross surmounted by a crown (diameter 20 mm, saec. XIX [post1885]). Found in Med. Palat. 218, fols. Ir, IVr, 1r, 33r, 353v, I'r, III'r; Med. Palat. 219, fols. Ir, 1r, 33r; Med. Palat. 220, fols. Ir, 1r, 33r, 494v, 495v. There is also an old shelf mark, in pencil, on the recto of the first flyleaves of the three volumes, in an eighteenth-century (post-1765) hand.10 Composed of the numerals and letters XXI. Anon(imo), this shelf mark presumably corresponds to an internal subdivision of the manuscript section of the Palatine Lorenese grand-ducal library, perhaps relating to its transfer to the Medici library, which occurred on 21 June 1783, by order of Pietro Leopoldo di Lorena (1765–1790), since it is very different from the shelf marks 743, later 711, that the codex had in the “Catalogo ragionato e istorico de’ manoscritti della biblioteca imperiale Medicea Lotaringia Palatina” (1763–1765), compiled by the sottobibliotecario Giovanni Gaspero Menabuoni (fl. 1763–1775). On folio IVv, a doxology reads “Christus vivit/Christus vincit/Christus regnat/Franciscus famulatur,” probably a glorification of God and Saint Francis for the end of the labor of compilation.11

7. See the lengthy discussion in Martínez, El “Códice Florentino,” pp. 24–29. 8. Martínez, El “Códice Florentino,” pp. 19–24. 9. Cf. Arduini, Documenti per una storia, pp. 276–301. 10. This can be deduced, for instance, from the title inscription in Menabuoni’s Catalogo “X. Menab.,” which includes the phrase “cominciato il dì 24 agosto 1763 e finito il dì XXV novembre 1765” on fol. [3r] unnumbered, for which cf. ASBL, Pluteo 92, sup. 227B [24]. 11. Cf. Martínez, El “Códice Florentino,” p. 17.

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c ov er : 315 × 220 mm; Spain, saec. XVI, second half. Brown leather over pasteboard, blind-tooled (three concentric double frames, decorated with floral motifs; a rhombus with double lines, and similarly decorated, fills the center) and gilt-tooled (the gilded ornamentation in each of the corners and around and inside the rhombus consists of small flowers, shells, acorns, birds, and angels’ heads). The spine has five double bands in relief, with similar blind and gilt tooling (small flowers and six crowned leopards in the corresponding panels, from which the title is missing). Headbands are glued, with the edge sprayed red. As already indicated by Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, this is almost surely a second binding12—certainly more ornate and precious than the preceding binding of Franciscan origin, which probably consisted of simple parchment with support straps of leather, more like those used in archives. The new binding served to rearrange the work, formerly in four volumes, as clearly noted by the author in book 9, into three, for reasons unfortunately no longer ascertainable, unless to achieve a more uniform book block.13 It is practically identical with one of the various covers preserved in the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid (fig. 3), that came from the collection of Manuel Rico y Sinobas (Valladolid, 1819–1898), a scholar and bibliophile who also happened to be an authority on bindings.14 c on di t ion : The three volumes are in good condition today, even if a few pages show traces of tannin or glue and signs of stains and mold, along with damage caused by the iron gall ink. Their bindings were restored15 (paper

12. Cf. del Paso y Troncoso, “Études,” pp. 173–174, where he refers to two passages clearly trimmed during the second binding at folios 177r and 240v of Med. Palat. 219. The missing parts can be completed using the Toulouse codex, the only known coeval apograph of Med. Palat. 218–220, for which see below (and n. 26). Various trimmed titles in the upper margins provide further proof. Del Paso y Troncoso also noted traces of the earlier binding on folio 222r (between the end of book VI and the beginning of book VII) of Med. Palat. 219, namely traces of glue where four parchment strips with writing had been attached, leaving an offset in black ink, difficult to decipher but certainly on what presumably had been a flyleaf, given the large extent of the darkened area. Del Paso y Troncoso detected further traces on folio 152r of Med. Palat. 220, between the end of book X and the beginning of book XI. I personally find these less convincing. 13. Cf. BML, Med. Palat. 219, fol. 307v, where in the “Prologo” to book IX it is made clear that the first volume is to contain books I–V; the second, book VI only; the third, books VII–X, and the fourth, books XI–XII. 14. Cf. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, RS/69. The binding is reproduced both on the cover and inside the catalogue published on the occasion of an exhibition in Rome at the Biblioteca Vallicelliana; Legature spagnole, p. 77. 15. One should point out the contemporaneous attempts to correct flawed passages by rewriting them on pieces of paper glued over the passages, as, for example, in Med. Palat. 219,

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lining, replacement of the three glued headbands, glazing of various leaves) in 1960.16 The volumes’ good state of preservation is probably due in part to reduced wear on the original as a result of the existence of various reproductions (chromolithography of the images, 1905; photographs of the entire text, 1938; first microfilm of the entire work, 1955).17

MED. PALAT. 218, FOLS. 1–353; MED. PALAT. 219, FOLS. 1–375; MED. PALAT. 220, FOLS. 1–495

Bernardino de Sahagún (from Palat. 218, at fol. 1r: “fray bernardino de saagun”) Doze libros de las cosas divinas o por mejor dezir idolatricas y humanas y naturales desta nueva españa (from Med. Palat. 218, at fol. 1r). i nc. : Prologo. El medico no puede acertadamente aplicar (Med. Palat. 218, fol. 1r) e x p. : y traba/jar fielmente en esta nueva españa (Med. Palat. 218, fol. 3r) i nc. : Al sincero lector. Quando esta obra se començo (Med. Palat. 218, fol. 3r) e x pl . : en la nueva y vieja españa (Med. Palat. 218, fol. 3r) i nc. : Sumario de los capitulos del primero libro/Capitulo primero que habla (Med. Palat. 218, fol. 3v) e x pl . : Capitulo treynta y siete de quando los muchachos mudan los di/entes. Ibidem (Med. Palat. 218, fol. 9v) i nc. : Al lector/Para la intelligencia de las figuras (Med. Palat. 218, fol. 9v) e x pl . : esta junto a los pies (Med. Palat. 218, fol. 9v)

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Capitulo primero, que habla/del principal dios que adoravan/y aqujen sacrificavan los mexica/nos llamado vitsilubuchtli|Inic ce capitulo yntechpa tlatoa/y noc cenca tlapanuja teteuh yn/qujnmoteutiaia yoan yn qujntlama/njliaia yn ievecauh. Este dios, llamado vitsilubuch/tli, fue otro hercules|Vitsilubuchtli çan ma/ceoalli çan tlacatl catca (Med. Palat. 218, fol. 13r). e x pl . : y todo lo davan a/Motecuzoma, todo cloro venja a su poder|valmocemaci intenu/chtitlan injxqujch Haca/laqujli in teucujtlatl (Med. Palat. 220, fol. 494r) (cf. Códice Florentino, 1979). observat ions : Med. Palat. 218, at fols. 37r–41v, also contains, in the right column, Sap., 13, 1–19; 14, 7–31; 12, 1–18; 15, 1–3; 16, 13–16, translated into Náhuatl in the left column. m a n us cr i p t bi bl io gr a ph y: ASF, Guardaroba medicea 132, fol. 484(?); BNCF, II II 309, fol. 31v; ASBL, Pluteo 92, sup. 227B (“Catalogo ragionato e istorico de’ manoscritti della biblioteca imperiale Medicea Lotaringia Palatina”), fol. 121r. pr i n t ed bi bl io gr a ph y: Bandini, Bibliotheca Leopoldina Laurentiana, coll. 454–456; Civezza, Saggio di Bibliografia, p. 525; Brinton, Rig-Veda Americanus; del Paso y Troncoso, “Études,” pp. 171–174; Sahagún, Florentine Codex, 1956 and 1970–1982; Historia general, 1938 and 1946; Historia universal, 1905; Conquista de México, 1978; Códice Florentino, 1979 (reprint 1996), 1982, 2001; Seler Sachs, Lehman, and Krickberg, Einige Kapitel; Cline, “Missing and Variant Prologues,” pp. 237–251; Cacho, Manuscritos hispánicos, pp. 403–405.

i nc. : Libro primero, en que se trata de/los dioses que adoravan los natu/rales desta tierra, que es la nue/va españa|Inic ce amuxtli uncan motene/oa in te teub in qujnmoteutiaia/in nican tlaca.

The work contained in Med. Palat. 218–220 lacks both the author’s name and the title. It is the only known illustrated copy of the twelve books18 in which the Spanish Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590) organized the remarkable quantity of material about Aztec-

fol. 192r–v, and Med. Palat. 220, fols. 50v, 158v, 389r, 389v. 16. Cf. BML, Registro dei restauratori, nr. 5 (1955–1963). 17. For the first chromolithographic reproduction, cf. Sahagún, Historia universal, 1905; for the photographic reproduction, see ASBL, 1938/XVI, 66, carried out in 1938 by Lansing B. Bloom of the University of New Mexico. The microfilm of the entire manuscript is available for consultation in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana di Firenze (hereafter, BML).

18. Books I–III deal with the religion of the Aztecs (divinities, myths, feasts, sacrifices, idolatry); books IV and V are about astrology and divination; book VI contains prayers and solemn discourses that exemplify the forms of Náhuatl rhetoric; book VII treats of the sun, moon, and the stars; book VIII deals with local history (nobles and governors); book IX is about commerce (merchants and craftsmen working with gold and precious feathers); book X regards Aztec society (vices and virtues of the people; diseases and remedies); book XI, the longest, is a treatise of natural history; and book XII, finally, describes the Spanish conquest and the fall of Tenochtitlán.

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Fig. 3. (Above) BML, Med. Palat. 220, and (facing page) Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, RS/69: Comparison of covers

Sometime between 1577 and 1578, Philip II of Spain (1527–1598) decided to add Sahagún’s work to the index of prohibited books of the Spanish Inquisition. As stated in the infamous cédula of 22 April 1577, addressed to the viceroy of New Spain, Martín Enríquez,23 the “… Historia universal de las cosas mas señaladas de esa Nueva España” concerned arguments “… que toquen a supersticiones y manera de vivir que estos indios tenían…” that should not have been written “… en niguna lengua, porque así conviene al servicio de Dios nuestro señor….” The Florentine Codex (so-called because of its location)24 originally must have included both the name of its author and the title—

culture that he started to gather in the 1540s.19 Written in both Náhuatl (by 1569) and Spanish (1569–1577), it is composed of outlines, various drafts, successive revisions, and redactions.20 Sahagún’s models are believed to have been two famous, widely diffused encyclopedic treatises, the Historia Naturalis of Pliny (23–79),21 and the De proprietatibus rerum of Bartolomeo Anglico (1200s).22 19. Cf. BML, Med. Palat. 218, fol. 1r. His secular name may have been Bernardino de Ribera, native of Sahagún (León). From 1529 on, he worked as a missionary in Mexico, which in 1521 had just been conquered by Hernán Cortés (1485–1547). 20. They are the Códices Matritenses, both in Madrid, one at the Real Biblioteca and the other at the Real Academia de la Historia. Both were published in facsimile in Sahagún, Historia universal, 1906–1908, and later described in detail in Códices Matritenses, 1964. The works in question are the Primeros memoriales (1558–1559) and the Manuscrito de Tlatelolco (composed of Primer manuscrito de Tlatetolco, 1561–1562; Memoriales en tres columnas, 1563–1565; Memoriales con escolios, 1565). The fate of both the manuscrito de 1569 (which is believed to have included a reorganization of the Manuscrito de Tlatelolco, clearly referred to in the “prologo” to the first book, see Med. Palat. 218, fol. 2v), and of the Sumario of 1570 is unknown. The Breve compendio de los ritos idolátricos de Nueva España of 1570 is conserved in the Vatican Archives (I–XVIII, 1816). Cf. Dibble, “Sahagún’s Historia,” in Sahagún, Florentine Codex, 1970–1982, vol. I, pp. 9–23. 21. Cf. Garibay K., Historia de la literatura náhuatl, vol. II, pp. 69–71. 22. Cf. Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting, pp. 167–168.

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23. Quoted from Marchetti, “Hacia la edición crítica,” pp. 1–36. During these years, Philip II had ordered the requisition of all of Sahagún’s writings. He was worried about transmitting the memory of idolatrous cults, both in writing (in the vernacular) and in images, as specified by the dictates of the Spanish Inquisition (1478–1834). This was in accord with the Index librorum prohibitorum (1559–1966) of the Sacred Congregation of the Roman Inquisition, one of the most important consequences of the Council of Trent (1545–1563). The Index, first promulgated in 1559, established that translations of the biblical message into vernacular languages could be read only with special permission by those who knew Latin, and not by women. On the adventuresome stages of the work’s compilation, at times warmly supported, at other times impeded and disturbed by the responsible religious and political authorities, cf. especially Dibble, Florentine Codex, 1982, pp. 9–23; Pietro Corsi, “Il Codice Fiorentino,” pp. 80–86; Spagnesi, “Bernardino de Sahagún,” pp. 7–24. 24. On the earliest use, and spread, of the designation “Códice Florentino,” cf. García Icazbalceta, Bibliografía mexicana, pp. 322–387; Zavala, Francisco del Paso y Troncos, p. 6;

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presumably written out in full and graphically elaborated, like the frontispieces in contemporary printed books—as well as the internal subtitle. Evidence for this is a trace of writing on the recto of what remains of a page at the beginning of the book block, which was excised close to the inside margin. Del Paso y Troncoso, who was the first to notice the writing in 1896, logically concluded that it was a part of the original title,25 which happens to survive in the Toulouse codex,26 a coeval descriptus of the Castilian section of the Mediceo Palatino codex,27 conserving Bernardino’s text in Spanish only and without illustrations. In my examination of the excised page, I noticed that there were two more traces of writing lower down on the page, below the one on the upper part recorded by del Paso y Troncoso. The trace in the upper part appeared to belong to the curl of the H of Historia, presumably the beginning of the now-lost title. Support for this hypothesis comes from the title inscription still visible on the first supplementary page of the Toulouse manuscript, which was copied from the now partially illegible inscription at the beginning of the codex proper:28 “Historia universal de las cosas de la Nueva España en doce libros y quatro volumenes en lengua española. Compuesta y compilada Por el Muy Reverendo Padre Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, de la orden de los Frayles menores de observancia.”29 The two traces that I noticed lower down on the excised page could be, instead, the remnants of the summary of the contents of the work’s first volume,

likewise missing from the Florentine Codex but included in the Toulouse codex, which begins (fol. 2v), “(E)n este libro o primer (volu)men/ se contienen cinco (libros)/ con sus appéndices. El primero trata….”30 All this, as I said, refers to the recto. It has not been previously noticed that there are also three traces of writing on the verso, probably testifying to the presence of the first of the work’s two dedications to the minister general of the Franciscans for Mexico, Fra Rodrigo de Sequera (fl. 1575– 1585), who arrived 4 September 1575. Bernardino was indebted to him for the final commission and for the means to finish the work of copying and illustrating his encyclopedia of the Aztecs. The dedication survives in the Toulouse manuscript, after the summary of the first volume.31 While the hypotheses proposed above are well founded, the question of why the first page was excised is more difficult to answer with any degree of certainty. It is worthwhile to point out that similar acts—for instance, tampering with a coat of arms—were performed to obscure a work’s original provenance, or its author and/or title when the work in question was banned by religious or civil authorities. In our case, the two possibilities could coexist. When was the page excised? The answer seems fairly obvious: it must have been done (leaving a strip extending circa 25 mm from the inside margin) after the work had been bound for the second time. If it had been excised during binding, the strip probably would have been glued to the inside of the quire. The present binding lacks any indication of a title, even on the spine of the three volumes.32 The title that has found the most widespread acceptance— Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España—derives instead from the first edition of Sahagún’s work, brought out in 1829–1830 by Carlos Maria de Bustamante. However, the text printed was not that of Med. Palat.

Dibble, Florentine Codex, 1982, p. 15 and notes 55–56. 25. Cf. del Paso y Troncoso, “Études,” pp. 171, 174; cf. also Dibble, Florentine Codex, 1982, p. 15; Marchetti, “Hacia la edición crítica,” p. 25, postulating also the presence of a dedicatory page. 26. Fra Juan de San Antonio first noted the codex around 1732 among the books of the Franciscan convent of Toulouse (Andorra). In 1793 it was found in Madrid by Diego Panes y Avellán, who had it transcribed. Today it is in the possession of the Real Academia de la Historia of Madrid (MS. A–77; Colección de Muñoz, 50. 9. 4812), for which cf. esp. Dibble, Florentine Codex, 1982, pp. 21–23; Martínez, El “Códice Florentino,” pp. 10–13; Marchetti, “Hacia la edición crítica,” p. 3 and n. 9. For the opinion that it is a copy of the Florentine Codex made in Spain around the 1580s, cf. Baudot, “Fray rodrigo de Sequera, avocat du diable,” pp. 47–82. The Toulouse copy, compared with a photographic reproduction of the Florentine Codex, is published in Sahagún, Historia general, 1956. 27. Cf. del Paso y Troncoso, “Études,” pp. 172–173; Cline and d’Olwer, Sahagún and His Works, pp. 196–203; Dibble, Florentine Codex, 1982, p. 22; Martínez, El “Códice Florentino,” p. 13; Marchetti, “Hacia la edición crítica,” pp. 3, 7, 33. 28. Cf. Martínez, El “Códice Florentino,” p. 18. 29. Cf. del Paso y Troncoso, “Études,” p. 172; Martínez, El “Códice Florentino,” pp. 10, 18.

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30. Quoted from the transcription by Marchetti, “Hacia la edición crítica,” pp. 4–5. 31. Ibid., p. 4. 32. Until the critical edition is available, for the complex problems relating to the title (from that most commonly used, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, to the most recent one, Historia general [o universal] de las cosas de la Nueva España of Lèon-Portilla), cf. esp. d’Olwer, Historiadores, p. 169; Dibble, Florentine Codex, 1982, pp. 15–16; Martínez, El “Códice Florentino,” pp. 17–19; Marchetti, “Hacia la edición crítica,” p. 31; Spagnesi, “Bernardino de Sahagún,” p. 12, and Léon-Portilla in Códice Florentino, 2001, p. 124 and passim.

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218–220, but rather that of the “Panes” codex, an apograph of the abovementioned Toulouse manuscript.33 There is no doubt that the transcription and illustration of the bilingual copy of the Historia was begun after the arrival in Mexico in 1575 of Fra Rodrigo de Sequera, Bernardino’s supporter and patron, in the name of Don Juan de Ovando, president of the Consejo de Indias (1524–1778), as he himself informs us in the “Prologo” to the first book “... pero como llego a esta tierra nostro R.mo P.e R.o de Sequera ... mando que estos libros todos se Romançasen....”34 This same motive is behind the two dedications in the book.35 We can be sure that the work was finished by 1577, since there are references in the manuscript to events that took place in 1576. Moreover, toward the end of book VI, Fra Bernardino writes “... que escrivio en la lengua mexican este año de mjll y quinjentos y setenta y siete.”36 We can state even more precisely that it must have been completed by the summer of 1577, because Archbishop Pedro Moya de Contreras wrote to Philip II on 28 October of that year to assure the king that all of Sahagún’s works, which he had ordered sequestered with the abovementioned inauspicious cédula of 22 April 1577, would be sent as requested.37 Further confirmation is provided by the friar’s declaration of 26 March 1578, written in response to the king’s same order, that “... todas las cuales obras acabé de sacar en limpio este año pasado, y las dì a Fr. Rodrigo de Sequera....”38

The work, therefore, was completed in the years 1576–1577, and presumably the copy conserved in the above-mentioned Toulouse manuscript was made not long afterward. The Toulouse manuscript was, in turn, the source for at least three apographs.39 A little less than two centuries after its completion, Sahagún’s work became a part of the Biblioteca Medicea Lotaringia Palatina. In Florence, the work received its first stamps of provenance between 1745 and 1765. Hitherto unknown is that the earliest description of the manuscript also dates from around this time. Giovanni Gaspero Menabuoni described it in his Catalogo as follows:

33. Cf. Sahagún, Historia general, 1929–1930. 34. Cf. BML, Med. Palat. 218, “Prologo”, fol. 1v. 35. Cf. BML, Med. Palat. 218, where, as we saw, the dedication was presumably on the verso of the excised page; and Med. Palat. 219, book VI, fol. 3v. 36. Cf. BML, Med. Palat. 219, fol. 219v. 37. Cf. Marchetti, “Hacia la edición crítica,” p. 22. 38. Ibid., p. 23, for the full text of the crucial passage of Bernardino’s letter to the king. According to del Paso y Troncoso (“Études,” pp. 173–174) and Dibble (Florentine Codex, p. 15 and n. 50), there were two original versions of Sahagún’s bilingual Historia. Del Paso y Troncoso simply states that “… le manuscrit de Florence … est un des deux originaux envoyés par Sahagun en Espagne …” without further details; Dibble, on the other hand, specifies that one version, copied in 1576–1577, was carried back to Spain by the viceroy Martín Enríquez (the so-called “MS. Enríquez”), the fate of which he claims “is not known”; the other, copied in 1578–1579, which was carried back to Spain by Fra Rodrigo de Sequera (the “MS. Sequera”), is to be identified with the Florentine Codex. In a note, Dibble also quotes a passage from Fra Bernardino’s last revised version of the Spanish conquest, the Relación de la conquista de Esta Nueva España, datable to 1585 and published by Carlos Maria de Bustamante (Mexico, D.F., 1840), in which the Franciscan does in fact refer to two copies, about which he has no further information. Martínez (El “Códice Florentino,” p. 7) does not mention two copies, presenting only the Florentine Codex, which he dates to 1578–1579. He maintains it came to Spain with

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N°. 3 codici cartacei folio. coperti di pelle scura tutta lavorata e dorata contenenti l’Istoria del Messico in lingua spagnola colla lingua messicana accanto. Si vedono in principio le immagini degli dei de’ quali si tratta nell’opera, che adoravano i messicani nel tempo della loro idolatria.40

Even though the Biblioteca Medicea Lotaringia had opened its doors to the public from 1765 to 1771—preceded by the Magliabechiana in 1747 and the Marucelliana in 1752—Bernardino’s work remained shrouded in silence until 1783, when Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo transferred it to the Laurenziana, along with 248 other manuscripts. These are the few documented, and therefore secure, dates of the manuscript’s iter up to the present day. But what had happened in that

Sequera, to whom it had been consigned when he left Mexico at the end of February 1580. Nor does Marchetti (“Hacia la edición crítica,” pp. 24, 26, 29–30, and n. 101) mention two copies. He correctly dates the Florentine Codex to 1576–1577, but believes it left Mexico in 1578 rather than with Sequera, based on a letter from Archbishop Pedro Moya de Contreras to Philip II, dated 16 December 1578, in which he confirms that the manuscript had been shipped and supposes it had already arrived. Marchetti critically analyzes the known text of Bernardino’s last works, which he maintains are highly uncertain. Léon-Portilla (Códice Florentino, 2001, pp. 125–131) returns to the problem of the two copies, arguing that there is no proof they ever existed. 39. These are the above-mentioned “Panes” codex (see above and n. 33) and the copy of Felipe Bauzá, the latter serving as the source for the partial edition (books I–VI) of the Historia, contained in books V and VII of King, Antiquities of Mexico, 9 vols., London 1831–1848. Sahagún, Histoire générale des choses de la Nouvelle-Espagne, 1880, is a conflation of the two codices mentioned above. A third copy, known as Uguina, remains unpublished. It is preserved in the New York Public Library; cf. Marchetti, “Hacia la edición crítica,” p. 3 and n. 9. 40. Cf. ASBL, Pluteo 9,2 sup. 227 B , fol. 121r.; the second sentence is added in the margin, by a different, contemporaneous hand.

