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In August 1576, in the midst of an outbreak of the plague, the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and twenty-two indigenous artists locked themselves inside the school of Santa Cruz de Tlaltelolco in Mexico City with a mission: to create nothing less than the first illustrated encyclopedia of the New World. Today this twelve-volume manuscript is preserved in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence and is widely known as the Florentine Codex. A monumental achievement, the Florentine Codex is the single most important artistic and historical document for studying the peoples and cultures of pre-Hispanic and colonial Central Mexico. It reflects both indigenous and Spanish tr...
For half a century the Franciscan friar Bernardino de SahagÃon (1499âe"1590) worked on a compendium of the beliefs, rituals, language, arts, and economy of the vanishing Aztec culture. This volume examines the Aztec use of colorâe"in art and everyday lifeâe"as revealed in the Codex, the most richly illustrated manuscript of this great ethnographic work.
Tells the story of the founding of American Christianity against the backdrop of devastating disease, and of the Indigenous survivors who kept the nascent faith alive Many scholars have come to think of the European Christian mission to the Americas as an inevitable success. But in its early period it was very much on the brink of failure. In 1576, Indigenous Mexican communities suffered a catastrophic epidemic that took almost two million lives and simultaneously left the colonial church in ruins. In the crisis and its immediate aftermath, Spanish missionaries and surviving pueblos de indios held radically different visions for the future of Christianity in the Americas. The Church of the D...
This beautiful catalog presents the first systematic study of feather mosaics from New Spain in the context of a broader creative exchange between Mesoamerican and European aesthetics and materials. Thirty-three scholars look at these unprecedented artworks that circulated in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries from a range of vantage points, including art history, anthropology, collecting, natural history, archeology, and conservation. Published to complement a major international exhibition held at the National Museum of Art (MUNAL) in Mexico City in 2011, the book is organized thematically and includes over three hundred color photographs of feather mosaics with astonishing detail, as well as relevant paintings, sculptures, drawings, engravings, books, European illuminated manuscripts, Mesoamerican codices, and studies of natural history. No book has ever brought together so many images of artworks from this tradition, let alone assembled a team of scholars to offer such trenchant analysis. It will be essential for art historians, scholars of colonialism, and historians of the Spanish Empire alike.
This volume includes the editorial “The absconded subject of Pop,” by Thomas Crow; “Enlivening the soul in Chinese tombs,” by Wu Hung; “On the ‘true body’ of Huineng,” by Michele Matteini; “Apparition painting,” by Yukio Lippit; “Immanence out of sight,” by Joyce Cheng; “Absconding in plain sight,” by Roberta Bonetti; “Ancient Maya sculptures of Tikal, seen and unseen,” by Megan E. O’Neil; “Style and substance, or why the Cacaxtla paintings were buried,” by Claudia Brittenham; “The Parthenon frieze,” by Clemente Marconi; “Roma sotterranea and the biogenesis of New Jerusalem,” by Irina Oryshkevich; “Out of sight, yet still in place,” by Minou ...
Folio 46r from Codex Telleriano-Remensis was created in the sixteenth century under the supervision of Spanish missionaries in central Mexico. As an artifact of seismic cultural and political shifts, the manuscript painting is a singular document of indigenous response to Spanish conquest. Examining the ways in which the folio's tlacuilo (indigenous painter/writer) creates a pictorial vocabulary, this book embraces the place "outside" history from which this rich document emerged. Applying contemporary intellectual perspectives, including aspects of gender, modernity, nation, and visual representation itself, José Rabasa reveals new perspectives on colonial order. Folio 46r becomes a metaph...
Folded plate (1 leaf, 39 x 61 cm, folded to 19 x 16 cm) in pocket.
New perspectives on an important era in Mesoamerican history This volume examines shifting social identities, lived experiences, and networks of interaction in Mexico during the Mesoamerican Formative period (2000 BCE–250 CE), an era that helped produce some of the world’s most renowned complex civilizations. The chapters offer significant data, innovative methodologies, and novel perspectives on Mexican archaeology. Using diverse and non-traditional theoretical approaches, contributors discuss interregional relationships and the exchange of ideas in contexts ranging from the Gulf Coast Olmec region to the site of Tlatilco in Central Mexico to the often-overlooked cultures of the far wes...
“Bassett at last provides a path to understand better the specifically Aztec characteristics of the teteoh and their ritual ‘embodiments.’” —Ethnohistory Following their first contact in 1519, accounts of Aztecs identifying Spaniards as gods proliferated. But what exactly did the Aztecs mean by a “god” (teotl), and how could human beings become gods or take on godlike properties? This sophisticated, interdisciplinary study analyzes three concepts that are foundational to Aztec religion—teotl (god), teixiptla (localized embodiment of a god), and tlaquimilolli (sacred bundles containing precious objects)—to shed new light on the Aztec understanding of how spiritual beings tak...
This volume showcases dynamic developments in the field of manuscript research that go beyond traditional textual, iconographic, or codicological studies. Using state-of-the-art conservation technologies, scholars investigate how four manuscripts—the Galvin Murúa, the Getty Murúa, the Florentine Codex, and the Relación de Michoacán—were created and demonstrate why these objects must be studied in a comparative context. The forensic study of manuscripts provides art historians, anthropologists, curators, and conservators with effective methods for determining authorship, identifying technical innovations, and contextualizing illustrated histories. This information, in turn, allows for more nuanced arguments that transcend the information that the written texts and painted images themselves provide. The book encourages scholars to think broadly about the manuscripts of colonial Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and employ new techniques and methods of research.