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Review: The Florentine Codex: An Encyclopedia of the Nahua World in Sixteenth-Century Mexico , edited by Jeanette Favrot Peterson and Kevin Terraciano

2022; University of California Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/lavc.2022.4.1.144

2576-0947

Claudia Brittenham,

Latin American history and culture

“There is no doubt that the Florentine Codex is the most remarkable and most important intellectual product of the exchange between Indigenous and European cultures in the early modern Atlantic world,” writes Kevin Terraciano in the introduction to this lavishly illustrated edited volume (13). Composed of twelve books treating subjects from the gods to the conquest of Mexico, the Historia general (or perhaps universal) de las cosas de la Nueva España was the result of decades of consultation and collaboration between Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and Indigenous Nahua communities in the Valley of Mexico. Nahua collaborators who contributed substantively to the project include grammarians Antonio Valeriano of Azcapotzalco, Alonso Vegerano of Cuauhtitlan, Martín Jacobita of Tlatelolco, and Pedro de San Buenaventura of Cuauhtitlan; along with scribes Diego de Grado of Tlatelolco, Bonifacio Maximiliano of Tlatelolco, and Mateo Severino of Xochimilco. Sahagún also credits anonymous elders of Tepepulco and Tlatelolco who were interviewed in the early stages of the project, as well as Indigenous physicians who contributed to the sections on ailments of the body and plants with curative properties. Diana Magaloni Kerpel has identified as many as twenty-two distinct artists’ hands in the book’s illustrations. As Terraciano writes, “Even those talented Nahuas who remain unnamed were not simply his ‘informants’ or his ‘aides.’ They were Sahagún’s sources of information: the multilingual writers of the Nahuatl text, the part of the work that was produced first; and the artists who ‘illuminated’ the manuscript, the part that was done last” (13). The project underwent numerous transformations between 1547 and 1577, which are laid out in a table on page 3 of Terraciano’s useful introduction. The version of the manuscript now in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence was compiled in Tlatelolco between 1575 and 1577, in the midst of one of the most devastating epidemics that swept through New Spain. The work we know today as the Florentine Codex consists of 2446 pages with paired columns of Spanish (or occasionally Latin) and Nahuatl text, interspersed with over 2500 illustrations and pictorial ornaments.How to account for such a multivolume, multilingual, and multivocal work? As Jeanette Favrot Peterson argues in her introductory chapter, the fragmented ways in which the Florentine Codex has been disseminated have substantially affected the shape of scholarship about the work. Until very recently, with the online publication of the Florentine Codex by the World Digital Library (www.wdl.org/en/item/10096/), most Anglophone scholars accessed the work through Charles Dibble and Arthur Anderson’s thirteen-volume translation of the Nahuatl text. Although a tremendously valuable resource, this translation isolates only one part of the total work, obscuring divergences between the Spanish and Nahuatl texts and severing the book’s images from their context. Spanish-speaking authors, by contrast, have often referred first to one of several editions of the book’s Spanish text, some of which omit the images entirely. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, there is still much to be done to consider the Florentine Codex as a book whose multiple modes of presentation—Nahuatl text, Spanish text, and images—exist in productive tension, sometimes closely coordinated, and sometimes offering quite different kinds of information.Yet Terraciano surely overstates the matter when he writes in the introduction that the 2015 conference from which this volume stems was “the first dedicated specifically to the interrelation of the three ‘texts’—the Nahuatl, the Spanish translation, and the images—and was certainly the first to focus on how the images and their meanings differ from textual exegesis” (12–13). This seems to neglect prior work by some of the very contributors to this volume, among others. The essays here demonstrate that this tripartite comparison can be a fruitful approach, but at the same time, it’s not the only approach that has value. We also need intensive studies of Nahua rhetoric in which the Spanish text is only an afterthought; detailed attention to European and Indigenous prototypes for text and images alike; analysis of the mise en page and flow of texts and illustrations across books, to name just a few possibilities. And what might we lose by