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interval of circa two hundred years? How, and when, did Fra Bernardino’s work make the remarkable journey from New Spain to Florence? It is now generally believed that before coming to Florence, the manuscript made an intermediary stop around 1580 in Spain. Fra Rodrigo de Sequera had left Mexico at the end of January of that year,41 presumably taking along the manuscript dedicated to him, which, unbeknown to Fra Bernardino, had been saved from Philip II’s requisition. While in Spain, the manuscript would have received its present Plateresque binding, here noted for the first time.42 Subsequently, the first page was excised, although it is not possible to say if this was done by Fra Rodrigo de Sequera or by the recipient of the manuscript. From Spain, the manuscript would have traveled to Florence. There are various hypotheses about when this might have occurred, and the times proposed stretch from the end of the 1580s to the first decades of the 1700s.43 In the course of research for my paper on Med. Palat. 218–220, I came across an interesting document in the Archivio di Stato of Florence, an

inventory from 1587, preserved in the Guardaroba medicea, listing the belongings of Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici (1549–1609). Among the items in the cardinal’s library in Rome were two codices, described as follows:44

41. Cf. d’Olwer, Historiadores, p. 179; Baudot, “Fray Rodrigo de Sequera, avocat du diable,” pp. 47–82; Spagnesi, “Bernardino de Sahagún,” p. 14; for the two different hypotheses, see also above and n. 38. 42. It is reproduced without further observations in Martínez, El “Códice Florentino,” p. 14. We would like to take this opportunity to note that in response to my paper at the conference, Carmen Hidalgo of the Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España in Madrid has undertaken to research the binding of Med. Palat. 218–220. 43. According to one of the earliest hypotheses, the manuscript was consigned to Philip II and then sent to Rome for papal approval. Pope Leo XI (1605–1606), a Medici, is named as a possible intermediary with grand-ducal Florence.The manuscript would then have arrived in Florence during the first decade of the seventeenth century. It may subsequently have been in the custody of the grand-ducal librarian and bibliophile Antonio Magliabecchi (1633–1714). Cf. Nuttal, “Francisco Cervantes de Salazar,” pp. 295–326; Dibble, Florentine Codex, p. 16; Martínez, El “Códice Florentino,” p. 7. Marchetti (“Hacia la edición crítica,” pp. 24–26, 31) claims instead that as soon as Philip II received the manuscript, between the end of 1578 and the first months of 1579, he donated it to the ruling grand duke, Francesco I (1541–1587), with whom he was on excellent terms, as a gesture of thanks for the economic and military help that the grand duke was offering for his campaign in Portugal. Philip would have sent it as a gift on the occasion of Francesco’s marriage to Bianca Cappello (1548–1587), in other words, before 12 October 1579. According to Marchetti, this would also explain the removal of the first page, since it contained a dedication addressed to someone else, which could have afforded great embarrassment, even if the manuscript’s opulence and beauty made it a most regal gift. Note that Marchetti states the dedication was on the recto, although according to my examinations, see above, it was on the verso. Spagnesi (“Bernardino de Sahagún,” p. 14) does not accept Marchetti’s proposal because of contradictions in the chronology. He is convinced that the manuscript was brought to Spain by Fra Rodrigo de Sequera in 1580.

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Un libro di pitture dell’Indie della camera venuto come sopra ad q. A, p. 399. 1 Tre libri di … (sic) quali sia, in consegna la camera, venuti come sopra a 399.

As far as I was concerned, there was a very strong possibility that the second entry referred to Med. Palat. 218–220. The dots could signify a repetition of the words in the first entry, or (thinking of our manuscript’s excised first page) they might signify the lack of both author and title. If my identification were accepted, it would allow us to finally establish a terminus ante quem for the work’s arrival in Rome, as well as a post quem for its arrival in Florence, as part of Ferdinando’s private library. On 19 October 1587, Ferdinando renounced his ecclesiastical career in order to succeed as grand duke. By the following year, 1588, the librarian Domenico Mellini (fl. 1565–1606) had compiled an “Index eorum librorum qui privatim regalibus in aedibus Ferdinandi Medicaei S. R. E. Cardinalis et Magni Ducis Etruriae tertii asservantur.” 45 Naturally, I immediately searched Mellini’s index for the “Tre libri di ...” listed in the Guardaroba, but I found no likely candidate for Med. Palat. 218–220. However, at “n. 1138” in the list of “Libri volgari scritti in penna” was a manuscript described as “1. De costumi de’ Mexicani libri 5 con una aggiunta. È traduzzione.”46 Here, again, was a description that immediately made me think of the first volume of Bernardino’s work. However, the fact that it was included with the vernacular books, that it was only one volume, and that it was a translation all seemed to argue against its

44. ASF, Guardaroba medicea 132 (fol. Ir: “1587. Questo libro si chiama inventario generale della Guardaroba del serenissimo cardinale granduca di Toscana don Ferdinando Medici, al tempo della amministratione del s. Benedetto Fedini guardarobiere maggiore; è segnato A con coreggie, pag. di carte 500”), fol. 484; in ASF, Guardaroba medicea 79, at fol. 203, only the first item is cited (cf. also Perini, Contributo alla ricostruzione della biblioteca, pp. 571–667). 45. BNCF, ms. II. II. 309 (formerly Magl. X. 13), fols. 1r–41v. 46. BNCF, ms. II. II. 309, fols. 30r–33r. The title is also found in the “Inventario della biblioteca granducale” (c. 1610), in ASF, Guardaroba medicea 237ter, fols. 1r–41v, published in Perini, Contributo alla ricostruzione della biblioteca, pp. 588–667.

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being the Laurenziana codex. Nevertheless, Mellini’s note raised a question that I was unable to answer: what could this vernacular translation of the “costumi de’ Mexicani” be? Fortunately, the answer was not long in coming. At the conference, Lia Markey, who was unaware of Mellini’s index, communicated that the Hispanic Society of New York possessed a manuscript, identified as B1479, bound in red morocco with the Medici cardinalitial arms gilttooled on the cover, which corresponded precisely to the description in the 1588 index. To clinch it all, the first flyleaf was inscribed with n° 1138. Here, then, was the vernacular translation of the Spanish text of Bernardino’s first five books. The translation had evidently been ordered by Ferdinando, who may even have intended to translate all the books, in which case either the work was never completed, or it has been lost.47 In light of my hypothesis regarding the Guardaroba entry of 1587, together with Lia Markey’s discovery of the translation of the first five books, it seems likely that Fra Rodrigo de Sequera presented Sahagún’s work to Cardinal Ferdinando, who, as is known, had close ties to the religious orders.48 Unfortunately, Fra Rodrigo’s motives are no longer ascertainable, but he may have donated the work to prevent its being found and sequestered by Philip II. He would have been certain that he was offering it to someone who could look after it in the best possible way and would appreciate the work’s great innovation and cultural content. Such was Ferdinando de’ Medici’s enthusiasm and interest when he received the work that he immediately ordered a vernacular translation, at least of the first five books. These, listed in the inventory of his library, mysteriously ended up in the United States. Caution may have prompted him to keep the original three volumes hidden away from prying eyes, since they are missing from both Mellini’s 1588 index and the “Inventario della biblioteca granducale,” which can be dated to circa 1610.49 However, the existence of the manuscript in Ferdinando’s library at court is likely to have been well known, since it is presumably to Bernardino’s work that the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522– 1605) refers, writing to the grand duke on 12 December 1589 about his desire “… arricchire et ornare queste mie composizioni con qualchuna

figura de peregrini (uccelli), tra quelle che accennò al dottore Mercuriale, che tiene in quel suo ricchissimo libro di Spagna.”50 Bernardino’s illustrated manuscript is also likely to have been the source of inspiration for the Florentine painter Lodovico Buti (c. 1560–after 1611) when, around 1589, he frescoed the vaults in the grand-ducal armory, the last rooms at the end of the first corridor of the present Uffizi Gallery.51 But after enjoying a brief period of fame hard upon its arrival in Florence in 1587, Bernardino’s work apparently dropped into oblivion for nearly two centuries. Not until Menabuoni included it in his Catalogo, compiled between 1745 and 1765, was there any further mention of the manuscript. Even after the volumes had been transferred to the Laurenziana in 1783, it was another decade before Bernardino’s work was made known to the scholarly world. In 1793, the prefect of the library, Angelo Maria Bandini, published his Catalogus,52 in which he provided the first thorough description of the manuscript:

47. Cf. the essay by Lia Markey in this volume, referring to another Medici inventory from the 1580s that lists the vernacular version. 48. Cf. Pieraccini, La stirpe de’ Medici di Cafaggiolo, vol. II, pp. 283–304. 49. Cf. Perini, Contributo alla ricostruzione della biblioteca, pp. 588–667.

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Historia mexicana libri XII lingua hispanica et mexicana exaratis, tribus voluminibus comprehensa, et innumeris figuris, rudi penicillo, in singulis ferme paginis delineatis exornata, quae ad mores, vivendi rationem, religionem, artes, naturae foetus illarum regionum attinet.53

Nonetheless, Bernardino’s work continued to languish in the library. Another century had to pass before the first complete transcription of the Florentine Codex was made by del Paso y Troncoso between 1892 and

50. Cf. Galluzzi, Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici, p. 214, where the letter is erroneously dated 12 October 1579. The letter, conserved in ASF, Med. VII. 2. 4. 385, is published in Tosi, Ulisse Aldrovandi e la Toscana, pp. 380–381; cf. also Arrigoni, Le Selve di Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti, p. 14, under Aldrovandi, Ulisse, where the month is corrected to December, but the year has not been corrected to 1589. 51. Observed by Detlef Heikamp, Mexico and the Medici, Florence 1972, p. 19; cf. Corti, Le piante medicinali del Codice Fiorentino, pp. 47–68, who is of the same opinion; on the probable date of Buti’s fresco, cf. also Meloni Trkulja, “Buti, Ludovico,” in Dizionario biografico, vol. XV, pp. 607–608. 52. Cf. Bandini, Bibliotheca Leopoldina Laurentiana, coll. 454–456; approximately a century later, the work is cited in da Civezza, Saggio di Bibliografia, p. 525 (cf. also Dibble, Florentine Codex, p. 16 and n. 64, where he confuses the correct date, 1879, with 1789, thus mistakenly presuming that Sahagún’s text was already known before Bandini’s description). 53. Bandini, Bibliotheca Leopoldina Laurentiana, col. 454. The title Historia mexicana reappears in Cacho, Manuscritos hispánicos, vol. II, pp. 403–405.

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1898.54 Shortly afterward, it was printed and made available to a larger public, even if progress to publish it in full was slow. Listed below are the first important editions and/or translations, more or less complete, of various parts of the text or of the images, which culminated in the facsimile edition of 1979: 1.

English translation by Daniel G. Brinton, 1890, of the Náhuatl text of the twenty hymns to the gods, using the texts recorded in Med. Palat. 218–220.

2.

First chromolithograph reproduction of all illustrations, but without explanatory text, published in 1905, vol. V, edited by Francisco del Paso y Troncoso.55

3.

German translation from Náhuatl of selected chapters from the seven books of the Historia,56 by Eduard Seler, published in Seler Sachs, Lehman, and Krickberg, Einige Kapitel.

4.

Transcription by del Paso y Troncoso of books I–VI, in Sahagún, Historia general, 1938, edited by Joaquín Ramírez Cabañas. This edition was based on Bustamante’s text.

5.

Transcription of four more books (VII–IX), likewise by del Paso y Troncoso (XII by Nuttal),57 in the edition of Miguel Acosta y Saignes in Sahagún, Historia general, 1946, similarly based on Bustamante’s text.

6.

Comparison of Bustamante’s text with the complete microfilm of Med. Palat. 218–220 in Sahagún, Historia general, 1956, edited by Angel M. Garibay K.58

54. Only the first six of the twelve books of his original complete transcription were deposited in the Museo Nacional de Antropología y Historía of Mexico City immediately after his death in 1916. The other books (VII–XII) remained dispersed until 1940, when an antiquarian in Mexico City offered to sell books VII–IX to the museum (cf. Dibble, Florentine Codex, pp. 17–19; Corti, Le piante medicinali del Codice Fiorentino, pp. 56–57). The location of the last three books (X–XII) is still unknown. 55. The plan was to publish eight volumes, of which volumes I–IV were to contain the text of Med. Palat. 218–220, which instead ended up reproduced in volume V, while volumes VI– VIII contain the unabridged edition of the Codices Matritenses (cf. Dibble, Florentine Codex, p. 17). On the images, see Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting, pp. 173–178. 56. Translated were chapters 1–29 of book I; chapters 20–38 and Appendix 2 of book II; chapters 1–14 and Appendices 1–9 of book III; chapter 29 of book VI; chapters 26–37 of book VIII; chapter 29 of book X; all of book XII. 57. Cf. Martínez, El “Códice Florentino,” p. 99; cf. also ASBL, R/F 14, 1890, registration of the “Riproduzione di disegni per la signora Zelia Nuttal.” 58. For further information about the use of the microfilm, cf. ibid., pp. 99–100, 139.

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7.

Reproduction of the images in book XII (Med. Palat. 220) relating to the conquest of Mexico in the text edited by Marta Dujovne, 1978.

8.

English version (left column) of the Náhuatl text (right column) in Sahagún, Florentine Codex, 1970–1982, edited by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble.

9.

Selected texts from the Florence codex and that of Toulouse, translated and edited to show omissions and variants in the existing editions, in the article “Missing and Variant Prologues” by Howard F. Cline, 1971.

10.

Facsimile of the manuscript in Códice Florentino, 1979.

By the time the Secretaría de Gobernación of the Mexican government produced the facsimile in 1979, the most arduous part of the endeavor to make the Laurenziana codex known to the scholarly and editorial world was over. But it had taken almost a century. Since then, an edition of the Castilian text of Med. Palat. 218–220 has been published,59 as well as a new facsimile, this one in four volumes, true to the original division of the manuscript.60 The direction to move in now, thirty years after the publication of the first facsimile of Med. Palat. 218–220, is toward a much-needed critical edition of Bernardino de Sahagún’s text. But that is another story, and one very much on the minds of all scholars of the manuscript.

59. First unabridged version, for the general public, with an introduction, a section on paleography, and notes, López Austin and García Quintana, eds., Sahagún, Florentine Codex, 1982. I was unable to examine the edition of the Historia published on the occasion of the fourth centenary of Fra Bernardino’s death (Sahagún, Historia general, ed. Temprano) to verify whether or not it is based on Med. Palat. 218–220. 60. Códice Florentino, 2001, edited and with an introduction by Léon-Portilla (De la oralidad y los códices a la “Historia general”), which had already appeared in 1999 for the fifth centenary of Bernardino’s birth as “De la oralidad y los códices a la ‘Historia general’: Transvase y estructuración de los textos,” pp. 65–141.

Painters of the New World: The Process of Making the Florentine Codex * DI A NA M AGA L ON I K ER PEL Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (unam)

To Giovanna Rao and Piero Baglioni, in gratitude From September to December 2006, I carried out research at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana on the original manuscript of the Florentine Codex, also known as Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (1576–1577). The Florentine Codex is a twelve-volume encyclopedia about the people and culture of Central Mexico compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and a group of knowledgeable Nahua intellectuals in the wake of the Conquest. Following the standardized book layouts established by the printing workshops of the time, the pages of the twelve books that comprise the Florentine Codex were divided into two columns. In this case, however, the script was handwritten in two languages: on the right, the original text in Náhuatl—the language spoken in Central Mexico before the arrival of the Europeans—and on the left, Sahagún’s abbreviated translation into Spanish. Some 2,686 magnificent illustrations were made for these twelve books, most of them placed in the Spanish column, whose text was shorter (fig. 1).1 The texts of the Florentine

Fig. 1. Florentine Codex’s layout. Left column in Spanish, right column in Náhuatl; framed, colored ink-drawings are generally in the Spanish column. Florentine Codex, book 3, fol. 209v.

* This work, like the Florentine Codex, is a collective enterprise and a bridge between Europe and Mexico, so I want to express my gratitude to the team that made this dream come true. This work was funded and realized thanks to the generous support of Piero Baglioni, who established a project of collaboration between the chemistry department at the Università di Firenze and the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) for the study and development of conservation methods for works of art made in pre-Hispanic and colonial Mexico. The scientific analysis of materials was done by David Chelazzi, Roderico Giorgi, and Marcia Arroyo from the University of Florence; further

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Codex can be considered our most important historical source for reconstructing the lost pre-Columbian past. But little attention has been given to the images, to the extent that most modern editions of the Historia general do not contain a single copy of the illuminated drawings. When the drawings are mentioned as one of the elements of the work, they tend to be described as being too Europeanized in style and therefore lacking the originality and interest of the prose.2 Thus, the main objective of my work was to understand both the creative process underlying the making of the more than two thousand amazing paintings and their relevance to our understanding of the culture of the pre-Columbian world.3 As days went by in the library, I felt compelled to hold on to the books’ materiality and to give myself over to the process of seeing the images again and again as a way to unveil the quality of the codex as a work of art. How was it made? How many painters participated in this project? What was the method used to organize the arduous task of handwriting 1,200 folios in Náhuatl and Spanish and creating 2,686 beautifully colored drawings?4 How were these bright, translucent colors obtained? Were the materials all made following the indigenous tradition

of painting or were there some European pigments? Was the choice of materials itself significant? During the time I spent observing and systematizing information in a database, as all these questions emerged, two main inquiries developed in my mind. The first was the need to better explain the nature and status of these images (including their materiality), that is, to consider them not as mere illustrations to the texts, but as self-contained visual narratives that sometimes revealed and sometimes concealed a world of their own. The second was the importance of better understanding precisely who the Nahua artists were. I found that through the careful and systematic observation of the images and through the analysis of their pigments, I was able to come closer to understanding the process of making the Florentine Codex and thus closer to the human beings who literally gave their lives to the writing and painting of their legacy.

analyses were performed by Giancarlo Lanterna at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, in Florence. Colorants and binding media were reproduced at the Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museografía (ENCRyM) in Mexico City, thanks to Lilia Félix, Arturo León, and Lorena Román. The work was possible thanks to the permission granted by the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. Special thanks go to Franca Arduini, director of the library, and to Giovanna Rao, curator of manuscripts. I sincerely thank Gerhard Wolf, Clara Bargellini, and Joseph Connors, whose help and support were instrumental to accomplish this work. I am deeply indebted to Liliana Giorgulli, director of the Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museografía in Mexico City. I also express my appreciation to Pedro Ángeles Jiménez, Ernesto Peñaloza, Alessandra Russo, Jaime Cuadriello, Berenice Alcántara, and Salvador Reyes Equiguas, who have been generous in providing support and critical observations to this project. 1. Martínez, El “Códice Florentino,” p. 13. 2. Lockhart, We People Here, p. 13; León-Portilla, Visión de los vencidos, and its English translation, The Broken Spears; Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting; Martínez, El “Códice Florentino;” Quiñones Keber, “Illustrations of the Sahaguntine Corpus”; Gruzinski, Painting the Conquest; Carieri, “Sortir du cadre,” 83–97. 3. This project was a consequence of my doctoral dissertation, “Images of the Beginning.” There are several publications dealing with the significance of the Florentine’s images as Nahua–Christian picture writing: Magaloni, “Images of the Beginning: The Painted Story of the Conquest of Mexico in Sahagun’s Florentine Codex”; and “Visualizing the Nahua/ Christian Dialogue.” Escalante, “The Painters of Sahagún’s Manuscripts”; Peterson, “The Florentine Codex Imagery and the Colonial Tlacuilo.” 4. This number comprises all the images and ornamental motives.

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A COLLECTIVE ENTERPRISE OF SURVIVAL

The process of compiling the information to create this indigenous encyclopedia took almost thirty years, but the process of making the Florentine Codex was a race against death. Fray Bernardino established collaboration with two groups of indigenous peoples: the wise old men, called the principales, of a number of towns in Central Mexico, and the Christianized indigenous nobility, whom Sahagún called grammarians, and who were trained in Latin, Spanish, and Náhuatl at the College of Santa Cruz Tlatelolco.5 The principales answered questionnaires prepared by Sahagún about their culture and religion, and recorded their answers as paintings, for this was their way of writing before the Conquest. The grammarians interpreted the paintings, expanded the answers, and transcribed them into alphabetic Náhuatl. Using this earlier process, the documents known as Primeros memoriales were created.6 In 1569, Sahagún finished the work of organizing this information into twelve books, and the grammarians completed the Náhuatl text that would serve as the basis of the Florentine

5. Founded in 1536, the College of Santa Cruz Tlatelolco was the first institution of higher education in the Americas. There, the children of the indigenous nobility were trained in the seven liberal arts, in Christian theology, Latin grammar, and other facets of European education. See Vargas Lugo, Claustro Franciscano de Tlatelolco, pp. 15–21, and Burkhart, Holy Wednesday, pp. 55–73. 6. Baird, Drawings of Sahagún’s Primeros Memoriales, pp. 1–5.

