Barbara E. Mundy - The Codex Mendoza - new insights

CHAPTER 1

The History of the Codex Mendoza

Jorge Gómez Tejada

CHAPTER 2

The Painting Materials of Codex Mendoza

Davide Domenici, Chiara Grazia, David Buti, Laura Cartechini, Francesca Rosi, Francesca Gabrieli, Virginia M. Lladó-Buisán, Aldo Romani, Antonio Sgamellotti, Costanza Miliani

CHAPTER 3

Report on Repairs of 1985-6, Watermarks, and Collation of Codex Mendoza (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1)

B. C. Barker-Benfield

CHAPTER 4

The Concept of Style for the Nahua Painters of New Spain

Diana Magaloni

CHAPTER 5

The Makers of the Codex Mendoza

Jorge Gómez Tejada

CHAPTER 6

The Whiteness of their Clothes

Mary Ellen Miller

CHAPTER 7

The Representation of Taxation in the Codex Mendoza

Claudia Brittenham

CHAPTER 8

Aztec Glyphic Writing in the Codex Mendoza and Other Pictorials: Some New Thoughts

Frances F. Berdan

CHAPTER 9

The Codex Mendoza and the City of Mexico-Tenochtitlan

Barbara E. Mundy

CHAPTER 10

The Legible Image: Painting in Translation

Daniela Bleichmar

CHAPTER 11

Abduction: The Reception and Reproduction of the Codex Mendoza in France and England (1553-1696)

Todd P. Olson

CHAPTER 12

Learning to Look: Pictures, Sacred Oratory and Memory in Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Conzederaciones

Carmen Fernández-Salvador

CHAPTER 13

The Ancient Rule for Living in the Codex Mendoza: Part 3 as a Transformed Tonalamatl

Joanne Harwood

CHAPTER 14

Arranging the Conquests: Section I of the Codex Mendoza

Lucien Sun

INDEX OF TABLES AND CHARTS

INDEX OF FIGURES

NEW INSIGHTS

CHAPTER 1

The History of the Codex Mendoza

Jorge Gómez Tejada

Universidad San Francisco de Quito USFQ

The Codex Mendoza, as it has been known since Francisco Clavijero first linked the manuscript to don Antonio de Mendoza, first Viceroy of New Spain at the end of the eighteenth century, is one of the most beautiful examples of tlacuilolli, the Nahua art of painting and writing. Produced at some point between 1542 and 1552, the manuscript is also one of the most famous collaborative projects between Nahua artists and Spanish interpreters of the first half of the sixteenth century.1 In the Codex Mendoza, the narrative that emerges from the convergence of Nahua pictographic writing and Spanish alphabetic writing describes the tripartite history of the Mexica world, a history that begins with the foundation of the city of Tenochtitlan in 1325 and ends with the death of its last ruling tlatoani, Moteuhczoma Xocoyotzin.

The first section of the manuscript (folios 1r to 18r) cogently represents the growth of the Mexica State. As Barbara Mundy shows in this volume, the altepetl of Tenochtitlan is the main protagonist of this narrative, which follows a dual axis composed of military conquests on one hand and brief biographies of the lords of Tenochtilan on the other. The second section of the manuscript (folios 18v to 56r) articulates the relationship between the Mexica capital and its vassals related to the collection of tributes and taxes.2 The choices made by the artists who produced the Codex Mendoza regarding the inclusion or omission of the types of objects involved in this process of taxation emphasize both the value allotted to finished products—highlighting a social structure based on the division and specialization of labor—and the performativity of such documents.3 In the third section of the manuscript (folios 56v to 71v), the artists charged with producing the codex depict the inhabitants of the Mexica State, creating unprecedented pictorial compositions that echo the rhetoric of order and beauty developed in the first two sections and that simultaneously humanize the events and social relations with which they are concerned.

As a whole, the pictures and texts of the three sections of the codex evoke not only traditionally Mesoamerican notions of social order, but also those imported from Spain, which became a source both of convergence as well as strain between the two societies. The Mesoamerican grid acts as the organizing principle of the manuscript and neatly overlaps with the one the first urban planners of New Spain had imported in books by thinkers such as Alberti. At the same time, the laws imposed by the lords of Mexico described throughout the first section of the Codex Mendoza are reflected in the notion of civility embodied in the Spanish concept of policía, upon which the character of New World societies would be measured and debated throughout the sixteenth century. The representation of space, which in Mexican manuscripts is traditionally two-dimensional, contrasts with the single point perspective imported from Europe by cosmopolitan friars, thus expanding the possibilities of representation of the natural world, both for the Nahua artist and the European observer. All of these matters are addressed in the following chapters.

Throughout the course of its history, the Codex Mendoza has been presented as an object of constantly changing form and identity, partly because of its very nature—a manuscript consisting of 71 folios which is impossible to fully understand outright—and partly because of the multiple ways in which it has been analyzed by those who have studied it, seeking to answer diverse questions originating in different historical contexts, as Daniela Bleichmar suggests. In her study on the circulation and transmission of the Codex Mendoza, she observes that the ontology of the codex manifests itself as unstable in time and that it it is created anew with every study and new interpretation, in spite of the fact that it remains static in Oxford (see Chapter 10). Likewise, in his essay for this volume, Todd Olson focuses on the manuscript’s reception and interpretation in the work of Melchisedech Thévenot, identifying a process whereby the contents of the manuscript are gradually sequestered and disbanded, to the point that they basically become unrecognizable within the world of encyclopedic knowledge that took shape over the course of the seventeenth century. The work of these art historians sees beyond the Codex Mendoza as a historical document or primary source, and functions instead as a logical segue to the work of scholars such as H. B. Nicholson, Silvio Zavala, and James Cooper Clark, who, responding to the historicist priorities of their times, sought to bestow upon the manuscript an identity as closely anchored in their documentary research as was possible.