considering images as a third “text”? Some of the most interesting things about the images in the Florentine Codex are precisely the ways that they are richly allusive and polyvalent, as only images can be. In addition, it’s clear that the images within the book were formed through diverse processes: line and color were executed in different moments, sometimes with substantial disagreements between them, the artists exercising considerable ingenuity as pigments became scarce. The large, often framed images, which seem to have been planned from the outset, seem different than those squeezed in apparently as afterthoughts; the ubiquitous floral ornaments still deserve serious study. Building on Magaloni Kerpel’s work, there is still more to be done to understand the materiality and meaning of the process of artistic creation here.The essays in this volume, written by an all-star cast of art historians, historians, conservators, and historians of religion, are organized into four sections: The Art of Translation, Lords: Royal and Sacred, Ordering the Cosmos, and Social Discourse and Deviance. Several authors focus on texts and images in a particular book or section of the Florentine Codex, including Terraciano’s analysis of the account of the Spanish invasion in Book 12, Peterson’s close reading of the speeches of the elders in Book 6, and Lisa Sousa’s excellent discussion of the discourses on social deviance in Book 10. Others compare the Florentine Codex to other sources, as in Elizabeth Hill Boone’s incisive analysis of the divergent models for images of deities and rulers or Eloise Quiñones Keber’s comparison of representations of the goddess Chicomecoatl in this work and the Primeros memoriales, one of its precursor texts. Building on a discovery by Lia Markey, Ida Giovanna Rao presents for the first time an Italian translation of the first five books of the Florentine Codex, produced before 1588, demonstrating that the text had already crossed the Atlantic and begun to attract considerable attention within a decade of its making. Pablo Escalante Gonzalbo, for his part, analyzes the use of European print sources, exploring “the juxtapositions, analogies, and experimental syntheses that constituted the very core of dialogic culture in the first six decades of the colonial era” (73). Other essays take a more thematic approach. Guilhem Olivier addresses the categories of god and devil throughout the Florentine Codex, Molly Bassett examines the folk biology underlying the tlaquimilolli, or sacred bundle, and Magaloni Kerpel addresses the power of painted images and sacred words. In a particularly innovative essay, Barbara Mundy considers the shared emplacement of Spanish and Nahua collaborators within the changing ecosystem of Mexico City.One thing that authors in the volume consistently do is pay close attention to both the Spanish and Nahuatl texts, always attentive to gaps and acts of translation—as well as censorship and resistance—between them. Several authors, including Terraciano, Souza, and Olivier, are especially effective at establishing the primacy of the Nahuatl text, and carefully examining the ways in which it diverges from the Spanish translation. Ellen Taylor Baird analyzes a particularly notable instance in Book 10 where the Spanish text is completely disconnected from the Nahuatl and was completed after the images, in contradistinction to the more typical sequence of Nahuatl text, then Spanish text, then images. The vision of Sahagún dictating the “Relación del autor, digno de ser notado,” in which he discusses the history of evangelization in Mexico, to a Nahua scribe, who placed the text between increasingly strange and fragmentary images of body parts, is one that lingers.But it’s striking how many of the essays begin with text and only later turn to images. While this ordering replicates the most frequent order of creation within the Florentine Codex, it sometimes obscures some of the most fascinating indices of the artistic process present within the images. The evocative image on the cover of the volume, which shows a hummingbird-headed man stretching out his arm, holding a heart to the chest of a falcon in flight, for example, seems to show traces of something—another figure, perhaps?—that has been covered over by a thick white pigment and part of the painted landscape (the complete image, from folio 47v of Book 11, is also illustrated as figure 7.1). And the way that the hairstyle of the red-shoed prostitute on folio 70r of Book 10 (illustrated as figure 12.1), was changed with a wash of color from a short cap of curls to a more traditional married woman’s two-horned headdress also raises all sorts of questions. Even after all of the advances in this volume, there is still much more to learn about this fascinating document.