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Codex. These writings, however, were given by Sahagún to the Franciscan authorities for review and were only given back in 1575, thanks to the intervention of Fray Rodrigo de Sequera, the brand new commissary general of the Franciscan order. Sequera gave Sahagún the necessary support to finish his task.7 By 1576, Sahagún and the indigenous team of painters and writers from the College of Santa Cruz Tlatelolco had already embarked on their long-awaited opportunity to paint and write a work that would crystallize their legacy. Unfortunately, in August of that year, Mexico City was afflicted by an epidemic of biblical proportions, in which more than eighty percent of the indigenous population of the Valley of Mexico died and the College of Santa Cruz Tlatelolco was almost emptied of students.8 The apocalyptic context was so devastating that Sahagún himself interrupts his translation into Spanish of a passage in book 11 and shifts into first person to state,

Fray Bernardino, who at this time was eighty years old and could barely hold a pen, they faced death like brave warriors, with their brushes and ink as their only weapons, as the world they painted lost its vital colors and became black and white.

In this year 1576 in the month of August, the Great Universal Pestilence began. It has been three months since it started and many have died and continue to die. I am now at Tlatelolco in Mexico City, and I can state that since the plague started until today, the eighth of November, the number of dead has increased dramatically; ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, seventy, eighty die every day. In this pestilence, and in the others mentioned above, many have died of hunger and of thirst, because it often happens that an entire household becomes sick and there is no one who can attend to them or even offer a simple jar of water.9

It is certain that this plague struck many of the painters. The survivors experienced an overwhelming grief at the loss of so many of their colleagues and loved ones, while fearing for their own lives, but they made the decision to continue working at Santa Cruz Tlatelolco. Together with

7. Hernández de León-Portilla, “La Historia General de Sahagún a la luz de las enciclopedias,” pp. 41–59. Bustamante García, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, p. 40–69; Dibble, “Sahagún’s Historia,” pp. 9–15. Baudot, “Fray Rodrigo de Sequera: Devil’s Advocate,” pp. 119–134. 8. Mendieta, Historia Eclesiástica Indiana; Marr and Kiracofe, “Was the Huey Cocoliztli a Haemorrhagic Fever?,” pp. 341–362; Acuna-Soto et al., “When half of the population died,” pp. 1–5; Few, “Indian Autopsy and Epidemic Disease in Early Colonial Mexico,” pp. 153–165. 9. Sahagún, Historia general, facsimile ed., 1979, vol. 3, fol. 390r.

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THE WORLD OF EVOKED COLORS

As we can deduce from Sahagun’s text, in November of 1576 the team was working on book 11, which is a “natural history” of New Spain made by the people who originally lived there. Book 11 includes more images than any other book in the codex. They are rendered with special care, and the coloring shows the use of a diverse array of pigments. At this period, however, amid the epidemic’s devastation, the painters seem to have run out of pigments. Folio 330v, near the end of the book, is the last one to have been rendered in color. From folio 331r onward, the painters sought instead to capture and convey the essence of the plants, flowers, and minerals of their land using only black ink. It is a tribute to their skill as artists that they could express the colors of their subjects without pigments, by means of the schematic and metaphoric qualities of the Náhuatl language and pictographic writing. In folio 343r, placing a ladybug right in front of the blossom denotes the red shade of the flower xilosuchitl (fig. 2a). On folio 356r, the precious stone quetzalitztli is both named and depicted using hieroglyphic writing (fig. 2b). The long feather above the stone denotes the particular shade of quetzal blue-green, and stands for the first part of the name quetzalli. A black, polished obsidian underneath represents the lustrous, shiny surface of the mineral and also the second part of its name: iztli, “obsidian.” The tlapalteoxihuitl, or “red turquoise” (fig. 3a), was painted in juxtaposition with a tomato, drawn in a botanical manner, to denote tlapalli (“red”) and a xihuitl (“turquoise”). Amber, called apozonalli, was rendered by the combination of two pictograms: that of fire, to represent the yellowish color, and that of water, which describes its transparency (fig. 3b). In all these examples, the evocative counterpoint between the invisible world of color and the image of that color in black and white renders the lack of pigment irrelevant. Not only did the Nahua painters know how to employ the schematic capacities of pictographic writing, but they produced a visual, intertextual relationship among images and concepts that activates the discursive capacity of these paintings. What kind of knowledge about the significance of color were these painters trying to

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Fig. 2. Xilosuchitl (2a, left) and quetzalitztli (2b, right). Florentine Codex, book 11, fols. 343v and 356v, respectively.

Fig. 3. Tlapalteoxihuitl (3a, left) and apozonalli (3b, right). Florentine Codex, book 11, fols. 358r and 359r, respectively.

express? Why was naming, denoting, and describing the hue and texture of a color so important? With these questions we arrive at the second section of this discussion: seeking to understand the identities of the artists.

well-trained masters, whom we believe were responsible for planning the work and who participated in the creation of the more significant and complex images. The first artist we have named, the Master of Both Traditions, is the author of the images in all of book 7 and a great number of those in books 3, 8, 11, and 12 (fig. 4). He is remarkable in his capacity to master the formal conventions of both the pre-Hispanic painting tradition, called tlacuilolli in Náhuatl, and Renaissance techniques. Using one or the other of these traditions, his figures intentionally evoke a time and a space, looking either into the indigenous past or the colonial present. He is a master draftsman and colorist. The second key artist we have named is the Master of the Three-Quarter Profiles. He is interested in creating internal spaces, and all his human figures are small in proportions and shown in three-quarter view (fig. 5). The third, called the Master of the Long Noses, is responsible for most of books 6 and 10, including the first depictions of indigenous social customs and poetic rhetoric (fig. 6). The fourth leading artist is the Master of the Complex Skin Tones. His line is immediately recognizable, recalling Italian Renaissance drawings and engravings. He is very precise in depicting skin tones, employing complex mixtures of red, yellow, green, and blue to create them (fig. 7). Most of the images in the codex are drawn inside frames. These frames can comprise sequences in order to establish narratives that relate in a precise way to the Náhuatl and Spanish texts. The sequence, number, and shape of the frames vary according to the book and thematic sections within each book.

THE PAINTERS

Each of the twelve books has a different number of paintings, with book 5 (“The Omens”) possessing the fewest images and book 11 (“Natural History”) including the largest number. My collaborators and I were able to identify the hands of twenty-two different artists who appeared in an apparently random manner throughout the twelve books. Following Morelli’s methodology, already applied by notable contemporary scholars to indigenous documents and mural paintings,10 it was possible to identify painters by analyzing a number of techniques: the ways in which they rendered the profiles of the human figures; the placement and detailing of the eyes; the general proportions of the human bodies; and the manners in which clothing was painted.11 We have identified four very

10. Baird, Drawings of Sahagún’s Primeros Memoriales; Boone, The Codex Magliabechiano; Stone, In Place of Gods and Kings; Brittenham, “The Cacaxtla Printing Tradition”; Trever, “Infrared Imaging and Painterly Practice.” 11. On attribution of artists’ hands, see Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes,” pp. 7–35; Wollheim, On Art and Mind, pp. 177–201.

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Fig. 5. Master of the Three-Quarter Profiles. Florentine Codex, book 6, fol. 198v.

painted with very diluted, watery colors, books 7 and 8 exhibit bright and saturated pigments, and book 6 contains black-and-white drawings that resemble prints. These well-planned differences among books indicate that the artists followed an organized plan and that the painters belonged to a well-defined painting tradition. THE COLORS OF THE EARTH AND SKY

Fig. 4. Master of Both Traditions. Florentine Codex, book 3 fol. 213r.

Each artist followed guidelines that were established to provide the twelve books with a standardized color scheme and format. To communicate as clearly as possible, the painters used varying techniques suited to each book’s individual theme. The images within a single book were given a special color scheme that helps the viewer distinguish that particular book from its counterparts. For instance, while book 10 was

The colors in the original Florentine Codex can be divided optically into two opposite groups: the translucent dyes, which are luminous because they allow the white of the paper to be seen, and the opaque, granular colors that cover up the substrate. The analytical study we made of the pigments in December 2006 showed that the transparent colors were for the most part organic in nature and very different from those made in any European tradition of painting (fig. 8). The opaque pigments were natural minerals as well as artificial compounds such as Maya blue and Maya green (fig. 9). However, we also identified the use of some European pigments, which are employed in a limited number of very specific and significant images.

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Fig. 6. Master of Long Noses. Florentine Codex, book 6, fol. 66v.

Both organic dyes and mineral pigments were central to the tlacuilolli manuscript painting tradition.12 Painted books were understood to be the foundation of knowledge, metaphorically referred to as in tlilli in tlapalli, or literally, “black ink, red ink.” (Tlapalli could also refer, more generally,

12. There are few studies on the analysis of the painting materials of pre-Hispanic and early colonial indigenous codices. González Tirado studied eight indigenous documents from the Biblioteca del Museo de Antropología in Mexico City in “Analysis of Pigments in Eight Mexican Codices”; Haude, “Identification of colorants on maps,“ pp. 240–270. Scientists from the Mobile Laboratory (MOLAB) in Perugia have studied the pigments of the Codice Cospi at the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna; Zetina et al., in “The Encoded Language of Herbs,” in this volume, have studied the early colonial document Codex Martín de la Cruz, also known as the Codex Badiano, and the pre-Hispanic Codex Colombino, both at the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Rodgers Albro and Albro talk about pigments in their “Examination … of the … Huejotzingo Codex,” pp. 97–115. Widermann et al., “Thermal and Raman Spectroscopic Analysis,” pp. 56–63. In 1961, the pre-Hispanic Codex Becker I at the Museum für Volkerkunde at Vienna was analyzed by Nowotny and von Humboldt in Codices Becker I/II, 1964. Condensed information about the materials possibly used in the ancient Mexican manuscripts can be found in Cervera Xicotencatl and López Ortíz, “Identificación de Materiales Constitutivos.” Very recently, a study of an important Peruvian colonial manuscript, Martín de Murúa’s Historia General del Piru, has been made by scientists from the Getty Research Institute; see the work by Phipps in this volume, that of Thomas Cummins, and also Phipps, Turner, and Trentelman, “Color, Textiles, and Artistic Production,” pp. 125–146.

Fig. 7. Master of the Complex Skin Tones. Florentine Codex, book 4 fol. 273v.

to all the colors.) Thus, in Náhuatl, the word and concept of “knowledge” is conceptually the actual stuff of painting: the black lines with which drawings were made and the colors that filled them up.13 Our work revealed compellingly how these artists drew on this tradition of in tlilli in tlapalli. Their conscious selection of materials and techniques, no less important in their eyes than the choice of words and images, adds yet another layer of symbolic and historic meaning to the Florentine Codex. COLORING WITH FLOWERS

The painters in book 11 of the Florentine Codex left us a brief but significant discussion of their painting materials. Chapter 11 provides us with

13. León-Portilla, La Filosofía Náhuatl, p. 67. The author translates in tlilli in tlapalli as “escritura y sabiduría,” that is, “writing and wisdom.”

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Fig. 9. Opaque mineral and artificial pigments. Detail of the pigments Maya blue and Maya green. These were artificial pigments made by fixing an organic colorant on the transparent clay palygorskite. This clay came from the Maya geographic area in the peninsula of Yucatan and Guatemala. Florentine Codex, book 9., fol. 370r.

Fig. 8. Transparent organic colorants. Florentine Codex, book 1, fol. 35r.

information about the flowers, weeds, seeds, fungi, insects, and minerals from which the colors were obtained. It is remarkable that in all of the drawings representing the production of tlapalli show a painter at work. Through these images and texts, the artists depicted the tradition of painting and writing in New Spain; we see their tlacuilolli, their materials and tools, as well as the locations where they worked, and, astonishingly enough, they might have depicted themselves as artists, for each painter shown in the codex is rendered as an individual, as can be seen in the images that describe the making of colorants and pigments, shown below. The texts describing the raw materials from which the colors were obtained are very brief, but there is a marked effort on the part of the Nahua authors to mention each of the colors used in their tlacuilolli and the materials used to make them. Through these descriptions, we were

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materials for over twenty years (fig. 10).14 Together, we were able to reconstruct the techniques of pigment production using most of the materials mentioned by the painters of the Florentine Codex.15 These experiments showed that in order to make these colors bright and stable, the craftsmen had to follow strict procedures, as all of these dyes are fairly sensitive to changes in pH and are not so easily stabilized. For instance, to make reds out of cochineal (nocheztli in Náhuatl, grana fina in Spanish), the insects have to be boiled for more than an hour (fig. 11).16 The colorant is extracted and dried and made into tortillas, after which it has to be stabilized with orchid gum (tzacutli in Náhuatl), and then dissolved in either a basic or an acidic medium in order to obtain a blood red or orangered.17 The Spanish translation by Sahagún states that the grana fina was such a precious colorant that it was exported throughout the world to regions as far away as China and Turkey. This red colorant was called tlaquauac tlapalli in Náhuatl, and it was sold in the market, ready to be used in the shape of a tablet called a panecillo in Spanish and tlatlaxcalolli in Náhuatl.18 A brilliant red color called huitzquiahuitl, made using brazilwood chips, was used by the Nahua painters in the Florentine Codex. The chips had to be fermented in water for years. The Nahua also used this colorant to produce black ink for writing, when mixed with an ironbased clay.19 To produce blue from indigo, they needed another complex

Fig. 10. Lilia Félix and Arturo León from ENCRyM, making a red colorant from cochineal.

able to reconstruct the techniques used to make the pigments and their binders, producing a series of reference samples. THE EXPERIENCE OF RECONSTRUCTING THE PAINTING TECHNIQUE

Lilia Felix and Arturo León at the National School for Conservation, Restoration, and Museography in Mexico City have worked with these

14. The project of reconstructing the painting technique was possible thanks to Lilia Félix, Arturo León, and Lorena Román at the National School for Conservation, Restoration, and Museography (ENCRyM) in Mexico City. The research is an ongoing venture, and many more colors mentioned in the Florentine Codex still need to be made. 15. The codex’s brief but highly significant treatise on how to make the colors to paint starts at fol. 368r, with the grana or nocheztli, and ends in fol. 373r. 16. Coccus cacti and Dactylopius coccus. The female insects of these species produce the colorant. 17. See Baglioni et al., “On the Nature of the Pigments …,” in this volume. The tzacutli, or orchid gum, as a binder is mentioned in the Florentine Codex, MS. Med. Pal. 220, book 11, fol. 372v. Caroluza González and Lorena Roman have studied the importance of this glue at the National School for Conservation, Restoration, and Museography, where they have found it has a high quality as a conservation material for paper and cloth (ENCRyM, 2005–2008). Another study of it has been carried out by Berdan, “Technology of Ancient Mesoamerican Mosaics.” 18. Florentine Codex, Ms. Med. Pal. 220, Book 11, fol. 368v. 19. Ibid., fol. 370r.

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Fig. 11. The manufacturing of organic red from cochineal. Notice the artist using this pigment. Florentine Codex, book 11, fol. 368v.

process (fig. 12).20 The leaves were soaked in water for a day. The green liquid obtained was then poured into another bowl and agitated until it became thick and blue. The blue paste was boiled for an hour, resulting in a solid blue. Then these solid particles had to become soluble again so they could serve as pigments, the whole process taking at least a year. The Spanish text summarizes all this complex process as follows:

Fig. 12. The production of blue from indigo. Notice that the artist using this pigment. Florentine Codex, book 11, fol. 372v.

There is a plant in these lands that is called xiuhquihuitl; they grind it to extract its juice, and then pour it into clay vases so that it becomes solid.

With this color they dye blues [that are] dark and resplendent. It is a very precious color.21

20. The indigo plant that grows in the American continent is Indigofera suffruticosa, while the indigo plant that was used in Europe but came from the Middle East is Indigofera tinctoria.

21. Florentine Codex, MS. Med. Pal., book 11, fol. 371r. “Hay una hierba en estas tierras que se llama xiuhquihuitl; majan esta hierba y esprímenla el zumo y échanlo en unos vasos. Allí se seca o se quaja; con este color se tiñe lo azul oscuro y resplandeciente. Es color preciado.” The English translation above is mine.

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Fig. 14. The red pigment (tlahuitl in Náhuatl), identified in our study as the mineral hematite, is shown as being obtained from a cave, while the white tizatl, identified as gypsum, is taken from the bottom of a lake. Both locations are related to the Nahua underworld. Florentine Codex, book 11, fol. 372r. Fig. 13. The production of yellow and brown from zacatlaxcalli. Notice the artist employing the pigment. Florentine Codex, book 11, fol. 369v.

In the Náhuatl texts, indigo was called tlacehuilli. Only the green color of the water of the first extraction of indigo was mentioned there, but the process of manufacturing the color was the same.22 Francisco Hernández (1515–1587), the naturalist whom Phillip II sent to New Spain, described the process of making blue pigment from indigo in detail: the leaves were soaked in very clean water and macerated; then the liquid was poured into ollas, or pots, until the sediments became solid. Hernández stated that the blue colorant was called mohuitli or tlacehuilli.23 In our team’s experiments in producing the yellow from zacatlaxcalli, we found out that the weed had to be mashed and made into tortillas because it was extremely sticky.24 Yellow hues could only be acquired by mixing the dye with an acidic solution. Otherwise, different shades of

brown would result (fig. 13). Hernández described how painters used this color in the shape of tortillas made by macerating the weed in water and mixing the yellow liquid with alum and nitro (nitre, or saltpeter). The pigment from this procedure, according to Hernández, was a “reddish yellow.”25 Practical experience in making these colors revealed two important technical facts: first, one can easily understand why the painters were not able to produce more colorants when the great epidemic hit Mexico City in 1576 and their pigments ran out while painting the last sections of book 11. The painting technique was rich, complex, and fascinating, but it depended on the existence of a functioning social, economic, and ecological system. Second, these organic dyes were surely used not only for their chromatic quality, but must have had an intrinsic value and significance. As Berenice Alcántara has accurately described in her work,26 the Nahua regarded flowers as the crystallization of powerful,

22. Tlacehuilli means something that has become cold—“cosa enfriada” in Spanish. López Luján, Chiari, and López Austin, “Línea y color en Tenochtitlan,” p. 23. 23. Hernández, Obras completas, vol. 3, pp. 112–113. 24. Zacatlaxcalli is a weed called dodder in English and classified as Cuscuta tinctoria.

25. Hernández, Historia de las Plantas, vol. 2, p. 394. 26. Alcántara, “In Neppapan Xochitl: The Power of Flowers in the Works of Sahagún,” in this volume.

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divine entities related to the upper world. They conceived of the universe as a living entity, always regenerating itself by means of the interactions of two opposing forces: that of the sky, where the sun dwelled; and that of the watery, dark underworld in the entrails of the earth, where the moon, the stars, and the seashells lived.27 Thus, if colors were made from flowers, those colors had the creative force of the upper world. The images, then, were made to exist by the power of those specific colors, those tlapalli, which had both a living force and a chromatic value. PAINTING WITH MINERALS

The minerals used as pigments were also described in book 11. The drawings and descriptions of the red iron oxide (called tlahuitl in Náhuatl)28 and of a white mineral pigment (called tizatl)29 relate these minerals to a cave and to the bottom of a lake. Both these locations are important sites to access the creative underworld of Nahua mythology (fig. 14).30 In the images of the Florentine Codex, mineral pigments seem to have been employed in very specific and meaningful ways. For instance, in book 7 there is a beautiful image of the moon (fig. 15). According to our X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis, the rabbit inside was painted with manganese brown, and traces of red cinnabar or vermilion, and the inner circle of the moon where the rabbit stands was painted with gypsum. The painter colored the rabbit and the moon with pigments obtained from a mineral ore found in the “entrails of the earth” and underneath the water of the lake, as described above. These colors were not obtained from a

27. López Austin, Cuerpo humano e ideología, pp. 55–75. León-Portilla, La Filosofía Náhuatl, pp. 154–163. 28. Florentine Codex, MS. Med. Pal. 220, fol. 372r. The Spanish text translates tlahuitl as bermellón, or vermilion. Molina’s Náhuatl dictionary translates it as almagre, or red ocher. All these names refer to an iron-oxide earth pigment. Molina, Vocabulario. 29. The Nahua text explicitly describes tizatl as like a “white mud.” A liquid pigment, it needs to be dried in fire before it can be used. Florentine Codex, MS. Med. Pal. 220, fol. 372r. There are two other names for white mineral pigments: tetizatl, which is obtained from a calcitic rock, and chimaltizatl, which comes from another rock that breaks into laminae, or thin plates, from which comes its name, chimalli, “shield.” López Luján, Chiari, and López Austin, “Línea y color en Tenochtitlan,” p. 21. 30. A study on the symbolism of minerals has been done by Salas, Ramírez, and Noguez, “The Sacred in Mesoamerican materials,” pp. 44–47. For the symbolism of the mountain, see Broda, “Calendrics and Ritual Landscape at Teotihuacán,” pp. 397–432, and “The Sacred Landscape,” pp. 74–120.

Fig. 15. Nahua moon with rabbit. Florentine Codex, book 7, fol. 228v. The analyses of pigments showed that the rabbit was colored with a mixture of mineral pigments and the moon was whitened with gypsum. All these pigments are related symbolically to the moon’s underworld nature.

flower, an insect, or any living organism. The choice was based not only on the beauty of the pigment’s color, but in their mineral, and thus earthy, watery nature.31 In Nahua cosmology the moon, in opposition to the sun, belongs to the realm of the humid and dark underworld; therefore, the

31. The moon, in Nahua mythology, acquired a rabbit on her face at the eve of the creation of the Fifth Sun, which marked the beginning of the Aztec Era. According to the legend, the moon was created from the apotheosis of a prince who hesitated in sacrificing himself to fire to be transformed into the sun; as a punishment, the gods set him in the sky but slapped the face of this “false” sun with a rabbit, and thus made its luminosity diminish. The actual sun was then created by the sacrifice of a brave but sick warrior who didn’t falter in front of the great pyre. Códice Chimalpopoca, pp. 30–40.

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pigment was meant to represent the moon’s earthy identity, to evoke its essence. In fact, as Michel Graulich has pointed out, the moon is part of both the “celestial nocturnal water” and the Earth Monster.32 The polarity between mineral pigments as representatives of the humid, dark, tectonic underworld, and the light essence of the upper world, as represented by the organic dyes made out of flowers and other living organisms, is essential in understanding the tlacuilolli technique in the Florentine Codex. This same principle seems to be present in the colors used to paint the Codex de la Cruz–Badiano, since pigments obtained from minerals were only applied to paint the roots of the botanical representations of plants.33 The roots are inside the earth and belong to the realm of the dark and humid underworld. It is also meaningful that in their reconstruction of the colors used to paint the great building of Tenochtitlan, called the Templo Mayor, Leonardo López Luján, Giacomo Chiari, and Alfredo López Austin found that colors were used to recreate the basic polarity of the rainy and the dry seasons, and the opposition between fire and water. These oppositions translated into a color-coded Templo Mayor that was divided into two regions, the north and south.34 Throughout the twelve books there are important polarities in the use of color: luminous versus dark, and very noticeably, the choices of special pigments to paint certain images. The most basic choices were mineral versus organic or European versus tlacuilolli. I will give a brief description of some of these choices.

dots.36 In the Florentine Codex, there are several ways to color these dots. When day-signs are presented in a consecutive series, the dots representing numbers are painted in diverse colors, such as green, red, yellow, and black. In all these examples, however, the red pigment is a deep carmine that is organic in nature, most likely cochineal. When day-signs and numerals are represented in a single frame, the round numerals are, for the most part, painted with cochineal (fig. 16). However, there is one significant exception. The two dots comprising the date Ome Tochtli (“Two Rabbit”) were painted with a bright orange hue that is fairly easy to distinguish from the rest of the dot series. We were able to identify this shade of red as the European pigment minium, or red lead (fig. 17).37 Why is Two Rabbit colored with a different red pigment from any of the other days in the calendar count? That is, why are these two the only numerals painted with a European pigment? A possible answer to this question is that Two Rabbit is described in the text as the day on which drunken people were born and the cihuateteo, or women who died in childbirth, came down to earth. It is well known that in ancient Nahua customs, there were strict regulations against alcohol and other enervating substances. Drunkenness was punishable, except for elders and for certain festivities prescribed in the calendar. In the wake of the Conquest, though, neither the Crown nor the Church imposed such restrictions. On the contrary, Spaniards promoted drinking as a profitable business, and the indigenous population found solace by drinking large amounts of pulque, a fermented drink from the juice of various agave plants.38 The Florentine Codex describes in a systematic, detailed manner all the ways in which alcohol affects a drunkard. For instance, a drunkard might just go to sleep because of the power of wine. Another can weep as though his tears are hailstones showering down. Yet another will only talk and others will neglect everything with jest. Other drunkards become very suspicious, the liquor giving rise to hatred, fury, and murder. Women can no longer be rational and wine can curse them. The Náhuatl text concludes, “Thus

THE COLORING OF TIME

Book 4, “The Soothsayers,” describes the 260-day divinatory calendar, or tonalpohualli. This calendar ruled almost all aspects of human life on earth. It was composed by twenty day-signs, such as Rabbit, Water, Flint, Alligator, and so on, that intermeshed with a rotating cycle of numbers from one to thirteen.35 In book 4, as in most of the pre-Hispanic divinatory almanacs, the thirteen numeric signs representing dates were indicated by a series of

32. Graulich, Myths of Ancient Mexico, p. 60. 33. Zetina et al., in this volume. 34. López Luján, Chiari, and López Austin, “Línea y color en Tenochtitlan,” pp. 29–30. 35. Soustelle, El universo de los Aztecas, p. 148.

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36. In most calendrical notations, numerals are a series of linear groupings of disks painted with a color. There are many disks painted in red, but there are other colors used for the numbers and a clear pattern has not yet been established. See Boone, Cycles of Time and Meaning, p. 38. 37. In fact, red lead or minium (Pb3O4) is described as an orange mineral. It was a favorite pigment of the Byzantine, Persian, and medieval Christian manuscript illuminators. Gettens and Stout, Painting Materials, p. 152. 38. Corcuera, Del amor al temor, and El fraile, el indio y el pulque.

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Fig. 16. Dates in book 4 of the Florentine Codex are colored mostly in red made with cochineal, like this figure from folio 270r, “Ten Eagle.” The red made with cochineal has a bloodlike hue and is transparent, like all organic colorants.

is his rabbit. Thus was his day sign; in this way did the wine gods manifest themselves on him.”39 This long description is actually referring to the period during which the codex was being painted, not to make allegations about the pre-Conquest past that Fray Bernardino wanted to document. In this fashion minium, a new pigment brought by the Spaniards, is applied here to signify that this particular date of Two Rabbit had been affected by a new reality. In fact, as Guilhem Olivier has demonstrated, in Nahua mythology, drunkenness as a transgression is often associated with the ending of an era and the beginning of a new time.40 Minium as a red pigment is equivalent to cochineal; however, in their different materiality, minium signals the transformed standing of this date in New Spain.

39. Florentine Codex, Dibble and Anderson, book 4, pp. 15–17. 40. Olivier, “La ebriedad en los mitos del México antiguo,” pp. 101–122.

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Fig. 17. The date Ome Tochtli, “Two Rabbit.” Florentine Codex, book 4 , fol. 252r. The two circles representing the numeral “two” of the sign “rabbit” are colored with the European pigment minium (Pb3O4, or red lead). This is a meaningful exception because the rest of the 240 signs in the tonalpohualli, or divinatory calendar, were colored with the red colorant cochineal, which is pre-Hispanic.

THE USE OF MAYA BLUE AND EMERALD GREEN

These colors have a long tradition in Mesoamerica. Maya blue was made by fixing indigo dye in a rare white clay called palygorskite, found in the Mayan areas of the peninsula of Yucatan and Guatemala. The emerald green is a mixture of blue and yellow dyes fixed in the same clay (see fig. 9). As mentioned above, in the brief treatise on colors in book 11 of the Florentine Codex, the painters mentioned a dark blue obtained from indigo that they called tlacehuilli or mahuitli (see fig. 12), another blue obtained from the flower matlalli, and a blue-green pigment called texotli that is also related to indigo.41 Texotli could be the Náhuatl name for Maya blue, and it must have come to Mexico City by commercial

41. Florentine Codex, MS. Med Pal. 220; Florentine Codex, Dibble and Anderson, book 11, p. 242.

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routes from the south of Mexico.42 What is remarkable is that in the Florentine Codex, it is possible to find a dark ultramarine blue, many shades of grayish blue, a bright sky blue, and the green-blue known as Maya blue. All the different names referring to the raw materials from which colors were obtained point to a complex technology in the manufacture of blue pigments. In book 8, “The Kings and Lords,” Maya blue is related to royalty, for it was used to color the capes of the ancient kings. In book 9, dedicated to merchants, Maya blue and the emerald Maya green were the basic tones to paint the rich landscape of the southern lands where the Nahua merchants traded their costly quetzal feathers, cacao, jade objects, and very likely both blue and green pigments with which the artists were coloring those scenes. In book 7, Maya blue is used in the background for the sun, the moon, and the stars (see fig. 15). Maya blue and green are colors related to royalty, preciousness, the southern lands, and commerce; they are probably like lapis lazuli was for the European painting tradition, a color of prestige used to paint symbolically important concepts and prized objects (see fig. 9).

him with the ancient Greek painter Apelles. Erasmus states that even though Apelles was a “prince of his art,” he was still assisted by colors, while Dürer expressed himself in monochromes. “These things,” writes Erasmus, “he places before the eye in the most pertinent lines—black ones, yet so that if you should spread on pigments you injure the work.”44 Thus, it seems that Sahagún regarded these black-and-white images as more authoritative than the colored paintings of the rest of the books. Paradoxically, these monochrome images bring to life the Huehuetlahtolli, the respected words of the Old Ones. These words represent the wisdom of the ancient pre-Hispanic tradition and yet, the images that are supposed to represent them are the most radically different from the conventional tlacuilolli, where colors had an important place. The coloring with different shades of black, gray, and white here is thus transforming the respected words of the ancients into something equivalent to the printed Bibles and books of the European Renaissance (fig. 18).

BLACK-AND-WHITE RHETORIC

Another interesting example of symbolic colorants is in the whole of book 6, “Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy,” which was illustrated using only shades of black, gray, and white. Up until today, scholars have wondered if the absence of color was symptomatic of haste in the process of making the document.43 Actually, the case is exactly the opposite. This book was the most admired and cherished by Sahagún. It is the only one that has a dedicatory page, written in Latin, to Father Rodrigo Sequera, who was the commissary general of the Franciscans at the time and the man who gave Sahagún the financial and moral support to write his Historia. Why is this prized book devoid of color? A quotation from Erasmus of Rotterdam, a well-read author among the Franciscans, may be the answer. In his Dialogues on the Proper Pronunciation of Latin and Greek, he wrote a passage where he praises Albrecht Dürer as an extraordinary artist and compares 42. Littmann, “Maya Blue,” pp. 41–55. Chiari, Giustetto, and Ricchiardi, “Crystal Structure Refinements of Palygorskite,” pp. 227–237. Arnold and Arnold, “Attapulgite and Maya Blue,” pp. 23–29. 43. Martínez, El “Códice Florentino,” p. 42.

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THE COLORS OF THE RAINBOW

The rainbow with all its colors is literally a symbol that unites both worlds: the indigenous America and Europe.45 In fact, it was called in Náhuatl ayauhcoçamalotl, a word composed of ayauitl, mist or fog, and coçamalotl, literally, the colors of the rainbow. Gabriel Espinoza, in his thorough analysis of the symbolism attached to the rainbow in pre-Hispanic Central Mexico, points out that the rainbow represented the polarity of the hot, bright, solar upper world, as expressed by its colors, and the humid, dark, heavy underworld, thus ayauitl, of mist or fog.46 In that regard, the rainbow was a symbol of creation. Both the image and the materials with which the rainbow in the Florentine Codex is made are very eloquent. First, as Serge Guzinsky has pointed out, in this illustration the painter has entered a new territory of “abstract drawing” in which

44. Citation taken from Dackerman, Painted Prints, p. 14. 45. In the Florentine Codex, book 12 is the history of the Conquest of Mexico as seen by the Mexica and Tlatelolca, inhabitants of the twin cities Mexico-Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, and who fought the war against the Spanish. Notably, the frontispiece of book 12 is an image that frames the scene of the meeting of both peoples and worlds under a rainbow. To learn more about the relationship between the image of the rainbow and the indigenous interpretation of the Conquest as the initiation of a new world era, see Diana Magaloni, “Images of the Beginning.” See also Siracusano, in this volume. 46. Espinoza, “La serpiente de luz, el arcoiris,” pp. 320–325.

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Fig. 18. Black-and-white ink drawing imitating woodcuts. Florentine Codex, book 6, fol. 174r.

the rainbow is “the sole subject of the picture.”47 In a sense, the rainbow has become an icon of sorts. Second, the nature of the colorants in the arch of light and water are tokens of both worlds, the indigenous and European, and also of the creative polarity that makes them become something new. This photograph was taken from the original codex and the colors are very accurate (fig. 19). As you can see, the lowest band of the arch of color starts with a dark red. This color is an iron-based mineral pigment applied over a substrate of gypsum. Both of these materials are minerals related to the watery underworld, as I have presented above. This red is then followed by an organic yellow, which is difficult to identify but is

47. Gruzinsky, Painting the Conquest, pp. 202.

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Fig. 19. Ayaucoçamalotl, “rainbow.” Florentine Codex, book 7, fol. 238v. This rainbow was colored using European and pre-Hispanic pigments to symbolize the beginning of a new era in Mesoamerica. It was also colored with both organic colorants, which represent the power of the sun, and mineral pigments representing the nature of the earth and the underworld. Together, these materials symbolize creation.

conceptually related to the flower pigments representing light. Then, the orange that follows is the European mineral minium, followed by Maya blue and Maya green. The upper arch is strangely colored with another lighter hue of orangey red. This color is again minium, the red lead oxide brought by the Spaniards. The combined pigments work together to convey the idea of creation and of the union of two different traditions and peoples in New Spain: the ancient indigenous culture and the newly dominant European civilization. In this central image of the rainbow, the

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painters of the Florentine Codex used their mastery of materials and techniques, both pre-Hispanic and European, to express their understanding of their moment in history: the end of one era and the beginning of another. Thus the colors convey the transition between two worlds. Today, five centuries after the creation of the Florentine Codex, through the use of our most advanced technology, we have begun to shed light not only on the materials and techniques of the painters but also on the artists themselves. We have begun to understand how they expressed themselves and how they viewed the new world that was forming around them. Their mastery of the traditional and European techniques gave them the capacity to express their understanding of the new world, not only in words and drawings but also through their use of pigments and colors.

On the Nature of the Pigments of the General History of the Things of New Spain: The Florentine Codex PIERO BAGL ION I†* ROD OR ICO GIORGI† M A RCI A CA ROL INA A R ROYO † DAV ID CHEL A Z Z I† F R A NCESCA R IDI† DI A NA M AGA L ON I K ER PEL ‡ INTRODUCTION

The General History of the Things of New Spain, also known as the Florentine Codex, was compiled, with the aid of native informants, by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún in Mexico between 1576 and 1577. The manuscript, conserved at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, is divided into twelve books and is written both in Náhuatl and Spanish. Its encyclopedic coverage of native Nahua customs makes it one of our most valuable sources for the study of ancient indigenous and early colonial cultures of the Valley of Mexico.1

Department of Chemistry and CSGI, Università di Firenze Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) * The authors wish to thank the Bruker Company of Germany for giving us the opportunity to use very sophisticated and innovative instruments to analyze the codex. In particular, we express our gratitude to Giovanni Bizzaro, Lorenzo Marchesini, Pierangelo Morini, and Armin Gross for their cooperation in this project. We would also like to acknowledge Franca Arduini, the director of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, and conservator Ida Giovanna Rao for their invaluable cooperation. Corresponding author: Piero Baglioni. E-mail: [email protected]; phone: +39-055457-3033; fax: +39-055-457-3032. 1. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, 1576–1577. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, trans. Dibble and Anderson, 1959. See also two reviews of the † ‡

Fig. 1. Fourier-transform infrared (FT-IR) spectrometer, HYPERION 3000 (two pictures on left), and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometer, ARTAX (two pictures on right), provided by the Bruker Company, Germany.

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This study is a contribution to the knowledge of materials and techniques used by Sahagún and his collaborators. We report here the main results of the first investigations ever performed directly on the pages and painted drawings of the Florentine Codex. These were achieved by using sophisticated instrumentation recently developed in the research and development laboratories of the Bruker Company of Germany, and kindly made available to us by that firm. We analyzed a selection of drawings and colors in a noninvasive way, mainly using X-ray fluorescence (XRF),2 and microreflectance Fourier-transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy (fig. 1).3 The colors analyzed were 102 samples in forty-eight painted drawings: seven from book 1, one from book 2, six from book 4, ten from book 7, seven from book 8, one from book 9, thirteen from book 11, and three from book 12. X-ray fluorescence analysis was chosen to detect the inorganic pigments, usually salts of high-atomic-number metals. In our case, we use XRF to identify elements with atomic weights equal to or greater than that of magnesium (!12). The instrumentation used is a portable microXRF spectrometer (an ARTAX system by Bruker) specifically designed to meet the requirements for a spectroscopic analysis of unique and valuable objects in situ, i.e. in archaeometry and in the examination of artworks. This system performs a simultaneous multi-element analysis ranging from sodium (11) to uranium (92) elements, with a spatial resolution down to 70 microns (µm), allowing at the same time the identification and semiquantitative analysis of the chemical elements. The energy transferred to the sample is usually so small that the analysis can be regarded as nondestructive. The other technique used in this study, FT-IR, is a technique allowing the identification of specific chemical bonds within the molecular architecture of materials, regardless of their organic or inorganic nature.4 The comparison of the spectra with a reference infrared spectra database allowed us to discriminate among different materials, even when overlapping signals from different molecular species were present. As explained

in the following, a set of pigments were prepared following the recipes reported in the codex, and were applied over paper to have more specific reference spectra to compare with the pigments used in the Florentine Codex. These were analyzed and the results compared with the international infrared spectra database. 5 In this project, the spectra have been acquired in microreflectance mode, using a HYPERION 3000 infrared microscope (Bruker Optics) capable of single-point measurements, line maps, area maps, and imaging (see fig. 1). In this configuration, the pages of the codex were put under the microscope to choose the area to be analyzed.6 All the examined colors were analyzed in several areas to have more representative results. Book 11 of the Florentine Codex is the most truly encyclopedic, fact-crammed book of the entire work, and constitutes a most valuable Mesoamerican ethnobotanical and ethnozoological source. The eleventh chapter gives names and descriptions for colorants traditionally used by the Nahua scribes, as well as how the pigments were made and how the resulting colors’ appearances could be improved.7 Following these descriptions, it was possible to identify the botanical sources of some of these colorants and subsequently, we could reconstruct them to be added to the database. Book 11 also provides precise and complete description of color preparation techniques for paints and dyes,8 and is the text most cited by historians and scientists in regard to the usage of colorants and pigments in Mesoamerican areas. The study of the color “recipes” reported in book 11, combined with information gained from other sources, guided the preparation of thirty reference color samples. This work was performed at the Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museografía, INAH. By mixing appropriate amounts of organic dyes (extracted from natural sources), binding media, and other additives, and by employing trough pH modifications, many tones of the colorants were obtained and applied over simple paper samples made of pure cellulose without sizing (Whatman® filter paper

Dibble and Anderson translation: Nicholson (review), “Florentine Codex,” pp. 1325–1327; Glass (review), “Florentine Codex,” pp. 282–283. 2. Szökefalvi-Nagy et al., “Non-destructive XRF analysis of paintings,” pp. 53–59. 3. Bitossi et al., “Spectroscopic techniques in cultural heritage conservation,” pp. 187–228. 4. Derrick, Stulik, and Landry, Infrared Spectroscopy in Conservation Science.

5. The international Infrared and Raman Users Group (IRUG), spectral database edition 2000; http://www.irug.org. 6. Bruker Optics, HYPERION series FT-IR microscope; http://www.brukeroptics.com/ hyperion.html. 7. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, book 11, fol. 372v. 8. Haude, “Identification and Classification of Colorants”; “Identification of Colorants on Maps,” pp. 240–270.

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for chemical use) to reproduce the colors of the drawings. Investigations performed on them and a comparison of the colors’ appearance and the spectra patterns helped us to identify the materials used. The selection of the colors to be analyzed was mainly made by Diana Magaloni, according to her consideration of findings from preliminary observations of the Florentine Codex drawings under the optical microscope. Until now, direct information about the pigments used by Sahagún and his numerous collaborators to paint the illustrations in the Florentine Codex was missing. Several questions had risen among historians and art historians, for example, about meanings that the authors of the codex may have attributed to the usage of colors belonging to the Mesoamerican tradition, or about the commercial network existing at that time to obtain the materials used for the paintings. Most of this information is now available, thanks to the scientific examinations reported in this article and performed in the framework of a cooperation among such different academic institutions as the Center for Colloids and Nanoscience (CSGI) at the Università di Firenze, the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the Villa i Tatti (Florence) of Harvard University, and the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.

In book 9 of the Florentine Codex, the Nahua authors describe the preparation of tzacutli in the context of feather artwork. There they say that the orchid bulbs have to be cut, dried in the sun, and then mashed. The mucilage obtained is then dried as a powder and used as glue.9 From our experiments with this orchid gum, we can deduce that the mucilage obtained by mashing the bulbs could be prepared in two ways: when manufactured for use as glue in feather artwork, the tzacutli was left to dry and then stored as a powder. When the glue was needed, the powder was dissolved in water. However, when used as a binder for painting, it was likely prepared as a liquid to be mixed directly with the colorants and pigments, and then dried. In this manner, the organic dyes would have been fixed in the orchid mucilage, making a very stable orchid-based lake pigment. In fact, this finding of ours is supported by the descriptions of Francisco Hernández in his Historia de las plantas de la Nueva España. He states that from the tzacutli, Indians prepare a very tenacious gluten: “… it is used mostly by the painters in order to bind their colors and make them permanent so that the figures will not be erased.”10 In this study, we used two different orchid species mentioned in the historical sources and already studied by the Mexican botanist Urbina:11 the Bletia campanulata and Laelia autumnalis. Conservator Lorena Roman and artists Lilia Félix and Arturo León at the National School of Conservation, Restoration, and Museology in Mexico City, with whom we are developing a joint project to study the tzacutli from the vantage point of its chemical properties, prepared these two orchids.

NAHUA PAINTING TECHNIQUES

The Nahua authors of the Florentine Codex provide important information on the painting techniques in book 11, chapter 11. Their descriptions not only mention the raw materials used to elaborate the organic dyes from flowers, herbs, and insects, as well as pigments from minerals, but also describe the prepared painting materials. Most colors were manufactured as “tortilla-like cakes”—tlatlaxcalolli in Náhuatl, or panecillos (“small breads”) in Spanish. That is, paints were prepared to be stored and perhaps sold in the marketplace as solid, circular tablets, much as solid tablets of watercolors are prepared today. Some descriptions point to these colored tortilla-like cakes being given this shape by mixing the colorants or pigments with orchid gum, tzacutli in Náhuatl. The orchid gum would serve not only to hold the tablet together but also, when diluted in water, as the binder between the paints and their supports. It must be noted that orchid gum is mentioned only in the Spanish column of the original manuscript. This might be because Sahagún tends to describe what the Nahua authors take as matters of fact that are needless to mention.

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In this chapter, a selection of the analysis performed on the codex is presented; figure 2 shows thumbnails of the fifteen pages under study. Several red tones were analyzed to determine differences and analogies in color composition and painting techniques. Among these samples, six are described in this section because all of them showed different appearances. Some were suspected to be from the same pigment (or dye),

9. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, book 9, fols. 371r–374r. 10. Hernández, Historia de las plantas de la Nueva España, vol. 2, books 3 and 4, pp. 336–337. The spelling of tzacutli is from Hernández, and is the same spelling used in the Florentine Codex. It can also be spelled tzacuhtli or tzauhtli. 11. Martínez-Cortés, Pegamentos, gomas y resinas en el México Prehispánico, pp. 19–20.

L1-006-011v

L1-014-018v

L1-015-022r

L1-024-035r

L4-166-252r

L4-222-329r

L7-339-233r

L7-341-236r

L7-343-238r

L8-358-253r

L11-750-214v

L11-776-227v

L11-799-240r

L12-1151-447v

Fig. 2. The set of drawings submitted to analysis and described in this contribution.

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simply diluted to have a lighter color; for others, a different chemical composition was hypothesized. The reference starting point of our examinations was Sahagún’s description in book 11 of the procedures used in New Spain for the preparation of red colors. In folio 368 verso, a red color made from insects is described thus:

Table 1. X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy analysis on red-based pigments. (Numbers reported are particle counts.)

Gusanos que crecen en las tunas y tienen sangre muy colorada, es la grana fina. Hacen grandes tratos de grana en esta tierra … llega hasta China y Turquía, casi por todo el mundo es preciada y tenida en mucho. [Some worms that grow on the prickly pear cactus and have very red blood are called grana. They (the Indians) are good merchants of this product. In these days it arrives even in China and Turkey; through almost all the world it is much known and valued.]

Again, La grana purificada y hecha en panecitos llaman tlaquauac tlapalli, grana recia o fina, venden en los tianguis echa pancecillos para que la compren los tintoreros del tochmitl y los pintores. [The grana, purified and made into “small bread” shapes, is called tlaquauac tlapalli, i.e. fine grana. It is sold in the market in this form to painters and to dyers of rabbit skin.]

In this description, Sahagún clearly notes the usage of grana fina (i.e. cochineal) to dye hides and to paint surfaces. The term pintores suggests that this pigment might also have been used to color the drawings of the codex. Other reds are described in book 11 (folio 370, recto and verso); for example, annatto red,12 and huitzcuahuitl, obtained from a reddish wood (Hematoxylum campechianum, also called logwood, or the palo de Campeche tree), as well as tezoatl, which was derived from a hotland

12. Regarding annatto red, “Hay un color colorado blanquecino que se llama achiotl. Este hace en tierras calientes, es flor que le muele, vendese en los tianguis, es medicinal … mezclanlo con ungüento amarillo que se llama axi para poner sobre sarna.” [There is a whitish red colorant that is called achiotl. It is made in hot lands. It is a flower that is ground/mashed. They sell it in the markets; it is medicinal … they mix it with a yellow unguent called axi to put it on mange/ scabies.]

L1-006-011v Red

L1-014-018v Red

L7-343-238r Red

Si

1,379

2,462

1,004

1840

Al

—

295

128

—

Cl

2,555

1,642

4,514

—

—

Element

L7-339-233r L8-358-253v Violet Orange

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L4-166-252r Orange

Paper

—

—

1,258

—

—

—

—

3,224

S

—

2,629

12,290

82,563

—

—

584

K

10,728

16,574

42,809

5,744

22,963

16,340

6,483

Ca

30,283

62,873

66,752

694,004

21,891

23,459

29,680

Ti

441

—

875

—

—

—

—

Mn

—

2,545

6,241

2,301

—

—

2,863

Fe

24,221

18,333

68,259

58,428

53,737

43,560

15,541

Cu

—

—

3,049

1,949

—

—

—

Pb

4,573

—

—

7,215

1,182,229

786,345

—

Zn

—

—

—

1,849

—

—

—

shrub and was mixed with alum to obtain “un color colorado fino.” All of these were described as commonly used to dye animal skins (or furs) or as a medicine (i.e. annatto). The only inorganic orange-red pigment described in book 11 is tlahuitl (or vermilion), which was largely used by Mesoamericans. The red magenta color from book 1, labeled as L1-006-011v (file name 006 from book 1, page 11 verso) was investigated under the optical microscope. Its appearance suggested that cochineal dye was probably used. X-ray fluorescence did not show any meaningful signal from metals, which supported the lack of inorganic pigments in this drawing. Each absorption peak in the infrared range analyzed through microreflectance FT-IR spectroscopy was assigned to paper cellulose, and no additional absorptions were detected. Analysis performed on the reference samples showed that cochineal did not give any meaningful signal to determine its presence. In fact, red magenta L1-006-011v was similar to the red preparation reported in figure 3, number 1 (in the darker area). In book 1, another red sample, labeled as L1-015-022r (file name 15 from book 1, page 22 recto), analyzed by XRF and FT-IR, presents spectra perfectly matching those of sample L1-006-011v. In this case, the color is paler and with a pinkish tonality, more similar to the bright part of reference sample

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Table 2. Chemical composition of reference model samples of colorants, prepared according to bibliographical sources and traditional manufacturing procedures

1

6

11

16

21

2

7

12

17

22

3

8

13

18

23

4

9

14

19

24

5

10

15

20

25

1

Cochinilla

Laelia autumnalis 5%

—

2

Cochinilla

Laelia autumnalis 5%

Ca(OH)2 (pH=13) and iron (traces)

3

Cochinilla

Alum 20%

Laelia autumnalis 5%

4

Cochinilla

Laelia autumnalis 5%

Ca(OH)2 (pH=13)

5

Cochinilla

Alum 20%

—

6

Cochinilla

Laelia autumnalis 5%

Xoconoxtle (pH=3.5)

7

Cochinilla(*)

Alum 20%

—

8

Cochinilla

Laelia autumnalis 5%

Iron (traces)

9

Cochinilla

Pulque

Guava

10

Cochinilla

Alum 20%

Pulque (pH=3.5)

11

Palo de Campeche

Alum 20%

—

12

Palo de Campeche

Laelia autumnalis 5%

Alum 20%

13

Palo de Campeche

Laelia autumnalis 5%

—

14

Palo de Campeche

Laelia autumnalis 5%

Copper sulfate

15

Palo de Campeche

Bletia campanulata 5%

—

16

Palo de Campeche

Pulque (pH=3.5)

—

17

Palo de Campeche

Bletia Campanulata 5%

Ca(OH)2 (pH=13)

18

Palo de Campeche

Ca(OH)2 (pH=13)

—

19

Palo de Campeche

Tequesquite (pH=9)

—

20

Zacatlaxcali

Alum 20%

—

21

Zacatlaxcali

Alum 20%

Laelia autumnalis 5%

22

Zacatlaxcali

Laelia autumnalis 5%

—

23

Zacatlaxcali

Laelia autumnalis 5%

Copper sulfate 3%

24

Zacatlaxcali

Bletia campanulata 5%

—

25

Zacatlaxcali

Bletia campanulata 5%

Pulque (pH=3.5)

26

Zacatlaxcali

Bletia campanulata 5%

Ca(OH)2 (pH=13)

27

Zacatlaxcali

Laelia autumnalis 5%

Tannic acid

28

Indigo

Laelia autumnalis 5%

—

29

Indigo

Laelia autumnalis 5%

Alum 20%

30

Indigo

Laelia autumnalis 5%

Palygorskite

(*) Sample 7 differed from sample 5 in the application procedure and the amount of applied colorant.

26

27

28

29

30

Fig. 3. Facing page: The set of model color samples, prepared according to traditional manufacturing procedures; their compositions appear in table 2.

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1 in figure 3; the same organic dye, cochineal, was probably used. One more red color with a different tonality, labeled as L1-014-018v, showed an identical FT-IR pattern, but XRF analysis showed a larger calcium content (table 1). The appearance of the red is similar to the color in preparation number 6 (fig. 3 and table 2), which was obtained by using lime water (i.e. saturated calcium hydroxide solution). Four of the six red colors described in this section were made with the same dye (likely cochineal), and different tones were obtained with the variation of dye content and pH changes. The color preparation techniques used for the codex may be identified by performing visual and microscopy analysis of the set of reference materials prepared according to the traditional recipes. However, one should note that is possible to obtain several other red tones by using reddish palo de Campeche wood (also known as brazilwood). In book 11, Sahagún only reported the use of this dye to paint rabbit skins, but this does not preclude its use on paper. Palo is a Mesoamerican timber tree and its wood yields a red dye called hematoxylin, which oxidizes to hematein to give a brilliant red color. Some of the colors in drawings analyzed in the codex look like the model reference colors in figure 3 that were obtained from palo de Campeche wood. (See table 2 and fig. 3.) In particular, the colors from drawings L1-014-018v (red) and L1-024-035r (pale ochre) have tonalities slightly different from those obtained with cochineal and quite similar to some of the colors obtained with palo. Cochineal dye is mainly composed of carminic acid (a red glucosidal hydroxyanthrapurin) that is produced by an insect (Dactylopius coccus) to deter predation by other insects. The colorant is extracted from the insect’s body and eggs. Figure 4 illustrates the chemical structures of the dye molecules. It is clear that FT-IR analysis does not allow an easy identification of the two molecules because they have basically the same functional groups and all of them strongly interfere with absorption by the paper’s cellulose. Figure 3 shows that some red tones are quite similar but are obtained by using different dyes. This is the case of samples 1 and 16, samples 6 and 18, and samples 9 and 12, respectively. The observations of these reference colors under an ultraviolet (UV) fluorescence microscope showed significant differences between the responses of the two colors to UV irradiation. The first two columns in figure 5 clearly showed that under visible light (magnification 100×), cochineal dye and palo appear almost

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Carminic acid

Hematoxylin

Hematein

Fig. 4. Molecular structures of red colorants in cochineal and Palo de Campeche dyes.

identical. Under UV irradiation, the fluorescence responses of the two can be easily distinguished by filtration at 430 nm because their appearances are totally different, allowing immediate identification of the colorants. This approach is not invasive and could also be used for direct analysis of the codex to obtain more definitive results in identification of the organic colorants. Most of the reds in the codex are from organic constituents. Visual inspection of several other drawings, which were not submitted to direct spectroscopic analysis, revealed many morphological similarities with the examined organic red (fig. 5). However, Sahagún and his collaborators also used certain inorganic red pigments.

Sample 12 UV-430 Sample 9 UV-430 Sample 9 Vis

Sample 12 Vis

Sample 18 UV-430 Sample 6 UV-430 Sample 6 Vis

Sample 18 Vis

Sample 16 UV-430 Sample 16 Vis Sample 1 Vis

Cochineal

Palo de Campeche

Sample 1 UV-430

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Palo de Campeche

PI ERO BAGL ION I E T A L .

Cochineal

92

93

Fig. 5. Images of reference colors observed under a microscope in visible light mode (first and second columns) and in ultraviolet fluorescence mode, using a filter at 430 nm (third and fourth columns).

The red colorant from the rainbow drawing labeled as L7-343-238r showed a more complex composition (fig. 6). X-ray fluorescence analysis revealed the presence of a good amount of sulfur and a larger amount of calcium, as well as signals from other metals, including manganese, iron, and copper (see table 1). In this case, the chemical analysis indicated the use of an inorganic pigment, i.e. hematite. The presence of sulfur is shown by XRF, and the FT-IR profile also suggested the copresence of gypsum. We can safely conclude that hematite was applied over a gypsum ground. Another interesting application of an inorganic red colorant is evident in one of the flowers depicted in folio 329 (L4-222-329r, flower number 4 in the third line). Red spots applied on the orange flower were made by using cinnabar, as shown by XRF. It is also remarkable that the FT-IR spectrum (not reported here) showed specific features that unambiguously allowed us to discriminate between this color from the hematite and the one from cochineal dye. Cochineal was also used to make the violet paint. As reported in book 11 (folio 372v), mezclando grana colorada que se llama tlapalli, con alumbre que viene de Meztitlan y un poco de tzacuhtli, hacen un color morado que se llama Camopalli, con que hacen las sombras los pintores. [By mixing the cochineal, called tlapalli, with alum that comes from Meztitlan and a little tzacuhtli, they make a purple color called camopalli, with which the painters make shadows.]

Analysis on the violet color used in the drawing L7-339-233r showed exactly the same results of the red cochineal colors already described. (See table 2 and figure 3, sample 3.) A vivid orange was used to color some drawings. Two examples were analyzed: the tips of the flames in the drawing from L8-358-253r and the orange spots in the drawing from L4-166-252r. In both, lead was identified through XRF and therefore, minium pigment (Pb3O4) was used. The

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FT-IR spectra also showed specific shapes that can unambiguously be attributed to the minium pigment. The best-known Mesoamerican color is undoubtedly the Maya blue. Maya blue is obtained by fixing indigo dye, which is extracted from the leaves of añil herbs (Indigofera suffruticosa) over palygorskite (otherwise called attapulgite). The chemical composition of this clay (Mg2Al2 [OH]2Si4O10.2H2O) made its determination by XRF easy because of the silicon, aluminum, and magnesium content. Hydroxyl groups, too, that are present in the crystal structure of the clay can be easily detected because of their absorption under infrared radiation, due to the stretching of the oxygen–hydrogen (O–H) bonds. It is helpful to note that Sahagún only described two blue colors. The first (folio 369v) is called matlalli. “Se hace de flores azules, color es muy preciado y muy apacible de ver, llámase ‘cadenillo’ en español.” [They make it from blue flowers. The color is highly prized and very pleasant to see, and is called cadenillo in Spanish.] The second color description (folio 371r) concerned the extraction procedure of dye from Indigofera suffruticosa: Hay una hierba en estas tierras que se llama xiuhquihuitl, majan esta hierba y esprímenla el zumo, y échanlo en unos vasos. Allí se seca o se quaja, con este color se tiñe lo azul oscuro y resplandeciente. Es color preciado. [There is an herb in these lands that is called xiuhquihuitl; they crush it and extract its juice, and place it in cups. There it dries. With this color they dye things a dark, resplendent blue. It is a very precious color.]

In this last description, Sahagún is describing the extraction of indigo dye. However, there is no mention of the use of clays to fix the dye, according to what is widely known about Maya blue.13 Another blue, cited in book 11 but not accurately described, was obtained from the flowers of the same plant from which matlalli was extracted; this blue is known as texotli and Torres has identified the plant as Commelina celestis, commonly known in English as the dayflower.

13. Ovarlez et al., “Indigo chemisorption in sepiolite,” pp. 1243–1248. Sánchez del Río et al., “Microanalysis study of … Maya blue pigment,” pp. 1619–1625.

Fig. 6. Rainbow in the drawing on folio L7-343-238r. Blue, green, orange, yellow, and red colors were analyzed by means of XRF and FT-IR analysis.

Selected blue areas were examined to see if indigo dye or Maya blue (indigo supported by palygorskite) was used throughout the codex. The tonalities ranged from a brilliant blue to darker hues. Two examples of very similar colors are from the rainbow in L7-343-238r and from the blue sky in L7-338-228v. A lighter blue color with grayish tonality from the seawater appears in drawing L11-750-214v, and two darker colors from the water depicted in L11-776-227v and the armor of L121151-447v were also analyzed. Analysis performed through XRF on the selected drawings shows significant differences in clay content (table 3). In the case of the blue sky sample, a typical Maya blue is evident. In the other cases, the changes in tonality are probably accountable to the smaller amounts of palygorskite.

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Lutein (carotenoid)

Beta (ß) carotene (carotenoid)

Basic flavonoid structure

Fig. 8. Molecular structures of yellow colorants in zacatlaxcalli (carotenoid) and xochipalli (flavonoid) dyes.

Fig. 7. FT-IR spectra of two blue colorants with the same tonality from books 11 and 12.

The analysis of the darker blue of water (book 11, drawing L11-776-227v) is also reported in the table; in this case, silicon is almost absent. Microreflectance FT-IR spectra perfectly matched the XRF findings. The main peaks at 3,616 and 3,550 cm-1 can be ascribed to the O–H stretching mode of aluminum-coordinated hydroxyls, and to coordinated and zeolitic water in palygorskite, with a contribution of the O–H stretching mode in aluminum-magnesium-hydroxyl (Al-Mg-OH).14 These spectral features are very clear in the blue of the painted rainbow and of

14. Suarez and Garcia-Romero, “FTIR spectroscopic study of palygorskite,” pp. 154–163.

the sky. Less intense signals were evidenced in the seawater of drawing L11-750-214v. On the other hand, the blue color in drawing L11-776-227v was probably made with indigo but without palygorskite (as evidenced by XRF). The tonality of this color is much similar to the blue of the armor in drawing L12-1151-447v; in that case, palygorskite was used, as clearly shown by FT-IR (fig. 7). Scrutiny of the reference color palette samples prepared according to the recipes in book 11 showed that indigo has a dark tone that does not change significantly with the small amount of palygorskite described. (Neither does the tone that might slightly depend on the amount of orchid gum used as a binder.) Similar dark blue colors can be obtained with a small amount of clay or wholly without clay. On the other hand, brilliant blue colors can only be obtained by using high amounts of palygorskite to give the classic Maya blue tone. Arie Wallert, in his paper presented in Cancun in 1994, emphasized that “not necessarily all the painters’ materials are described in written

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Al color amarillo fino le llaman Xuchipalli, que quiere decir, tintura de flores amarillas, este color amarillo traen y crian en tierras calientes. [They call the fine yellow color xochipalli, which is to say, dye from yellow flowers. This color is brought here and grows in hot lands.]

On the verso side of the folio, zacatlaxcalli dye is described thus: A un color amarillo claro llaman Zacatlaxcalli, que quiere decir pan de hierba porque se a masa de unas hierbas amarillas muy delgadas, venden en los tianguis, son como tortillas amarillas, usan las tortillas para teñir de amarillo o para hacer color amarillo para pintar. [There is a clear yellow color called zacatlaxcalli, which is to say “herb bread” because they mix it from some very slender yellow herbs; they sell it in the markets, like yellow tortillas, and they use the tortillas to dye yellows or to make yellow color for painting.]

Fig. 9. Drawing L8-358-253r. Orange, green, ochre, yellow-brown (“woman skin”), and brown (“man skin”) colors were examined by means of XRF and FT-IR analysis.

sources, and that the sources should be read and interpreted with care.”15 This is the case of the blue colors in the codex. In fact, most of them were obtained by using clays to support the indigo dye, with different hues resulting from changes in the amount of palygorskite. However, in book 11 there is no mention of this procedure. Sahagún and his associates described two yellow pigments in book 11. In folio 369r, the author reports that

15. Wallert, “On some natural organic yellow colorants in Aztec codices,” pp. 653–662.

In his paper, Wallert provided plentiful information about the chemistry of these dyes (fig. 8). Zacatlaxcalli is a carotenoid dye giving a strong yellow, sometimes shifting to orange, obtained from the stems of various species of Dodder (Cuscuta). Xochipalli, the yellow mentioned previously, is extracted from flowers of the homonymous plant, known in English as orange cosmos (Cosmos sulphureus), and is mainly a flavonoidbased color. X-ray fluorescence analysis performed on the yellow star in drawing L7-341-236r showed high amounts of potassium and sulfur. Energy-dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) analysis that was performed by CSGI (Università di Firenze) on the model reference samples demonstrated that samples containing zacatlaxcalli, associated with alum, showed a similar pattern, with high potassium and sulfur content. On the other hand, FT-IR did not seem very useful in examining those same specimens because all the signals from zacatlaxcalli overlap with those of paper. Unfortunately, this study did not include xochipalli as a reference material. The hypothesis was that the artists used zacatlaxcalli, but additional examinations should be performed to confirm this assumption and exclude the presence of xochipalli. Organic yellow was used throughout the codex, alone or combined with other pigments. The drawing labeled L8-358-253r showed rich com-

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Table 3. X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy analysis on blue pigments. (Numbers reported are particle counts.)

Table 4. X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy analysis on selected yellow and green pigments. (Numbers reported are particle counts.)

Element

Mg

L7-338-228v “Blue Sky”

L7-343-238r “Rainbow”

L11-750-214v “Seawater”

L11-776-227v “Water”

Element

L7-341-236r “Star”

L8-358-253r “Man Skin”

L8-358-253r “Woman Skin”

L8-358-253r Green

101

L8-358-253r Ochre

L7-343-238r Green

321

173

—

—

Al

800

1,158

1,422

762

—

690

Al

3,773

1,152

519

—

Si

1,060

2,355

1,072

5,922

1,538

8,483

Si

44,570

14,033

7,003

826

S

34,524

3,065

10,920

20,415

7,346

71,883

S

1,449

2,646

738

1,040

Cl

944

2,945

1,737

2,855

2,243

—

Cl

1,236

1,640

2,996

2,144

K

71,003

20,790

56,959

9,785

15,709

6,855

K

32,340

13,252

10,394

7,301

Ca

51,043

42,143

46,763

147,817

98,256

572,993

Ca

69,308

42,490

42,291

39,400

Ti

—

2,003

1,407

864

—

—

Ti

7,477

2,130

—

—

Mn

1,270

3,112

2,003

3,188

5,700

3,903

Mn

13,065

4,342

4,248

1,769

Fe

11,609

23,392

31,828

36,048

873,101

25,974

Fe

171,374

43,777

27,023

13,792

As

—

—

—

33,404

25,865

28,448

Pb

20,552

—

—

—

Sr

—

—

—

803

—

—

Hg

—

—

—

2,383

—

—

Pb

—

—

—

14,359

1,444

31,303

binations of yellow tones obtained by using zacatlaxcalli and inorganic pigments, too (fig. 9). The yellow tone of “woman skin” (in the first character from the top) differed from the brown skin of the man (the character with the naked shoulder). Both colors showed significant amounts of aluminum, potassium, and sulfur, as in the preparation of zacatlaxcalli yellow with alum. The “woman skin” showed larger amounts of iron and manganese (the latter probably as an iron oxide impurity). The ochre color used to paint the roof of the building in the same drawing has a similar tonality to the “man skin.” In this case, XRF evidenced a large amount of iron and surprisingly, arsenic and sulfur. Aluminum was not present. In this case, arsenic sulfide, or orpiment, a wellknown inorganic yellow color, was probably combined with iron oxide to get a brown ochre tone. Orpiment was also used to make the green color of the feathers in the same drawing, and was found in the green of the rainbow in L7-343-238r, as well. Green colors, according to the descriptions in book 11, folio 372v, were created using the yellow dye from the zacatlaxcalli plant. This is reported twice: a dark green was produced when

Cu

—

—

—

—

2,155

—

Zn

—

—

—

—

3,135

—

Ba

—

—

—

—

9,935

—

el color amarillo zacatlazcali mezclan con azul claro que se llama texotli y con tzacuhtli, hacen un color verde oscuro que se llama yiapalli. [they mix the zacatlaxcalli yellow with a clear blue called texotli and with tzacuhtli (orchid gum); they call this dark green yiapalli.]

A lighter green is made simply by adding a greater amount of yellow: Mezclando color azul claro, que llaman texotli, con amarillo de zacatlaxcalli, echando más parte de amarillo, hacen color verde claro fino que se llama quiltic. [Mixing clear blue, called texotli, with yellow from zacatlaxcalli, (and) adding more yellow to the mix, they make a fine light green that is called quiltic.]

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Fig. 10. Heat flow versus temperature curves obtained through differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) on mucilage films from orchid bulbs. Glass-transition temperatures are reported.

Investigations performed through FT-IR on certain green colors from the codex (L11-799-240r, L7-343-238r, L1-024-035r, L8-358-253r), showed signals from clays. Therefore, we can conclude that Maya blue was used in mixture with yellow. THE CONSERVATION STATUS OF THE FLORENTINE CODEX

In addition to the chemical characterization of pigments and colorants used by Sahagún and his colleagues, this study allowed the determination of the conservation status of the manuscript through careful scrutiny of the inks and paper under an optical microscope. Direct and specific measurements were made in order to characterize the integrity of the cellulose fibers in the paper. It is well known that the mechanical properties of paper (i.e. resistance to folding and tensile strength) depend on the degree of polymerization (DP) of its cellulose.16 This parameter quantifies the “length” of the cellulose polymer, which is comprised of thousands of glucose units bonded together to form a linear chain. Therefore, the integrity of the molecules can be expressed in DP units. The degradation

16. Orr et al. “Degradation of Cotton Fibers and Yarns by Heat and Moisture,” pp. 399–406.

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of paper is mainly caused by acidity, which at room temperature catalyzes the depolymerization of cellulose through a hydrolysis mechanism.17 Acidity originates from several factors in the papermaking technique, but also from environmental pollution. For this reason, it is very difficult to remove the causes of an increase in acidity. Oxidation of cellulose is another important contribution to degradation, the main agent being the iron-gall ink used in handwritten manuscripts.18 The Florentine Codex shows clear degradation effects from ink. X-ray fluorescence analysis evinced the presence of iron spread over the whole pages, due to ion migration. In an acidic environment, iron catalyzes the oxidation of paper, and in some cases within the codex, where the amount of ink is greater (i.e. in the capital letter at the beginning of each chapter), paper perforation phenomena are visible. To determine the acidity (or pH level) of the paper, its degree of polymerization, and its amount of oxidized cellulose all require invasive and destructive measurements that are impossible to use on the Florentine Codex. However, the advanced deterioration of the paper from the inks and the characteristic smell of acidic paper suggest that an accurate characterization of the codex’s pages should be done to identify the best procedures to use to deacidify them and stop the ink corrosion process, which is accelerated by paper acidity. In this context, a preventive deacidification should be considered to arrest the current processes of decay and prevent further damage. In order to attain optimal conservation conditions, we recommend a paper pH of around 7–7.5 to preserve the manuscript and inhibit the mentioned degradation mechanisms. Such a pH can be safely achieved through nonaqueous deacidification, using calcium or magnesium hydroxide nanoparticles.19 Despite these observations, the painted drawings themselves, with special emphasis on the colorants, are in a very good conservation status. This point is interesting and stimulates certain hypotheses. It is well known that most of the colors were applied using gum extracted from orchid bulbs,20 likely Bletia campanulata and Laelia autumnalis orchids,

17. Whitmore and Bogaard, “The Effect of Oxidation on … Paper,” pp. 26–45. 18. Neevel and Mensch, “The behaviour of iron and sulphuric acid during iron-gall ink corrosion,” pp. 528–533. 19. Giorgi et al., “Nanotechnologies for conservation of Cultural Heritage,” pp. 8198– 8203; “Nanoparticles of Mg(OH)2 : Synthesis and application to paper conservation,” pp. 8495– 8501. 20. González Tirado, “The Tzauhtli Glue.”

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which were also used to prepare some of the model reference materials presented in table 2. Pena, Capella, and González determined the chemical composition of the mucilage from orchid bulbs, revealing that its principal components are sugars: mono- and oligosaccharides (the latter mainly di- and trisaccharides).21 These findings prompted us to formulate some hypotheses about the role that these saccharides might have in the preservation of the colorants. It is widely recognized that sugars presenting high glass-transition temperatures22—in particular trehalose (disaccharyde), maltotriose (trisaccharide), and maltohexaose (hexasaccharide)—act as bioprotective agents for living organisms exposed to extreme environmental conditions such as low temperatures and low water content.23 Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) is a technique particularly useful to characterize the thermal behavior of materials, and in the present study was used to detect the presence of possible glass transitions associated with sugars. Saccharides and polysaccharides present glass-transition temperatures that are particularly high (>100ºC), showing a shoulder on their thermal analysis spectra similar to those reported in figure 10 for the two orchids. This property is related to their ability to bind water, decreasing the presence of free water. For this reason saccharides act as a bioprotective for paper, since the lack of free water removes a primary agent involved in the paper’s degradation mechanisms. Plants living in a dry environment can retain water to live, and living organisms exposed to very low temperatures inhibit freezing mainly because the water they contain, which is bound to the glassy structures of the plant’s saccharides, cannot diffuse at all and the transport properties related to water mobility are prevented. Similar mechanisms could explain the preservation of colorants in the manuscript. Strong interactions between the sugars and water may explain the lack of alterations of the delicate dye molecules used in the codex—a result of their being encapsulated and therefore protected from

the diffuse presence of iron ions and the acidity of the degraded manuscript’s paper. The chemical break-down reactions are slowed because of the “frozen” state of their water molecules. Orchids also protect the paper from degradation, since the acidic catalytic reaction arising from the mobility of protons in water is strongly reduced when orchid mucilage binds the water in a glassy state, causing very poor proton mobility. We therefore speculate that the very good conservation of some colors of the Florentine Codex drawings is related to the presence of saccharides in the orchid bulb extracts, which act as protective agents to the colors. Additional work is necessary to provide clearer evidence in support of our hypothesis.

21. Pena, Capella, and González, “Characterization and Identification of the Mucilage,” pp. 713–717. 22. Glass-transition temperature is the temperature at which a glass-forming liquid changes to an amorphous or glassy solid. 23. Green and Austen Angell, “Phase Relations and Vitrification,” pp. 2880–2882; Furuki, “Effect of molecular structure on thermodynamic properties of carbohydrates,” pp. 441–450.

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CONCLUSIONS

For the first time, the origins of the colorants in the Florentine Codex have been studied. We found that the descriptions of the pigments used in the codex and shown in book 11 correspond to most of the colorants found in the images investigated. However, the blue colorants were obtained by using a procedure that was probably considered so obvious that it was not mentioned in the descriptions in book 11. The codex shows incipient deterioration, mainly due to the iron from the ink used in the writing, which, over the years, has diffused throughout the pages. Despite the probable acidic characteristics acquired by the paper of the pages, the pigments used for the drawings are in a very good state of conservation. This is probably due to the presence of orchid extracts within the paints, as suggested in book 11. A better knowledge of the acidity and the likely presence of orchid extracts requires direct sampling from the paper. A deacidification procedure is recommended in order to bequeath this important work of art more securely to future generations.

In Nepapan Xochitl: The Power of Flowers in the Works of Sahagún* BER EN ICE A L CÁ N TA R A ROJA S Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (unam)

The Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, a work that came to us in its most complete version as the Florentine Codex, is one of many writings that Fray Bernardino de Sahagún conceived as a collaboration with his religious order and his king in their joint duty of facing the Devil in the New World.1 With the Historia, Sahagún tried to show other preachers the reaches of idolatry among the Nahua, and with his doctrinal writings he tried to provide a cure for what he believed was a terrible sickness. The Historia was the “seine,” or “red barredera,” created to separate and register all the words of the Náhuatl language and their intimate significations; the doctrinal texts were the proof that those manners of speech could be used in the translation of the Christian message. The Historia was the account of the value, or “quilate” (literally, “carat”), of the Mexican people; the doctrinal works were the bet on that quilate as the cornerstone of a renewed Christian society.

Fig. 1. Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, book 11, chapter 7, paragraph 9, dedicated to descriptions of flowering trees. Facsimile edition by the Secretaria de Gobernación, República Mexicana, of MS. Med. Palat. 218–220, vol. 3, fol. 187v–188r, from the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.

* This paper, deeply inspired by Louise Burkhart’s works, is at the same time a small review of a previous study about the significance of flowers in Sahagún’s writings (especially in the Psalmodia Christiana) and the starting point of further research concerning the “flower world” in the doctrinal art and literature of sixteenth-century Mexico. 1. In addition to the Florentine Codex, we can highlight, among these writings, fragments of preparatory versions of the Historia general held today in the Codices matritenses, the Sermones de dominicas y de sanctos (a large compilation of sermons for Sundays), the Postilla (a translation and explanation of the Gospels and Epistles for Sundays), the Colloquios (a doctrinal dialogue between two groups: the first twelve Franciscans who arrived in New Spain and some priests of the ancient Aztec religion), and the Psalmodia Christiana (a collection of songs to be performed by the Nahua on holidays, according to their ancient song-dance tradition, and the only such work published in Sahagún’s times).

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However, in the works of Sahagún there appear other interests and meanings besides those imagined by Fray Bernardino, because all of these writings were born from the complex and still misunderstood collaboration of several persons, with their efforts, skills, and creative processes. First, the Historia general was the result of a process of compiling information that went through several stages between 1536 and 1569, and between Tlatelolco, Tepepulco, and Mexico City. The communicative interactions between Sahagún and the Nahua elders he decided to interrogate were always mediated by a group of literate Nahua, proud heirs of the legacy of their own people and proficient participants in the cultural tradition inculcated into them by the Franciscans fathers at the College of the Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco.2 Second, all the works of Sahagún were the outcome of long, simultaneous, and very intricate processes of creation in which the information obtained for the Historia was reelaborated, and in which was composed a large corpus of lengthy doctrinal texts. Here again, close to Sahagún stood the same literate Nahua, composing and reviewing the Náhuatl texts for the Historia and the doctrinal works, as well as the professional scribes who placed in “good letter” the final versions of all these writings, the tlacuilo (or native painters) who added beautiful paintings to the Primeros memoriales around 1558 (today in the Códices matritenses) and to the Florentine Codex around 1575–1577, and the Nahua printer’s assistants who prepared the Psalmodia Christiana for publication in Pedro Ocharte’s workshop in 1583. Therefore, the works of Sahagún must be seen and studied as a major collective and intercultural enterprise. In this paper, I will review some of the contexts in which flowers appear in works of Sahagún, as an attempt to show the interconnections among these works, and that inside all of them are hidden the voices, not always concordant, of the different men responsible for their creation. *

*

*

Flowers, or to be more specific, the blossoms of certain plants, were very significant for the ancient Nahua, and consequently, they had a

2. As Federico Navarrete has pointed out, the interactions among all these men must not always have been easy, even if all of them shared the interest in working together. Navarrete, “La sociedad indígena en la obra de Sahagún,” pp. 97–116.

Fig. 2. Black-ink line-drawings of plant profiles. Facsimile ed., MS. Med. Palat. 218–220, vol. 3, fol. 193v.

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Fig. 3. Black-ink line-drawing emphasizing generic aspects of flower. MS. Med. Palat. 218–220, book 11, fol. 190r.

place in the great encyclopedia designed by Sahagún. In particular, in book eleven of the Historia general, the eighth through tenth paragraphs of chapter seven are dedicated to descriptions of flowers and flowering trees (fig. 1). These sections were composed according to the model of the Renaissance herbarium.3 Hence, the information presented followed this order: Náhuatl name of the species, its synonyms, its morphological characteristics, its habitat, its properties, and some of its uses. In the same way, the native painters who illustrated these flowers adopted the botanic conventions of their time to create images that assisted recognition of the species in the “real” world, applying different techniques: a) black-ink

3. Pablo Escalante has identified some structural and formal links between book 11 of the Florentine Codex and the Hortus sanitatis of Johann von Cube, as well as the De Materia Medica of Dioscorides, particularly the 1566 Castilian edition of the Dioscorides by Andres Laguna, commissioned by Philip II. Escalante, “The Painters of Sahagún’s Manuscripts,” pp. 175–176.

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Fig. 4. Schematic depiction of flowers in different stages of development. Facsimile ed., MS. Med. Palat. 218–220, book 11, fol. 186v.

line-drawings of profiles of entire plants (fig. 2); b) emphasis on depicting generic aspects of the flowers (fig. 3); and c) schematic depiction of the flowers in their different stages of development (fig. 4).4 The familiarity of these painters with the botanic conventions of representation is not surprising because in the scriptorium of the college of Tlatelolco had been painted, two decades earlier, the medicinal herbarium known as the Codice de la Cruz–Badiano (fig. 5). Besides, it is quite possible that some of the painters who collaborated in the Florentine Codex had also participated in the nature compendium of Francisco Hernández, Philip II’s protomedic, as well as in the garden

4. One must not forget that in some of these drawings, the painters added pictographic resources to indicate the colors of the flowers, as Diana Magaloni points out in her work in this volume.

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Fig. 5. Cacahuaxochitl. De la Cruz-Badiano Codex, fol. 53v, from de la Cruz, Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis, 1991.

frescoes of the lower cloister of the Augustinian monastery at Malinalco (fig. 6).5 However, I do not attempt to go further in the analysis of these botanic conventions. Instead, I want to explore some fragments of the complex net of signification surrounding two flowers whose images in the Codex break entirely with naturalistic depiction. I refer to the images of the cacahuaxochitl (Lat., Quararibea funebris) and the izquixochitl (Lat., Boureira huanita) located in the Historia general, book eleven, chapter seven, paragraph nine (figs. 7, 8). To do so, I will make a journey into the flowers of two different works associated with Sahagún. In addition to the sections of book eleven already mentioned, flowers appear in book four of the Florentine Codex as one of the twenty day-

5. Favrot Peterson, Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco, pp. 52–56.

Fig. 6. Xiloxochitl. Malinalco (Estado de México), monastery, lower cloister.

signs of the divinatory calendar (fig. 9), in book two in many ornamental motives framing the texts and images in which the ancient deities were condemned, and in book eleven as the sources of medicinal treatments and pigments. They also appear, as Magaloni and Baglioni’s team has discovered, as the actual sources of the colorants with which many images of the Florentine Codex were made. More importantly, throughout all these occurrences and contexts, flowers appear in the Florentine Codex as the primary materials of apparel and insignia worn and held by nobles,

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Fig. 7. Cacahuaxochitl. MS. Med. Palat. 218–220, vol. 3, fol. 188v.

rulers, warriors, priests, god-impersonators, singers, and many other Nahua during the song-dance rituals that took place in almost all of the ancient religious festivities (figs. 10, 11). Such song-dance attire was so important that there were artists and ritual specialists involved in its invention: the women who made the clothing; the amanteca, or feather artists, who gave form to the feather garments; and the xochichiuhque, or “flower makers,” who were the professionals in charge of cutting, handling, and interlacing flowers and otherwise turning them into ritual settings, bouquets, mosaics, and

Fig. 8. Izquixochitl. Facsimile ed., MS. Med. Palat. 218–220, vol. 3, fol. 189r.

garlands. These specialists also performed the service of offering their flowery creations to the participants of song-dance rituals and other festivities. A description of this flower art appears in book eleven, chapter seven, paragraph eleven (fig. 12), just after the depiction of the flowers themselves, in a manner similar to the presentation and description of the painted art. In this case we find, side by side, images illustrating the principal stages of this craftwork along with a first-person statement in Náhuatl:

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I offer flowers. I plant flowers. I assemble flowers [...] I pick the different flowers. I remove flowers. I seek flowers [...] I make flowers. I make flower necklaces, flower garlands, paper of flowers, bouquets, flower shields, hand flowers [...] I smell them. I cause one to smell something [...] I provide one with flowers. I make flowers, or I give them to someone who will observe a feast day [....] 6

This floral work was as highly valued in the sixteenth century as it had been in pre-Conquest times, as we can see in the images from the Florentine Codex in which a sixteenth-century flower maker offers his work to a Nahua noble (fig. 13). The practice of adorning sacred spaces, images, and ritual participants with flowers was never forbidden.7 Instead, it was encouraged within Catholic contexts, and even today this work remains as an essential ritual specialization among Nahua peoples (fig. 14). Turning back to the song-dance rituals of pre-Conquest times, one must point out the very different natures of the rituals: some involved multitudes, and others were the privilege of a few; some occurred as the climax of major annual public festivities, while others were for the simple leisure of the elite. However, all of them were offered to the gods as an act of reciprocity and during all of them, the complex settings, elaborate apparel, choreography, repetitive sounds, intricate song texts, flowers, and feathers combined to make possible, via interrelated symbolical codes, the communion with other realms of reality, the manifestation of the divine through the human, the reconfiguration of time-space, and the reestablishment of social and political hierarchies. The song-dance rituals were a multifaceted phenomenon in which the power of flora was exploited to lead the sacred through the face of the earth, as evident in the

6. Florentine Codex (facsimile ed., 1979), book 11, chap. 7, paragraph 11, fols. 198v–199r. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. 7. This was so, even if the practice seemed suspiciously related to idolatry for some priests, like the Dominican father Diego Duran: “[Before,] they used to hold flowers in their hands as they do today in some solemnities, particularly in the feasts of the Ascension and of the Holy Ghost around May, and in some others that correspond to their ancient ones. I see this and I remain silent, because no one notices it; then, I also hold my flower staff, as everyone else, even if I consider our great ignorance; thus there could be evil in it.” Duran, Historia de las Indias, vol. 2, p. 51.

Fig. 9. “One Flower” day-sign. Facsimile ed., MS. Med. Palat. 218–220, vol. 2, fol. 19r.

following fragment of the chant for the feast of Atamalcualiztli preserved in the Primeros memoriales, and in book two of the Florentine Codex: My heart is a flower bursting into blossom […] Our mother has arrived, The goddess has arrived, The goddess Tlazolteotl has come. Cinteotl was born in Tamoanchan, In the place where the flowers stand erect […] Now the sun will rise, The dawn will arise.

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Fig. 10. Merchants offering flowers for song-dance rituals. Facsimile ed., MS. Med. Palat. 218–220, vol. 2, fol. 30v. Let all the various quechol birds sip nectar at the place where the flowers stand erect […] Let there be rejoicing by the flowering tree various quechol birds. Hear the quechol bird, Our god speaks, Hear it, His quechol bird speaks. Are they perhaps our dead who play the flutes? Is he perhaps the one who will be chased with the blowgun? Only with my flowers shall I fan the wind. With the tonacaxochitl, With the izquixochitl, at the place where the flowers stand erect [....] 8

8. Florentine Codex (facsimile ed., 1979), appendix of book 2, fol. 142. Among other fragments in which the connection of flowers with the song-dance ritual is apparent, I present this quotation about the One Flower feast: Also it was said that when One Flower set in, then everywhere began [a dance], spread all around; always there was dancing, always there continued, and was always held, a dance, a procession. But only Moctezuma in his own heart knew [...] for how many days he established his dance.

Fig. 11. Impersonator of Huitzilopochtli adorned with flowers. Facsimile ed., MS. Med. Palat. 218–220, vol. 1, fol. 60v.

Atamalcualiztli (the “eating of water tamales”) was a festival dedicated to Cinteotl, the maize god, and was celebrated by the Nahua of the Valley of Mexico every eight years. For this feast, the Nahua prepared plain tamales by simply steaming them, which allowed the sacred maize to “rest” instead of suffering the usual rigors of the nixtamalization process.9 Among other solemnities, they performed a ritual in which all the gods

And in this way it might be known that the dance had been arranged: two poles with flowers were set up; they remained at the palace, at the place of the tlatoani. Thus was made known that this was the feast of the flower, that there would be flowery enjoyment, flowery rejoicing. — Florentine Codex (facsimile ed., 1979), book 4, chap. 7, fols. 18v–19r 9. Nixtamalization is the process of soaking maize or corn fermentation in hot, limed water to soften it and remove the outer husk as preparation for grinding it and making tortillas.

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Fig. 13. Flower maker giving adornments to a noble. MS. Med. Palat. 218– 220, vol. 3, fol. 199r.

danced via their ixiptla, or impersonators, coming down to earth in the guise of hummingbirds, butterflies, honeybees, and other flying creatures to suck the nectar of the tree in which grew the “flowers of different kinds” (fig. 15). The ritual actions of Atamalcualiztli recreated, as some scholars have pointed out, a mythical time-space known as Tamoanchan—“the place of the flowering tree” or “the place where the flowers stand erect.”10 Tamoanchan was one Nahua manifestation of what has been called the “flower world,” a conceptual unit shared by many peoples from the UtoAztecan family. The flower world was the upper realm of reality, a place full of light, heath, fire, war, singing, and dancing—a world in which forces

Fig. 12. Xochichiuhque or flower makers. Facsimile ed., MS. Med. Palat. 218–220, vol. 3, fol. 198v.

10. See López Austin, Tamoanchan y Tlalocan, and Graulich, Mitos y rituales.

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Fig. 14. “Mayordomos” (ritual custodians) attired with flower adornments. Alta Puebla, Santa Cruz feast, 2007.

and powers manifested themselves among humankind through “colored flowers and other brightly colored and iridescent natural phenomena.”11 For the Nahua, this flower world was a place of origin, the place where the gods were created and where they generated the movement and combination of forces that made earthly life possible.12 At the same time, this flower world was a time-space of destiny. In the Historia general, we find a report of the existence of a place known as Tonatiuh Ichan (the

11. Hill, “The Flower-world of Old Uto-Aztecan,” pp. 117–144. 12. López Austin, Tamoanchan y Tlalocan, chap. II.

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Fig. 15. Atamalcualiztli feast. Códice Matritense del Palacio Real de Madrid, fol. 254r, from Sahagún, Primeros memoriales, facsimile ed., 1993.

“house of the sun”), where one of the souls of men who died in war and of women who died in childbirth went to help the sun in his daily battle against darkness.13 This precinct was sometimes described as a desert of

13. In pre-Conquest times, according to López Austin, the Nahua distinguished at least three souls, or “entidades anímicas,” as main components of the human being: the tonalli, the ihiyotl, and the teyolia; each of them was connected with diverse forces of the cosmos. After one’s death, these souls separated and experienced different destinies. Only the teyolia made the voyage into the underworld, the upperworld, or the waterworld, according to divine choice and the circumstances of demise. See López Austin, Cuerpo humano e ideología, vol. 2, Las concepciones de los antiguos nahuas, chaps. 5 and 6.

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Fig. 17. Cacaloxochitl (Lat., Plumeria rubra). Fig. 18. Cacaloxochitl.

were described as the place of the “different kinds of flowers” (nepapan xochitl). One of the most frequent Nahua epithets referring to the upper world, as it can be seen in many chants of ancient tradition: Fig. 16. “Flowery heaven.” Malinalco monastery, vault of lower cloister.

heath and war, and others as a flowery realm where warriors experienced transfiguration into birds with iridescent feathers: And when they had been there for four years, then they transformed into precious birds, hummingbirds, xochitototl birds, totocoztli birds […], chalky butterflies […], who went sucking [nectar] everywhere. And also they came here to the earth; they came to suck from the different kinds of flowers: the equimitl, or the tzonpanquahuitl, the xiloxochitl, the tlacoxiloxochitl.14

We can recognize this realm as the same locus where Cinteotl was born according to the chant for Atamalculiztli, because both of them

14. Florentine Codex (facsimile ed., 1979), book 3, appendix, fol. 29r.

Let there be song with flowers, let it be said, oh my younger brothers! The inebriating flowers have arrived right here. Comes the intoxicating poyomahtli flower, comes swelling. Let the flowers arrive right here. Only the rejoicing flowers disperse away, shake away. They are indeed the different kinds of flowers. The drum resounds. Let there be dancing.15

Nevertheless, the richest and most overwhelming expression of this flower world does not appear in the Historia general, but in various 15. “Ma xochicuicoya ma ihtoa nichuana ayyahue teyhuinti xochitl aoyano yehcoc ye nica poyomaxahuallan timaliuhtihuitz ayyo. / Ma xochitl oyecoc ye nican ayyahue çan tlaa’huixochitla moyahuaya motzetzeloa anca ço yehatl in nepapan xochitl ayio. Çan comoni huehuetl ma ya nehtotilo et.” Bierhorst, Cantares Mexicanos, p. 226.

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Fig. 19. Xiloxochitl (Lat., Pseudobombax ellipticum).

sixteenth-century Christian doctrinal writings, among which are found the Náhuatl songs of Sahagún’s Psalmodia Christiana, as Louise Burkhart has indicated.16 On the Day of the Stigmata of Blessed Francis The various kinds of flowers lie giving off much fragrance. In eloxochitl, in cacahuaxochitl, in mecaxochitl, lie extended over all the land. Alleluia! The cacahuaxochitl, the colored izquixochitl, spread about sparking, lie blossoming. Alleluia! Alleluia! They stand bending with quetzal feather dew, there on the mountaintop, in the place called Mount La Verna. May your hearts be filled, you children!

16. Burkhart, “Flowery Heaven,” pp. 89–109.

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Fig. 20. Xiloxochitl. MS. Med. Palat. 218–220, book 11, fol. 191v. May our hearts bloom with the red tecomaxochitl, with the eloxochitl! Red tecomaxochitl lie dawning with roses there on the mountaintop. A great marvel happened there to God’s loved one, to our father Saint Francis!17 On the Day of Saint Bernardine

Let us honor the cypress tree of quetzal feathers, The silk cotton tree of trogon feathers, which our lord God caused to sprout: he, Saint Francis. Throughout the world [its] branches, [its] shadows, shade all the children of the Holy Church. And in its shade, in its leaf, we people of New Spain are happy here. We rejoice.

17. Ibid., p. 98. I take here Burkhart’s translation, with only the change of flower names, which I prefer to maintain in their original Náhuatl forms.

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All the various flowers of heaven waft [their scent] to it. All the diverse precious stones of heaven grow as its fruits.

The yolloxochitl, the teuizquixochitl, the cacahuaxochitl, the eloxochitl, the tecomaxochitl, the red omixochitl, all are arched there, scented, scattered wide.18 On the Day of the Virgin Saint Clare

May she be marveled at, may she be praised, the maidenly elder sister of our lord Jesus Christ! Various flowers lie together, lie gathered there! The very fragrant and wonderful flowery green water spreads about, flowing wondrously over them, spreads about gushing. It stands, going about in all directions. Our lord’s walled garden is watered with it. There our lord appointed his precious Saint Francis. He is his gardener, his florist!19 Our lord’s walled garden is walled all with precious stones, and it is encrusted with gold! His enclosed garden has an entrance in only one place. Its door is of pearl. The stewards who are on guard there are arraying for war. The flowers that lie growing there are the sunshine of our lord Jesus Christ. He loves them dearly, he tends them carefully, especially the heavenly flower, his precious Saint Clare! There our lord’s flowery mountain lies visible, lies giving off warmth, lies dawning. Its fragrance, its emanation, its scent lies reaching far, lies spreading over all the land. The red omixochitl, the jade yexochitl, the red rose, the red tecomaxochitl, lie blossoming preciously, lie flaming, lie waving, lie dripping with golden dew. The rose, the dark red one, the pale one, the red ihuixochitl, the teucuitlaxochitl, lie bending with quetzal feather dew.

18. Sahagún, Psalmodia Christiana, p. 155–156. This is Anderson’s translation, with only the change of flower names, which I prefer to maintain in their original Náhuatl forms. 19. “Ixuchipixcatzi, ixuchimacantzi” (his flower keeper, his flower offerer).

Fig. 21. Huacalxochitl (Lat., Philodendron mexicanum). De la Cruz– Badiano Codex, fol. 18v. They spread about giving off warmth. They lie extended over all the land, scented and fragrant.20

The creation of this flowery garden, where Saint Francis unites with Jesus Christ and where the saint appears sometimes as a precious tree and others as the xochimanqui, or flower offerer designated by God, is a testimony of the convergence and interpenetration of several ideas and representations of heaven whose origins can be traced to different cultures and continents. First, this flowery garden is heir of the long process that led, in Western Christianity, to the superposition of various 20. Burkhart, “Flowery Heaven,” pp. 98–99. Burkhart’s translation, with only the change of flower names, which I prefer to maintain in their original Náhuatl forms.

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Fig. 22. Cacahuaxochitl (Lat., Cuararibea funebris). Fig. 23. Ixquixochitl (Lat., Beureria huanita).

notions about paradise, among them the Garden of Eden of Genesis, the New Jerusalem of the book of Revelations, and the Hortus conclusus of the Song of Songs or Canticles, this last an important flowery symbol of Mary’s purity and of the redemptive character of the Catholic Church. Second, this flower garden was possible thanks to a conjunction that occurred in New Spain, within different doctrinal arts, of that square and flowery conception of Paradise (with its roots in the Old Testament) and certain native conceptions of the universe as a four-cornered place whose upper realm was a flowery space full of light, song-dance, and birdlike transfiguration of the dignified dead (fig. 16). As I try to show here, it is the sixteenth-century Christian Náhuatl songs (preserved today mostly in the Psalmodia Christiana and the Cantares mexicanos) that reveal the nature of the flower world in all its potentiality, Christian and Amerindian, for the Nahua. It is also thanks to these cantares that we can accurately reconstruct the repertory of flowers that the Nahua associated with this high and incandescent plain of reality. The flora of the flower world did not include all the blossoming species known by the Nahua but a certain set of them to which they refer, in general terms, as the “flowers of different kinds,” or in nepapan xochitl. These different kinds of flowers share common attributes. They are flowers of the hot lands, growing in the tops of trees, and blossoming in the dry season. They reproduce the luminous colors of the sunlight spectrum and possess, above any other characteristic, the quality of producing sweet fragrances with the capacity to affect the human nervous system and create

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altered states of consciousness, making possible a communication with supernatural powers and realms. Among these flowers we can count the cacaloxochitl (Lat., Plumeria rubra; figs. 17, 18); the yolloxochitl (Talauma mexicana); the eloxochitl (Magnolia schiedanae); the tecomaxochitl (Solandra maxima); the xiloxochitl (Pseudobombax ellipticum; figs. 19, 20); and the huacalxochitl, (Philodendron mexicanum, fig. 21). Of course, too, there are the cacahuaxochitl (Quararibea funebris; fig. 22), and the izquixochitl (Beureria huanita; fig. 23), those two flowers whose images I pointed out at the beginning of this paper. The cacahuaxochitl and the izquixochitl stand out, too, as the only white flowers of this group, and as those whose names most frequently appear together as a diphrase in the corpus of cantares as an immediate reference to the flower world.21 Coming back to the images of the cacahuaxochitl and the izquixochitl in the Florentine Codex, one may suggest that the tlacuilo who drew them chose to outline them so differently because the two flowers, as a pair, were a paradigmatic symbol of the upper realm, that flowery garden that was an entity full of both convergent and contradictory meanings for the Christian Nahua of the sixteenth century. In the case of the cacahuaxochitl (see fig. 7), the Nahua painter selected the tree archetype—a tree that sinks its roots into the depths of the earth and projects its branches to the sky. It is a tree full of insects and butterflies sipping nectar from its flowers, just like the descending gods of the Atamalcualiztli feast, and the dead warriors of the House of the Sun. Yet this tree, which stands sheltering these two flower makers, also evokes a very complex Christian imagery concerning the origins of human kind, the transition from a pagan past to a Christian present, and the possibility of everlasting redemption.22 In the case of the izquixochitl (see fig. 8), the tlacuilo chose the figure of a four-cornered garden, enclosing four trees and four rivers. It is a garden that is at the same time the flower world of the Nahua and the Christian paradise, in which rabbits and deer roam as a sign of its heavenly condition, and in accordance with native cosmic geometrics.23 However, of these two paradigmatic images, the flower world appears just

21. Sautron, “In izquixochitl in cacahuaxochitl,” pp. 243–264. 22. Russo, “El renacimiento vegetal,” pp. 5–39. 23. The words rabbit and deer constitute a diphrase in Náhuatl, referring to

the periphery and its instability, and also to the sun and the moon (the latter in its erratic character). See Burkhart, “Moral Deviance,” pp. 107–139; and López Austin, “Los dichos,” pp. 49–53.

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a few times in the Florentine Codex. Instead, it appears where it more properly belongs within the conceptual framework of Sahagún’s works— in the cantares, the song-dance texts created by Sahagún and his Nahua aides to celebrate the glory of the blessed ones. Many times I have asked myself what this flower garden really was for those men who participated in its creation. One possible answer I have found is that it functioned, between Sahagún and his Nahua collaborators, as a commonality (or locus communis) that allowed them to join two different cores of ideas and representations of the heavenly. From these two sets of concepts they used all the elements that they considered equivalents or that they forced to be equivalents: heaven as a place of light, as a garden full of trees and flowers, as a home of sacred warriors, as a place of singing and music, and of course, as a space of joy. More than a final conclusion, these lines are an invitation to approach more closely this colorful and scented flower world kept in many Indo-Christian works, to start decoding it in its details because these works contain, in every trace, and sometimes behind the most superficial coincidences, the voices of those men who made them possible, each one with different ideas, points of view, and aspirations, but all capable of uniting and reinventing two cultural traditions in such dissimilar ways, as diverse as the flowers of different kinds.

Plants and Colors in the Florentine Codex SA LVA D OR R E Y ES EQU IGUA S Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Fig. 1. Tonalamatl de los pochtecas (the Fejérváry-Mayer Codex), folio 1. Leaf from the Nahua 260-day divinatory calendar, depicting the horizontal plane of the Aztec cosmos with its center and four regions, each associated with a type of tree, a color, and a pair of gods. The codex is located in the National Museums Liverpool, England, cat. 12014.

Although there are valuable studies on the use of plants in the elaboration of dyes by the Nahua as a result of ethnographic reports and archaeological and historical research, there remain aspects of the issue still to be resolved. In particular, we lack a precise understanding of Nahua concepts of plant nomenclature, especially in regard to the practice of naming plants according to their color, and the cosmogonic implications of such names. This paper analyzes the names of some of the plants that served in the production of dyestuffs, and their possible symbolic implications. In this analysis, language itself becomes a primary tool for assessing the criteria used by the Nahua in classifying and ordering their natural environment, and specifically the vegetable kingdom. It is well known that in the Nahua conception of the universe, space was arranged on two axes: a vertical that was made up of three levels, and a horizontal divided into four regions and containing a central point, where man was located. On the vertical axis, the lower level, or underworld, was named Mictlan; the middle one, or surface of the earth, Tlalticpac; and the uppermost, made up of thirteen celestial strata, the Ilhuicame. The horizontal plane defined the cosmic regions that were equivalent, in certain ways, to our four cardinal points: mictlampa (north), huiztlan (south), tonatiuh ixco (east), and icalaquian tonatiuh (west). On each of the horizontal vertices there was a tree; each had its roots in Mictlan and grew through Tlalticpac, where man lived, with its fronds reaching Ilhuicame. Together, these trees held up the heavens and formed the cosmic axes. Each region of the horizontal plane was characterized by a type of tree and a color, as we can see in the first sheet of the Tonalamatl de

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los pochtecas, also called the Fejérváry-Mayer Codex (fig. 1).1 In another manuscript, the Tudela Codex, we can see variants of these trees: quetzalmizquitl (Parkinsonia aculeata, or feathered cactus), quetzalpochotl (Sabino precioso, or bald cypress), quetzalhuehuetl (Sabino precioso, or Mexican swamp cypress), and quetzalhuexotl (Salix L. Salicaceae, or weeping willow). A color corresponded to each of the four cardinal directions, and in some cultures a fifth color was assigned to the center. The specific correspondence between color and cosmic region varied among the Mesoamerican peoples. For some, white corresponded to the center; for others, it related to the south. The colors associated with the cosmic regions were red or yellow for the east; black, red, or yellow for the north; white or blue for the west; and red or blue for the south. Each region had associations not only with a tree and a color but with a pair of gods, also depicted in figure 1. This chromatic and vegetal arrangement has important consequences for the criteria of plant classification used among various Mesoamerican peoples. For example, Alfredo Barrera found that the Yucatan Mayans also used color as a criterion in classifying plant types and that the colors used were only five, corresponding to those assigned to the cardinal points and to the center: chak (red); ek (black); ya’ax (green); k’an (yellow); and sak (white). They used no other color to classify plants.2 This observation has been corroborated among the Nahua peoples. Even today the diverse Nahua groups persist in classifying maize into five color-specific terms, corresponding to those of pre-Hispanic antiquity: white maize (iztactlaolli), yellow (coztictlaolli), blue (xiuhtlaolli), red (tlayaolli), and black (yauhtlaolli). The same is true of plants of the genus Amaranthus (Náhuatl, huauhtli; Mexican Spanish, alegria) (fig. 2). We find a number of variants of the name huauhtli, corresponding to the colors red (tlapalhuauhtli), dull or grayish brown (nexhuautli), green-blue (texohuauhtli), black (tlilhuauhtli), and yellow (xochihuauhtli). While maize is the most convincing example of plant classification by color, no doubt other significant plants for the Nahua, such as beans and chili peppers, were categorized in a like manner. The Nahua employed at least two systems of taxonomy for plants. The first was based on the description of morphological attributes; the other

1. See León-Portilla, “Tonalámatl de los pochtecas,” pp. 9–12. 2. Barrera Vázquez, “Taxonomía maya,” pp. 29–66.

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Fig. 2. Amaranthus (Náhuatl, huauhtli), a plant whose variants are named by adding color words to the root: tlapalhuauhtli, nexhuauhtli, and xochihuauhtli.

corresponded to the cultural uses assigned to these plants.3 Thus the same plant could have more than one name—one founded on its physical attributes and the other on its Nahua uses. In this way, the etymology of Nahua names can reveal the classification criteria on which those names are based (figs. 3a, b). The names of plants in Náhuatl are made up of two or more etymological roots, where a lexeme corresponds to a plant genus and the

3. Estrada Lugo, El Códice florentino, passim.

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Figs. 3a, b. (Left, 3a) Chart of Nahua plant classifications based on similar morphology; (right, 3b) Nahua plant classifications based on uses.

other component to a genus variant. Thus we have, according to morphological classification, the roots quiahuitl (tree), xihuitl (herb), and xochitl (flower), to which a prefix can be added to specify the type of tree, herb, or flower. For example, we have oceloxochitl, “flor de ocelote” (ocelot flower), mecaxochitl, “flor de mecate” (rope flower), xiloxochitl “flor de jilote” (jilote flower), and many other varieties.

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In the system of classification by uses, we find diverse nominal roots that, instead of describing the morphological characteristics of the plants, indicate the utility given them by the Nahua. One such root is pahtli, which is added to the names of plants used in the treatment of various diseases. The root zapotl groups together sweet edible fruits; xocotl, sour fruits; and quilitl, young edible plants.4 As already mentioned, one of the criteria used to specify a certain plant is by adding the color, as for the maize cintli: we have cozticcintli, quappachcintli, tlatlauhcacintli, and yauhcintli: yellow, tawny, red, and dark maize, respectively. Given this information, many questions arise concerning the connection between colors and plants. How should we understand plant names with etymological roots relating to color—as descriptions of physical attributes or as indicators of the tints that could be obtained from the plants? To propose an answer to these questions, it’s necessary to take some considerations into account. The first is that, according to Daniel Dehouve’s detailed study “Nombrar los colores en Náhuatl (siglos xvi– xx),” color nomenclature can be of two types: descriptive or symbolic.5 In the first case, the name of an object can give rise to the designation of a color, which is very similar to what occurs in Spanish and English with the color “rose,” or in English with the word “orange,” among other examples. In the second nomenclature system, the color can form part of a symbolic language that is full of metaphor and could signify much more than just a chromatic attribute. For example, red could be related to heat or the east (the dawn region), and blue-green to vegetation and water, and therefore refer to fertility and sustenance. In this work I intend to gather, based on the Florentine Codex, the names of plants used as tints and those whose names include chromatic attributes, and to analyze their etymology to try to understand the criteria used in the classification of plants based on color, and also to comment on the possible consequences of this phenomenon. The fundamental tools for this analysis are the Castilian–Náhuatl vocabulary and grammar elaborated by missionaries in order to accomplish their mission of evangelization during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among those who stood out were the Franciscans Alonso de Molina (1513/1514–1579) and Andres

4. See Ortiz de Montellano, “¿Existió un sistema de clasificación botánica?,” p. 56. 5. Dehouve, “Nombrar los colores en Náhuatl,” p. 38–59.

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de Olmos (c. 1485–1571), and the Jesuit Antonio del Rincón (1566–1601). To all this we could add the curious work of a Spanish merchant, Pedro de Arenas, who, in order to practice his trade and to exchange goods with the Indians, wrote the Vocabulario manual de las lenguas castellana y mexicana sometime before 1611. It is worth mentioning that the works of these and other authors have been gathered in an electronic publication named cen (available at http:www.sup-infor.com). We will begin with the plants whose names include etymological roots from the cosmogonic colors in Nahua thought: red, black, greenblue, yellow, and white. For what we call “red,” Nahuatl counted on the term chiltic, which can be interpreted as “similar to a chili” (chilli, plus the adjective ending -tic). With this root we encounter names of plants like chichihuauhtli and chichiquiltic, which can be interpreted as “amaranth red, like a chili” and “red like chili leaves.” Another term, in some ways synonymous with chiltic, is tlatlauhqui, from the root tlahuitl (red ochre, a clay with ferrous oxide), with a duplication of the root word tla that can denote the intensity of the color, plus the adjective ending -qui. It is very probable that both endings denoted distinct tones of red. Yet another word in the texts that denotes a type of red is tlapalli, which includes the root palli, “tint,” in combination with another nominal root that I haven’t been able to determine precisely. In a paragraph in chapter eleven of the eleventh book of the Florentine Codex, we read that the term color is a translation of the Náhuatl word tlapalli. Literally, the Náhuatl text says, Tlapalli: Icentoca in ixquich nepapan tlapalli, chipavac, qualli iectli, maviztic. [Tlapalli: It is the name of all the diverse colors; {the color is} clear, good, beautiful, precious, marvelous.]

In his text, Molina agrees that tlapalli is “color”: “color para pintar o cosa teñida” (color for painting or dyestuffs), “grana color afinado” (the color of refined cochineal), and a very interesting definition, “sangre de parentesco” (kindred blood).6 This last idea relates the term tlapalli to that which is red (blood), an idea that is reinforced with a construction

6. Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana. This and the following references to the Arenas, Olmos, and Rincón dictionaries were consulted in the electronic publication available at http://www.sup-infor.com.

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Table 1-1. Náhuatl Plant Names with a Color Root Meaning Red Red=Tlapal/Tlatlauh/Chichiltic Nominal roots

Botanic classification 1. Family 2. Genus

Tlatlacuezonan

?

Tlapalcamotli

?

Tlapalcintli

1.!Leguminosae 2.!Eysenhardtia

Tlapalezquauitl

1.!Euphorbiaceae 2.!Jatropha

Tlapaliuixochitl

?

Tlapalizquixochitl

1.!Baraginaceae 2.!Bourreria

Tlapalli

?

Tlapaloauhtli

?

Tlapalomixochitl

?

Tlapaluacalxochitl

?

Tlapatal

1.!Solanaceae 2.!Datura

Tlapatli

?

Tlatlalpaltic

?

Tlatlapanaltic Tlatlapantli

1.!Scrophulariaceae 2.!Escobedia

Tlapalatlacuezonan

?

Tlatlauhcacintli

?

Tlatlauhcapatli

1.!Geraniaeae 2.!Geranium

Tlatlauhquixihuitl

?

Tlatlauhqui

1.!Bombacaceae, 2.!Ceiba 1.!Geraniaceae, 2.!Geranium

Tlatlauhquipatli

1.!Geraniaceae, 2.!Geranium 1.!Acanthaceae, 2.!Justicia

Tlatlaquitezontzapotl

1.!Sapotaceae 2.!Lúcuma

Chichihuacuauhtli

1.!Amaranthus

Chichiquiltic

?

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Table 1-2. Náhuatl Plant Names with a Color Root Meaning Black Black=Tlil-li (nominal root) Nominal roots

Botanic classification 1.!Family 2.!Genus

Tlilpotonqui (Ocopiaztli)

?

Tlilliozotl

?

Tlilticchien

1. Labiatae 2. Salvia

Tlitictlamiaualli

?

Tlilxochitl

1. Orchidacea, 2. Epidendrum 1. Vanilla (Anderson)

Tlilpotonqui (ocopiaztli)

?

Note: The names of plants are taken from the Florentine Codex; otherwise, the author of the source is specified. Full citations appear in the bibliography at the end of the text.

already conceived in colonial times and which Molina himself registered: tlapal vino, “vino tinto” (red wine). In this form, tlapalli would be the designation for the thing colored, in the sense that it possesses color, and that color in its most excellent form would be red. This perception of red as the paradigmatic color coincides with the Castilian perception, in which colorado may refer equally to something that is colored or to something that is red.7 From the word tlapalli arises the Mexicanism “tlapalería,” denoting an establishment that sells paint, in the sense of dyes. In this form, the roots chiltic, tlatlauhqui, and tlapalli are used to emphasize the reddish characteristics of some plants. With regard to the range of dark colors, among which of course black stands out, we find associated with the names of plants the nominal root tlilli, a word that certain dictionaries relate to the tinting uses of carbon. The eleventh book of the Florentine Codex mentions that tlilli is obtained from pine soot. Similarly, we have such words as tlilpotonqui, tlilliozotl, tlilticchien, tlilticlamiaualli, and tlilxochitl. Molina defines tlilli as “tinta” (ink/tint), or “tinta para escribir” (ink/tint for writing). Arenas,8 Olmos,9 and Rincón10 7. Diccionario de la lengua española, available at http://www.rae.es/rae.html. 8. Arenas, Vocabulario manual de las lenguas castellana y mexicana, p. 11. 9. Olmos, Arte de la lengua mexicana. 10. Rincón, Arte mexicana.

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also define it as “tinta,” and only Guerra specifies that tlilli refers to “la tinta negra” (black ink). Just as tlapalli relates to that which has the most excellent color, which is to say red, tlilli relates to the black ink they generally wrote with in early colonial times. To demonstrate a metaphorical usage, in Náhuatl there existed the idiomatic phrase “tlapalli tlilli nictlalia,” which Molina interpreted as “dar buen exemplo” (to give a good example). Note that the two colors, red and black (tlapalli and tlilli, respectively), together connote a model of human behavior, by a slight extension of which the phrase signifies “to give a good example.” To this we can add the expression tlilli in tlapalli—the “black ink, red ink” difrasismo, or diphrasis, that suggests the idea of wisdom and knowledge.11 Below I will take up this topic again. With regard to the green-blue tones, it is natural to feel that these colors would be associated with description of the vegetal world. The terms matlalli and xoxuhqui denoted greenish blues. Of matlalli Sahagún tells us, A la color azul fina llaman matlalli, que quiere decir azul: este color se hace de flores azules, color es muy preciado, y muy apacible de ver, llamase tambien cardenillo, en la lengua española. [The fine color blue they call matlalli, which is to say blue: They make this color from blue flowers; the color is very precious and very pleasant to see; it is also called verdigris in the Spanish language.]12

For his part, Molina asserts the term matlalli as “color verde oscuro” (dark green color). The Náhuatl text of the Florentine Codex tells us that the word matlalli does not come from any other term and that it is the name of an herb’s flower, whose color is that of tender, edible green plants. By this we can infer that the name of the color is the same as that of the plant. According to Sahagún, in Spanish it is called cardenillo (verdigris). Plants whose names include the root matlalli include matlalxihuitl, matlalquahuitl, and matlalxochitl, which may be interpreted as “blue herb,” “blue tree” and “blue flower,” respectively. These names do not refer to

11. A difrasismo, or diphrasis, is a coupling of two metaphoric words or phrases to produce a new meaning by the association of ideas. 12. Sahagún, Historia general, Book 11, fol. 217, p. 369v.

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Table 1-3. Náhuatl Plant Names with a Color Root Meaning Blue-Green Blue-green=Matlalli or Xoxuhqui (nominal roots) Nominal roots

Botanic classification 1.!Family 2.!Genus

Matlalli (“cardenillo”; verdigris)

1. Commelinaceae, 2.!Commelina (Cervera, López, and Roquero) 1. Tradescantia

Matlalxihuitl

1. Commelinaceae, 2.!Commelina (Cervera, López, and Roquero) 2. Tradescantia

Matlalquahuitl (Hernández)

?

Matlalxochitl (Clavijero)

?

Coaxoxouhqui (Xoxouhcapatli, Ololiuhqui) Xoxocauhqui (“enmohecido”; “moldy”) (Molina)

? ?

Xoxotlacotl (Clavijero)

?

Xoxotlilton (Clavijero)

?

Note:!The names of the plants are taken from the Florentine Codex; otherwise, the author of the source is specified. Full citations appear in the bibliography at the end of the text.

groups of bluish trees, plants, or flowers but only to one specific tree, one flower, and one herb. Of the matlalquahuitl, we know that the name refers to the well-known guayacán (Lignum vitae, or ironwood) tree, and that it was used from the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries in the treatment of syphilis.13 Concerning the term xoxuhqui, Molina indicates that it is equivalent to a “cosa verde no madura” (immature green thing) and also “azul color de cielo” (the blue color of the sky). Among plant names that include the root of this term are coaxoxouhqui, xoxocauhqui, xoxotlacotl, and xoxotlilton. The first, coaxoxouhqui, contains the root coatl, “serpent.” Xoxocauhqui is described by Molina as “enmohecido, enmohecido cosa” (moldy, moldy thing). Xoxotlacotl contains the suffix -tlacotl, or “rod.” Xoxotlilton is made up of two roots that allude to colors, on one hand xoxo-uhqui and on the other tlil-li, with a diminutive ending, -ton, that

13. See, for instance, Cárdenas and Monardes.

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together express a blue-green with a darkish tone. None of these words were recorded in the vocabularies utilized in the present text, nor do we count on proposals for their botanical identifications. Another term, iztac, correlates with “white,” and comes from the nominal root izta-tl, or “salt,” with an adjective ending to indicate “that which is like ….” Many plants contain this root in their names, but it doesn’t necessarily refer to the possible whiteness of their flowers or fruits. Among these names we may find some that are relatively simple, like iztacquauil, iztaquilitl, iztaquiltic, iztacamotli, iztacpatli, and iztacetl, which can be understood as “white tree,” “white tender vegetable,” “similar to a white tender vegetable,” “white medicine,” and “white beans,” respectively. Other plant names that include the root in question are more complicated, like iztaczazalic, which incorporates zazalic, alluding to the sticky gum of a plant; iztacxoxocoyoli, which contains part of the root xoxo-uhqui (green-blue), and coyol-li, which Molina records as cascabel (small bell/rattle), “cuna de niño” (baby’s cradle), and “anzuelo” (fish hook), referring perhaps to the form of these objects. One interesting word is iztacchichiquauitl, since it contains the root for white, followed by the root chichi-c, which in this case refers to the bitter taste of the plant, plus quauitl, “tree.” Therefore we may understand this word as “bitter white tree.” Similarly, iztaciuxochitl combines iztac (white) with cihui-tl (feather) and xochitl (flower) to make “white feather flower”; iztacpalancapatli is literally “white medicine for swelling.” Finally, iztacaxixpatli is the name of a medicinal plant for urinary diseases (from iztac [white], axix [urine], and pahtli [medicinal plant]). Coztic, a root meaning yellow, is incorporated into names of the following plants: cocoztic (which may suggest something that is very yellow, as indicated by the repeated syllable co-); cozauhquixochitl (yellow flower), coznochnopalli (yellow prickly pear nopal), coztomatl (yellow tomato), cozquicpatli, and cozticcintli (neither of which last two terms is simple to translate). We can see in this preliminary compilation that some names of plants contain nominal roots deriving from other elements of nature in order to allude to a chromatic characteristic; thus chili, ochre, mold, and soot are references that describe certain plants rather than indicate that such tints were extracted from them. In order to show that a tint was obtained from a certain plant, the Nahua used the word palli, which according to Molina means “barro negro para teñir ropa” (black clay for dyeing clothes).

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Table 1-4. Náhuatl Plant Names with a Color Root Meaning White

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Table 1-5. Náhuatl Plant Names with a Color Root Meaning Yellow

White=Izta (nominal root)

Yellow=Coztic (nominal root)

Nominal roots:

Botanic classification 1.!Family 2.!Genus

Nominal roots:

Iztacaxixpatli

1. Poligonaceae 2. Polygonum

Botanic classification 1.!Family 2.!Genus

Cocoztic

Iztaccacalic (Iztaczazalic)

1. Ranunculaceae 2. Thalictrum

?

?

Iztaccamotli (Poxcauhcamotli)

Cozauhquixochitl (Cozauhquiyeixochitl)

?

Coznochnopalli

Iztacchichiquauitl

1. Garryaceae 2. Garrya

1. Cactaceae 2. Opuntia

Cozquicpatli

?

Iztaciuixochitl

?

Cozticcintli

?

Coztomatl

1. Solanaceae 2. Physalis

Iztacpalancapatli

?

Iztacpatli

?

Iztacquauitl

?

Iztaquilitl

1. Portulacaceae 2. Portulaca

Iztaquiltic

1. Chenopodiaceae 2. Suaeda

Iztacxoxocoyoli

?

Iztacetl

1. Leguminosae 2. Phaselus

Note:!The names of the plants are taken from the Florentine Codex.

Note that within the body of sources, none of the words such as tlilpalli, chichipalli, cozpalli, nexpalli, or matlalpalli appear, which suggests that conceptually, certain nominal color roots may have precluded the word palli (tint). Diverse authors have searched for references to plants having tint uses whose names don’t necessarily include a root meaning either a color or ink. Perhaps the most exhaustive compilation we can count on is the one produced by Estrada Lugo, from which the following data was obtained: It’s important to clarify that this compilation merits paying greater attention to the Náhuatl section of the Florentine Codex, since the compilation is based on Sahagún´s Spanish paraphrases. The Náhuatl text in the Florentine Codex is emphatic in pointing out that the colors are “made from” the plants recorded in chapter 11, in the

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Note: The names of the plants are taken from the Florentine Codex.

sense that the tints are produced with them. The Náhuatl reads, “Inic ce parrapho itechpa tlatoa, in isquich tlapalli in quenjn mochioa.” (“The elaboration of all the colors is mentioned in the first paragraph.”) The colors listed in the eleventh chapter can be classified according to their origins, these being vegetable, mineral, or animal: In a preliminary manner, the list presents some interpretations from the Náhuatl text, which clarifies etymological roots that derive from names of tints and, on occasion, the ways different ingredients are mixed to obtain particular colors. Of xochipalli, the text tells us that the name comes from words meaning flower and color. The tint produced from this flower is a light yellow. The name of the color comes from the root xochitl, one of the designations for the color yellow. As for matlalli, the Náhuatl text says that the name does not come from another term, but denotes the herb’s flower, which has the color of young edible plants. The name of the color is the same as that of the plant. The name cacatlaxcalli derives from zacatl (grass) and tlaxcalli (tortilla). The plant is similar to grass and the colorant is formed into a tortilla shape. The color of the tint is yellow, very yellow. In this case the name of the color is coztic.

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Table 2. Náhuatl Plant Names with the Nominal Root -Palli (“Tint”) Tzatzapalli (“espigas de maíz” or “maize spikes” Acuitlacpalli Xochipalli (“tinte de flores amarillas” or “yellow flower tint”); (“naranjado color” or orange color—Molina) Iyappalli (Iya-uh-tli) (“verde oscuro” or dark green) Quilpalli (“cardenillo” or verdigris; “entre azul y verde” or “between blue and green”) Yappalli (“cosa negra” or “black thing”—Molina) Tlapalli (?) Xiuhpalli (Siméon) Note: The names of the plants are taken from the Florentine Codex; otherwise, the source is specified.

The word achiotl derives from no other name. The color obtained from the fruit of this plant is red (tlatlauhqui). The name huitzquauitl derives from huitztli (thorn) and quauhuitl (tree). The dark color produced from the wood (literally, from its “flesh”) is called ixtlitl, a term applied to the color black. If the colorant is mixed with tlalxocotl (a substance of mineral origin), we get a red color (chichiltic). Of nacazcolotl, the text says that it is the fruit of a large tree. The name comes from nacaztli (ear) and colotl (scorpion), alluding perhaps to the appearance of the fruit being similar to that of a small ear or scorpion. In Molina´s vocabulary, one reads that nacazcolotl means “agallas para hacer tinta” (gallnuts to make tint). Complementing the content of the Náhuatl text, we have Sahagún´s paraphrasis: Ay en esta tierra un fructo de un árbol que se cria en tierras calientes, el cual fructo no es de comer, llamase ese fructo nacazcoltol, usase ese fruto para con él y con aquella tierra que se llama tlaliyac y con cascaras de granadas y con goma que llaman mizquicopalli de muy buena tinta para escribir. [In this land there is a fruit of a tree that grows in the hotlands, which fruit is not to be eaten. It is called nacazcoltol and it is used with that soil called tlaliyac, and with pomegranate peels and a gum they call mizquicopalli, in order to make a very good ink for writing.] From nacazcolotl one obtains the colorant cuichtli; in other words, soot. It is worth clarifying that this was used for writing; the text resorts to Spanish in the expression letrachioaloni to denote that the tint “es la

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Table 3. Plants Found Mentioned in the Florentine Codex as Colorants (according to Estrada Lugo and Siméon) Name Quauhpachtli, Tillandsia usneoides, Usnea sp.

Location in the codex (vol., chap., para.) XI, chap. 11, ¶ 3, p. 373

Colors and Colorants as Described in Text “Leonado, violeta claro” (tawny, light violet) (Siméon, Diccionario de la lengua Náhuatl)

Ahuaquauitl (“aguacate” II, chap. 33; X, chap. 22; or avocado), XI, chap. 1, ¶ 1; chap. 6, Persea ¶¶ 2, 3

XI, chap. 11, ¶ 2

“Arbusto que crece en tierra caliente y cuyas hojas hervidas con alumbre y con tlaiatl servían para hacer un color muy fina” (Shrub that grows in hot lands and whose leaves, boiled with alum and tlaiatl, served to make a very fine color) (Siméon)

Tlaceuilli or xiuhquilitl, Leguminosae, Calliandra, Indigofera

XI, chap. 7, ¶ 2

“Hierba pastel; planta verde que las mujeres utilizaban para teñirse los cabellos” (Herb paste; green plant that women utilized to dye their hair) (Siméon).

Tlapalli

XI, chap. 11, ¶ 3

“Color, pintura, teñido, coloreado” (Color, paint, dyeing, coloring) (Siméon)

Tliliozotl

XI, chap. 11, ¶ 2

Tezuatl, Tezoatl, Melastomataceae, Conostegia, Miconia

XI, chap. 6, ¶ 3; chap. 11, ¶¶ 2, 3

“Arbusto que crece en la provincia de Michoacán y su madera servía para hacer un tinte rojo llamado brasil por los españoles. Ciertas partes de ese arbolillo eran usadas para combatir las fiebres.” (Shrub that grows in the province of Michoacán and its wood was used to make red ink called brasil by the Spaniards. Certain parts of this bush were used to fight fevers.) (Siméon)

Xochipalli

XI, chap. 11, ¶ 1

“Hierba cuya hoja se parece a la artemisa y sirve para teñir las telas de color amarillo rojizo” (Herb whose leaves look like sagebrush and serve in dyeing cloth a reddish yellow).

Zacatlaxcalli, Cacatlaxcalli, Convolvulaceae, Cassytha

XI, chap. 7, ¶ 1

Uitzquauitl, Leguminosae, Caesalpinia, Haematoxylon

Note: The names of the plants were noted in the Florentine Codex by either Estrada Lugo or Simeón.

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Table 4. Colorants/Pigments and Their Origins According to Chapter 11 of the Florentine Codex Vegetable

Mineral

Animal

Indefinite

Xochipalli Matlali Çacatlaxcalli Achiotl or achiotetl Uitzquauitl Nacazcolotl Tezuatl Tlaceuilli Tlilli

Tecozauitl Tlaliiac Tlalxocotl* Tetlilli or tezcatetlilli Tlauitl Tiçatl Tetiçatl Chimaltiçatl

Nocheztli Tlatlaxcalolli Tlapalnextli**

Tlaquauac Tlapalli Texotli

* “Xocotl proviene del sabor agrio de esa tierra, que es como tepetate.” (Xocotl comes from the sour flavor of this soil, which is similar to tepetate.) ** “Mezcla de cal y cochinilla” (blend of lime and cochineal)

que hace la letra” (is the one that makes letters). It is very possible that this statement indicates that the Florentine Codex itself was written with this ink. In fact, in one illustrated sheet of the book, we see how a Nahua collects the materials from the tree in order to elaborate the colorant. It appears that the materials collected from the tree were, as Molina says, gallnuts or protruberances from the bark, and not fruit.The illustration contained in the Florentine Codex invites the supposition that nacazcolotl might be a Corticola fungus. Note that the nacazcolotl is cooked and then used for writing (fig. 4). Of tezuatl, the text says it is a bush (quauhxihuitl) that is blended with cochineal in order to dye tochomitl, a yarn made of rabbit hair. Tlaceulli, the text says, is a grass that is crushed in order to extract its juice, from which one can obtain a greenish (xoxotlani) blue (mouitic). In regard to the colorant texotli, the text tells us that the name does not come from any other root word, and that the resulting color is “like” a green, comparable to that produced by mixing texotli with xoxoctic (another green). There is no mention of its origin. These interpretations of the text demonstrate that many of the names of colorants come from the names of those substances from which they originated. This occurs with tlilli and matlalli, among others. It is worth examining other words derived from the same sources, and whose names are related to colors. In the following cases, the words do not describe the plants’ tint uses, but rather their morphology. I will begin with tlacuilolquahuitl, the “scribe-painter’s tree,” which is portrayed

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in the eleventh book. The text states that the huehue and teponaztli, two pre-Hispanic percussion instruments, were made from this tree, as well as colonial string instruments, in Náhuatl called mecahuehuetl, which may correspond to a baroque vihuela (an early form of guitar) or a harp. The text says, “ su palabra es bella, buena, deseable” (“its word is beautiful, good, desirable”), without defining whether this refers to the sound of the instrument or to the tree. This was not necessarily important after all because instruments are the “flesh” of the trees themselves, according to Nahua perception. If its use had no connection with colors, then where does the name “scribe-painter’s tree” come from? The answer has to do with its appearance, since its bark looks painted, as one reads in the Náhuatl, “cuicuiltic, motlililania, motlatlamachia” (“painted with black and red lines”). It is worth reflecting on the fact that precisely the diphrasis in tlilli in tlapalli—“black ink, red ink”—signifies wisdom, knowledge, and artistic expression. We find that the glyph of this diphrasis is associated with the tlacuilo artist-scribes (fig. 5), and is depicted within virgules as a chant of Macuilxochitl, Nahua god of the arts, in the Borbonic Codex (fig. 6). We can see here that colors acquire very profound symbolic values that are worthy of a more detailed interpretation. The Florentine Codex does not illustrate the tlacuiloquahuitl in the section dedicated to trees, and it does not appear in the color section because it seems that no tint was obtained from that tree. From what has been said up to now we can infer that the names of plants can include root words of color names that indicate their uses or morphology. When the name of the color appears as a prefix, then it refers to the color of the plant. An example of the morphological value of colors is the classification of maize and alegria already mentioned, which corresponds to the cosmic colors, even though not all plants contain the full range of those five colors. For example, tlilxochitl, “black flower,” refers to the vanilla orchid, which when dried out acquires its aromatic properties and its dark color. A similar case occurs with tlalpoyomatli and tlalizquixochitl, two odoriferous red flowers. Among these examples, the blue, white, and yellow variants do not exist. Considering plants used as colorants, it is worth mentioning that in the list shown in table 2, the suffix palli, which would denote use as a tint, is not found in their names as we would expect. This is because the names of the colors there come directly from the names of the plants

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Figs. 5a, b. Two glyphs illustrating the diphrasis in tlilli in tlapalli (literally, “black ink, red ink”)—an expression associated with the Nahua tlacuilo and signifying wisdom, knowledge, and artistic expression. (Left, 5a): Mendoza Codex, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, lam. LXXI. (Right, 5b): Codex Telleriano-Remensis, fol. 30r. Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale de France, Paris.

Fig. 4. A Nahua gathering gallnuts from a tree to make nacazcolotl, a tint used to make cuichtli, the ink with which the Florentine Codex itself was likely written.

from which they are obtained. In other words, palli is not a category of Nahua classification of plants according to use. However, the end of the eleventh chapter of the Florentine Codex mentions the manner in which the following colors are prepared, including plant name etymologies: The name iiapalli comes from yauhtli, an odoriferous, sacred plant and also from yayauhqui (dark) and tlapalli (color). However, the text doesn’t mention whether the plant referred to is the origin of the tint or whether the color obtained is similar to that of the plant. Camopalli is made from mixing nocheztli and tlalxocotl, which is to say, a blend of organic and inorganic. This case is revealing in that the name of the tint is not referring to the fact that the tuber is used to

elaborate the tint, but rather to its color being like that of the sweet potato, very close to purple. The name quiltic comes from quilitl (generic for young, edible green plants), and like them is a little green, a little yellow. Quiltic is made by blending texotli and zacatlaxcalli. As in the previous case, the name does not come from any particular plant but rather from the generic color of young green vegetables. The name quappachtli is from quauitl (tree) and pachtli (a Spanish moss or epiphyte from the Bromeliaceae family, genus Tillandsia, which grows on the quauhtepoztli [literally, “tree that is hard as metal”]). In this case, the text does not mention how the tint was produced. It was very probably a brownish or bluish gray-green, the color of the moss. From such examples as these we can deduce that palli does not describe specific plants but rather the tints produced from them, which may have the same colors as their respective plants.

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Although these conclusions are of preliminary character, they can be of use as a guide for a more precise future analysis that includes a broader range of textual sources.

Fig. 6. Glyph depicting Macuilxochitl, Nahua god of the arts, chanting the phrase in tlilli in tlapalli (within virgules). Borbonic Codex, fig. 28. Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale, Paris.

Regarding the preceding, we may conclude that 1.

The names of colors can be added to plant names as prefixes to indicate a morphological characteristic, to specify the way in which a natural reality can be perceived in coherence within a cosmogonic system.

2.

The names of colors can be taken directly from the names of certain plants. In other words, the vegetable noun is adjectivized, leading to concept words that can be interpreted in the manner of “young green vegetable-like color,” “matlalli-like color,” and so on.

3.

The vegetable world is used as a referring agent to chromatically classify the whole environment perceived by the Nahua.

4.

Palli, “color,” is added to the botanic nomenclature as a suffix, denoting a use as a colorant.

5.

The Nahua names of plants can include etymologies that allude to a cultural value bestowed by society, thereby forming part of a complex symbolic language.

Sahagún’s Codex and Book Design in the Indigenous Context * M A R I NA GA RON E GR AV I ER Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

To Valentina in her third year of life WRITTEN CULTURE AND BOOK DESIGN AS THE FOCUS OF STUDY IN ART HISTORY

One of the first drawbacks in dealing with the visuality of a text is that, in speaking of a written work, people tend to think almost exclusively of its literary or historical value, aspects that would seem to negate the document’s graphic value. This separation between ground and form has been inherent to the conception of written communication; writing has been understood as a mere transcription of sound, in which the signs employed and their spatial distribution seem to serve no significant function in the configuration of a text. The notion that calligraphy is “ornamental or contingent” and that editorial design is a “cosmetic or implemental” action may be attributed partially to the fact that in the process of producing a book, both aspects are the final ones. However, these perspectives do not take into account that both language and the text itself acquire a visual presence within the framework of design and writing so that neither is something external, but rather something intrinsic to the work. In the production of a manuscript, decisions are made among forms of presentation of the words and the means of spatial distribution of the words on the page (Fig. 1). These

Fig. 1

* !"#$"%&'()*('"*+",-#.#"/#.0(--%&%"#&'"1%#&#"2#0#-+&%"3+."0%4%&0"$("*5("+66+.7 *8&%*9"#&'"5+&+."+3"3+.$%&0"6#.*"+3"#"*(#$"3.+$"'%4(.:("#.(#:"+3"(;6(.*%:("*5#*"5#:" #66.+#